Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

There is an easy going charm that cannot be ignored when it comes to watching Robert Cray on stage, the deferential that meets the cool and the understated charismatic. The smile in the beautifully creative that greets each song with a polite hello and then plays with each string as if it’s attached to an angel’s heart, sometimes being as rough as the angel likes and causing a blush on the cheeks of the cherubs. At other points smooth, joyous and almost velvet like in its sincerity; it is the charm and ability of a man who knows which angel likes it which way and which has the touch of the Devil in them.

Inside the ornate and at times almost mystic building that is Birmingham’s Town Hall, Robert Cray casts a spell on an audience that is touching, natural and unaffected by the state of unease and tension that pervades the corridors of those with more power than sense, the sense of the occasion is overwhelming at points and the sound of a guitar, haunted by its master’s delicate touch, sings deep into the souls of all present.

The Devil and the angel dance with tenderness and earnest integrity and with Les Faulkner, Richard Cousins and Dover Weinberg giving the extra flair and the down beat required to tracks such as the opener Phone Booth, The Forecast (Calls For Pain), Poor Johnny, the tremendous Chicken in the Kitchen, On the Road Down, Sadder Days, the stunning Right Next Door and Times Make Two all become almost intrinsically an entity in their own right. The power of musical fortitude and decades of proving time and time again just how good you are, how much of a modest leading light that shines with so much hope and glory, all of this comes out when watching an ordinary down to Earth man become a maestro with a simple weave of humble guitar brilliance.

For those who travelled into Birmingham, who battled the Friday night madness and relished the openness of the Town Hall’s abundant acoustics, The Robert Cray Band were unimpeachable, they were just what a Friday night called for, a sense of the oasis, the splendid grandeur in Blues melancholic bliss.

Ian D. Hall