Just over a year after my first blog post about Patrick Duff's gigs in Malta and my ears have been delighted yet again to this wonderful artist's magical voice. He has been by far the BEST artist to have graced the tiny stage at our local gathering spot - Coach and Horses (and the best to do an impromptu cover The Suburbanite's chorus of "Dance with me" for the competition - https://www.facebook.com/notes/yasmin-kuymizakis/dance-with-me-competition/10150591382798727).
Former lead vocalist of UK brit-pop band Strangelove, Partick is now travelling to different venues where he entrances the audience with his captivating stares, haunting voice and beautiful songs. Again the atmosphere was intense and magical albeit rudely interrupted by an overly chattery bunch. However, all bad things have a silver lining, and although these rude idiots very visibly distressed Patrick, his performance of some of the songs was greatly improved by this contained anger. Unfortunately the audience was not treated to an encore on the first night, and understandably so. However, in a very special moment which I shall cherish, Patrick was kind enough to treat myself, Daniel, Emerson, Tim, Nigel and Stimpy to a special encore in the shaft of the pub where he sang "Spider Woman" - one of my personal favourites on his album "Mad Straight Road". As the seven of us huddled together in the 2m x 2m cold and wet shaft , everything about us seemed to fade away as we were carried elsewhere with Patrick's voice and soon we were all singing softly with him, reliving all the times we had sung the song in our cars and in the pub, waiting for him to return to our tiny island.
During the set we were graced with songs from his up coming album, "Luxury Problems" and "Mad Straight Road" thus treating us to new songs we hadn't heard him play last year while also giving us songs we have come to love over this last year among which were "Dead Man Singing" and "Maria" and the newer "Hail Holy Mother" written about an experience he had the year before in our old capital city - Mdina, which we had visited after his Saturday concert. We were all especially lucky to have been treated to two songs performed on the piano. Despite him justifying his lack of technique to do being self-taught while under the influence, I adored his playing. Being self-taught myself, I am a firm believer of not going to lessons or doing grade exams to learn an instrument as I find that this limits the user with the full exploration of what this tool can do. Granted, I will never play as well or as quickly as a trained pianist and I am surely limited by this in certain ways. However, I am also sure that the creativity and passion of self taught musicians is in its own way more valuable. And this belief was proven yet again while I heard Patrick play on the piano as I heard my new favourite song - "Early Morning Birds".
A word of advice for anyone who enjoys music and likes to attend such events: always try to attend both nights!
And if you want to be there, but find yourself uninterested for whatever reason? Please step outside or into the side room, were you can shout and chatter all you like without disturbing everyone else.
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