Wednesday 19th March 2025
In November 2024 I booked tickets to see Katherine Priddy in Leeds after seeing several reports of her excellent live shows and terrific songs, but before I’d actually listened to many of the songs. She was playing at the City Varieties Music Hall which once hosted The Good Old Days on BBC1 back in the 1970s. I think this partly influenced by decision to buy tickets, because it really wasn’t because of her music. I remember watching The Good Old Days in the early 1970s since my Mum and Dad liked it and since we only had one TV, if it was on and I was in the same room, I watched it. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I remember Leonard Sachs introducing the (generally awful) acts using many long words I’d never heard before (nor since, in truth).
When I took the time to really listen to Katherine Priddy’s albums (there are only two), I realised that although they are beautiful songs, you can’t really hum along to them and I then spent the next four months feeling that I’d wasted my money getting tickets.
To make the most of the trip, we’d also booked a night at the Leonardo hotel in Leeds and we planned to spend a couple of days in and around the city so on Wednesday morning we bundled Tilly off to the cattery (she seemed quite happy to go, thankfully) and headed over the Pennines. Initially, we called into Ilkley for Gee to spend some time in the many shops there.
We spent a lovely couple of hours in Ilkley, including enjoying a coffee and scone eating outside in a café by the station before heading down to check into the hotel at 2pm. Although we arrived early, the room was ready and we collected our keys. After a cup of tea in the room, we left to wander around the city until about 4.30 when we came back to the hotel and I had a shower and freshened up.
We had tea in a lovely Italian restaurant (Ciao Bella) in Brewery Wharf where I had a huge calzone and Gee struggled to finish an enormous bowl of pasta. We’d been given a 20% discount on food for the hotel bistro, but the Italian restaurant still came in £1.50 cheaper for a meal and I’ll bet the portions were much larger.
After I’d booked the concert tickets I received an email advising me that the tickets for the 7pm concert could be collected from the box office from 6.30, so we turned up to collect them soon after that time. We were then told that the concert only started at 8pm (which is what I would have expected) and that the auditorium only opened at 7.30 although we could get drinks from the bar at earlier. As a marketing ploy to get us to spend more time spending money in the theatre bar, it worked very well.
I was disappointed that photography was banned inside the theatre, but I sneaked one the in the bar before we went into the auditorium.
Our pre-allocated seats were on row T which turned out to be on the back row of the stalls! We could see OK, but the stage was a long way off (by our standards). The support was Amelia Coburn and she was a young singer/songwriter from Middlesbrough who played half a dozen of her own songs. She was excellent. She sang funny, meaningful songs about her life in the North-East and had us all laughing at her patter between songs.
During the interval, we were told that the seats down the sides of the auditorium were free if we wanted to move, so we took advantage of this to sit closer to the stage alongside row D. These were great seats, if a touch less comfortable and afforded a much improved view of Katherine Priddy and her accompanist George Boomsma. The duo played and sang beautiful songs but ultimately, I found the music a bit too ‘nice’. They were very well written with beautiful harmonies but just not memorable. Katherine admitted that her songs are not bouncy or lively which I suppose I must like. It was a beautiful evening of music, but not really what I was looking for.
I’ve since watched some YouTube videos of both Amelia and Katherine and found them enchanting, but the videos only lasted three or four minutes, not the two hours we heard tonight. I’m sure when I look back on this evening I will remember it as being very enjoyable, but just now, I feel a bit disappointed.
We admired the lights of the city as we strolled back to the hotel.
Thursday 20th March 2025
After a night in the hotel and a terrific breakfast, my disappointment has faded and already I can sense that the show was quite special, but just not something that got my foot-tapping and wanting to sing along to.
We had a couple of hours to spare this morning before we needed to head back, so we wandered around town again, calling into John Lewis looking at replacing my Amazon Fire with a tablet. The Fire is now seven years old and has been playing up lately. Last month it refused to upload the latest software upgrade because it said there was too much data on the machine. So I did a factory reset and just loaded Borrowbox, which is an app where I can download library books for free and is the only thing I use the tablet for, and it has worked for a few more weeks. Recently, however, it’s been shutting down unexpectedly and occasionally freezing so I perhaps need to replace it. My birthday’s coming up soon, so I can see a new tablet as a very suitable present.
It’s only a week now before we’re off to another concert, this time in Manchester to see Ruth Lyon (lead singer of Holy Moly and the Crackers, now on a solo career), so we know just what we will be getting there.
