MADELEINE PEYROUX

When you get home, you make yourself another jug of the fruity red nectar to try to reproduce that holiday magic.

But something’s wrong.

OK it’s still nice, but it sort of doesn’t work. Right people, right time, just wrong location.

Madeleine Peyroux’s concert at The Anvil on Saturday was a bit like that.

The American songstress with the melancholic, Gallic voice is known for her smooth, lilting jazz and blues, infused with a note of country, and an almost full house at Basingstoke’s Anvil theatre were treated to all her best known songs and covers of confirmed crowd pleasers.

A cover of Ray Charles’ Take These Chains From My Heart set the tone for the evening, with a string quartet providing bluegrass-style backing and Peyroux working hard to give the number her personal touch with some idiosyncratic phrasing and unusual melodic reworking of the vocals.

A version of Bye Bye Love was an unexpected and downbeat offering, while Between The Bars, from her Careless Love album, was given a clever twist with a mock-drunken presentation.

Much of her vocals were lost, though, drowned out by an illbalanced sound that persisted well into the second half of the show.

This problem aside, Peyroux’s quirky presentation brought a much more contemporary jazz feel to the music than we have come to expect from her easylistening album offerings, and she held the audience’s interest throughout the evening.

But this unvarying stream of plaintive, late-night jazz felt out of place in the large concert hall, and cried out for a jazz club-style setting.

Enjoyable though it was, by the end you felt that you needed to hear this somewhere else, with a stiff drink to lift your spirits.

So – right music, wrong location.

Sangria, anyone?

CHRIS PARKINSON-BROWN