For Christmas both myself and Jo managed to independently go for gifts ‘you do’ for each other and Jo’s gift to me was tickets to see the genius that is Newton Faulkner and so last night I headed down to Sheffield for the Newton Faulkner gig.

I’ve been going to gigs since I was 17 and it’s the first gig I’ve been to with seats and so even upon entering the venue there was a very different vibe about this gig, City Hall in Sheffield is a lovely venue quite a contrast from the sticky floored O2 Academy in Sheffield I last went to in November to see Bowling for Soup.

The crowd were warmed up by musician Charlie Winston who, whilst being a very talented musician didn’t quite do it for me…not sure why….however this didn’t take any anticipation away from the arrival of Newton.

With some light background music Newton Faulkner casually strolled onto the stage, picked up his guitar and burst into ‘Intro’ and ‘Badman’ from his album ‘Rebuilt by Humans’ before continuing to go through the majority of songs from both his albums with a few quirky sections such as a short cover of ‘you spin me right round’ and concluded the gig with his famous 1 man cover of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘I’m not giving up just yet’.

Throughout the gig there was something very refreshing about the gig, Newton joked, made some comments, explained what he was doing and even tuned his own guitars giving the impression that even though he is really well known he is still a pretty humble man.

For me as a music geek my favourite thing about the gig was the transparency. All but 1 song was played by Newton all on his own combining guitaring, tapping his guitar in a variety of places and using a series of pedals to play strings, synths and a variety of other noises (oh and he used a cassette at one point!). To accompany this one man band was a couple of cameras positioned so you could see him doing everything showing that Newton Faulkner is truly a musical genius!

All in all one of the best gig’s I’ve been to and Newton Faulkner is well worth going to see!