Last night's gig at the excellent Birdwell Venue confirmed to some in the audience that most of us there already knew:

1. Chantel McGregor has an angelic, crystal clear, velvet sweet voice that has power and emotion in spades.

2. When Chantel McGregor plays guitar, that guitar becomes possessed by a dirty Succubus that is outrageously earthy, being both playful and sexy, seductive and exquisitely beautiful, and yet full of murderous intent.

The contrast of that voice and the guitar shredding delivered a truly amazing gig that left us uttering a lot of "bloody hell!"'s and "WOW!"s throughout. And we already knew Chantel was an amazingly talented artist.

Before we go into anymore of Chantel's performance, we need to talk about the support act, Tom Kilner, and the venue for the gig, The Birdwell Venue.

We'll start first with the Venue. We've driven past the Venue may times and seen banners for appearing artists and said, "ooh we should go see that" but for one reason or another we never managed to. So this was our first visit, not knowing what to expect. We loved it. Air conditioned hall (which given how hot and humid it was outside was truly welcome), friendly and helpful staff, reasonably priced drinks, fair sized car park. It might have been our first visit, it will not be our last.

Now onto Tom Kilner. We know Tom's work of course, his songs are regularly played on several shows on the station, but Miss Bonnie and I had never seen him live. He and the band rocked the stage as though it was their own and won over new fans for sure. Certainly, we will be back to see him perform again also.

He's also hard at work on a new album, and played several songs from it which showed a drift toward a southern rock influence. Still with that blues-rock root, but nonetheless none of the songs he played would be out of place on one of our Southern Rock specials.

Now back to our headliner. What was astonishing from the off was how a sweet hello into the mic was instantly followed by a power chord and subsequent riff that would have made Tony Iommi proud. That set the stage for an evening of dirty riffs followed by a series of solos that ranged from beautifully emotive thorough to virtuoso shredding that brought spontaneous applause from the audience throughout. Now, to be clear, not every song began with a power chord, Chantel's material is varied after all. Some songs begin with a gentle semi-acoustic intro, others with a softer riff. There was also a beautiful solo performance of 'Anaesthetise', the proggy 'April' and the epic 'Walk On Land' (which was the encore song).

We should also mention that Chantel has a lovely sense of humour, delivering various one line (or in some cases one word) comments, and also joking about the "pretend to walk off" only to come back to do an encore... so she didn't bother to walk off but announced the encore song anyway.

As of writing, Chantel still has several dates of her tour left and you should make every effort to go see her (dates are here https://www.chantelmcgregor.com/tour) . And if you can't on this tour, please do so on the next!

You will not be disappointed.