I’d been dreading this gig, on the basis that I love Blue Skies, Broken Hearts Next 12 Exits, and wasn’t convinced that seeing it acoustic and live would live up to my expectations, and might ruin the record. Man, how wrong was I?

The set was a mixture of BSBH, So Long, Astoria and End if Forever. Kris was chatty throughout, he spoke with the crowd rather than just to us, and most of all he was faithful to the original songs without ever being boring. It’s obvious from the lyrics that the songs mean a lot to him, and that passion was really what made the live performance so good. It takes a lot for a solo acoustic gig to be a total success, but this undoubtedly was.

Photography-wise, Kris asked for the front gels to be turned off, and so was playing in almost complete darkness. This didn’t make life very easy! Despite f1.8 and ISO3200, there was still plenty of motion blur and focussing problems. The sheer number of people didn’t help, so it wasn’t a terribly successful night in terms of image-making. I also found it quite ridiculous how many people thought it totally fine to spend an entire set firing flashes at an artist. To my mind, it’s rude and distracting, and I really do think people should have some consideration both for the artist and the rest of the crowd before photographing (or worse, videoing with a constant light). But that’s just one of my little bug-bears!