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REVIEW: Miles Hunt & Erica Knockalls, The Tower, Winchester.  Friday 21st November

Miles Hunt may be more familiar to most as lead singer of the Wonderstuff but he has also carved out a successful solo career. Usually accompanied by Erica Knockalls, the pair have been on the road since April 2007.  It's been 19 years since I first saw him perform, which makes tonight’s appearance at the excellent Tower Arts centre both an exciting and nervous prospect, wondering how time has treated one of Britain’s most under-rated lyricists and musicians.

He may be more sober looking in middle age, but it’s not tamed his sharp tongue or taste for barbed cynicism; nor thankfully, his way with a song. Tonight’s set is a kind of ‘evening with Miles Hunt’ – a mixture of Wonderstuff classics and recent solo compositions, all interspersed with a wealth of stories and musings from 25 years of song writing, touring and recording.

The opening handful of songs are all from the recent album, ‘Not an Exit’, yet despite probably being not as well known, are immediately welcoming and familiar. ‘Back on The Charm Offensive’ is everything you would expect: sharp and full of bile. A driving, biting outpour which even in acoustic form, the skill he has with voice and chords gives it plenty of edge. ‘Corny But True’, by Miles’s own admission is the first *proper* love song he’s ever written, all wistful vocals, rhythms and chords punctuating like heartbeats, and strings that sigh. Which perhaps gives an insight into a man finally at a place where he’s content musically, much of which you suspect is down to the partnership with Erica Knockalls on strings. There’s always been an air of folk about his melodies – the instrumentation and the sentiment beneath the acidic wit. Erica is the perfect accompaniment, grounding and soothing the plaintive melodies or bolstering the spittle on the more cutting, punchy ‘Mission Drive’ with sharp, brittle jabs.

The background behind the songs is just as enjoyably received and lapped up by the crowd, and as we move into the second half of the set the eagerly awaited Wonderstuff back catalogue is dusted off, re-worked for acoustic and sounds as fresh as ever.   ‘Circlesquare’ is a helter skelter of twisty fiddle and shuddering chords, and ‘Sing the Absurd’ is, um, absurdly fragile yet strangely sweeping enough to be stadium-like.  The set ends with fan favourite, ‘Here Comes Everyone’, and as Miles sings ‘….there is only I’ it somehow sums up the whole of his appeal.  He does what he does, is brutally honest in what he thinks, and even more honest in playing the music that invigorates him.  Which is even better summed up in another line: ‘Come one, come all, I don’t give a fuck’.

Chris Roberts