Newbury wowed by Sons of Pitches
Sons of Pitches, at Arlington Arts, Snelsmore, on Friday, April 28, review by BRIAN HARRINGTON
Sons of Pitches came to public attention as the winners of Gareth Malone's Naked Choir in 2015 and have since gone from strength to strength. The current tour celebrates the ‘Best Bits’ of their performances and could, perhaps, be subtitled A Cappella Par Excellence.
Their vocal harmonies and beatboxing is a joy and the humour they inject in to every performance and their rapport with the audience wonderful. A measure of their ever growing popularity is that their performances have received over 3.5 million views on YouTube.
Opening with a stunning medley of 50 number one hits (in around 10 minutes) they then went back to their roots with Move, the Little Mix track, which was the first song they performed on The Naked Choir.
They included their trademark, and hugely popular, party piece of creating a song on the spot, based on contributions from the audience, in this case the final line of a text on someone's phone with suggestions as to musical genre.
The Abba medley was brilliant and had the capacity audience singing along and the renditions of Eleanor Rigby and Brothers In Arms were spectacular. It is intersting to note the age diversity of tonight's audience - literally from 8 to 80 and everything in between.
Their second set carried on in a similar vein, opening with a boy bands medley followed by an original track Picture Of My Soul, which they said they had created as a Eurovision audition piece (failed). King Of Kings, their cover of a Ladysmith Black Mambazo song was magnificent.
Their, rightly popular, take on Wuthering Heights was followed by an encore medley which included hits like Tragedy, Cotton Eye Joe, Gangnam Style and YMCA. The finale was a fabulous rendition of Give It Up (the KC and the Sunshine Band hit), which had the audience up and dancing.
Arlington Arts succeeded once again in bringing quality live music to Newbury, much to the delight of the crowd. Such venues are few and far between and to be valued.
Wonderfully entertaining.
