This show was part of the long running Blow Up club that has now taken up residency at the St Moritz club on a Friday night. And on this particular Friday night, it wasn't exactly heaving which is a shame as it is one of the only old school Soho venues that's still in existence.
First on were Moxy who are a 4-piece, slightly psychedelic Paisley pop band. They featured one of those musicians whose name should trip off my tongue and yet I had to go searching for and failed to find, so I won't call him Dave Harmon this time as I did when he was playing in Cauldronated earlier in the year. Anyway, he's a more than familiar face and usually in better bands than Moxy.
From the opener about being One In a Million, Moxy never really got out of second gear. All the songs were at the same slow pace with a bit of Jangle going on and Moxy's vocals sounding a bit like The Sundays' Harriet Wheeler.
About the most interesting of their songs were Sugar - a rather bitter love song of sorts - and the one they closed with about Brian Jones but to be honest they were rather easily forgotten and had nothing to really make me want to find out more about them.
Still, soon enough it was time for Anne Pigalle to saunter onto the tiny stage wearing a long black dress and a black and gold hooded cape meets coat and black and gold rimmed sunglasses. She was accompanied by her Keyboards, bongo player and trumpeter for a set of Soho Chanson D'amour that opened with Madame Sex: the title song of her most recent CD. It is indeed a sultry Chanson about...well, having sex and it's good to hear that Anne's vocals still sound fine after all these years; pitched somewhere between Edith Piaf and Brigitte Bardot.
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Queen Maria was sleazy and sexy and had one photographer snapping like he was at a Paris runway show while the trumpet and keyboards set off the vocals nicely. Over The Top was a sort of statement of intent for the milieu that Anne has been part of in Soho for the last 30 years on and off.
Erotica De Toi was a slightly less smokey Dalida-style Chanson but very much all about Anne and her love of sex. We then got her theme song Pigalle London Paris that could perhaps have been her walk on music. Ace Of Spade had some nice dark lyrics about not burying the corpse before the deliciously salacious St Orgasm: a fine example of Anne at her most Bardot-like.
23 then followed and most of us struggled to sing along as the lyrics are the word "Kiss" sung (well I'm guessing) 23 times!! Before she was telling us to "Fuck You, Fuck Me" on X Amount and it left you in little doubt that she would ravenously seduce many of us and give a good seeing too to the people at the back who wouldn't shut up.
She closed with a nice version of the Jacques Brel classic Amsterdam sung in the original French (naturellement) which adds a layer or two of sleaze missing when the likes of David Bowie sing it in English. All in all, a decent set of Chanson which is something I don't hear much of in London these days.
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