Live Review : Kris Barras Band + Dea Matrona @ The Tivoli, Buckley on February 10th 2023

Little do I know as I wander into the always welcoming arms of the Tiv that tonight is going to be a night full of surprises! We start off with Dea Matrona, who are two young lasses from Belfast who came to fame via youtube. Apparently they busk on the streets of their home city, film it, and have amassed over seven million views in the last couple of years. Not bad going! Tonight they also bring a drummer and come on playing bouncy blues. OK, that's not a bad start, accessible and hummable.

But wait, what? The girls swap instruments (guitar and bass) and go into a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Oh Well’, complete with acapella vocal and full-on guitar soloing. This is not what I was expecting! It's a very retro sound but the thing that makes it special is the vocals. Both lead and harmonies are impeccable and their own stuff is fresh, funky and fun. It's probably a little bit out of the ROCKFLESH comfort zone these days but I like it - there's a lot of attitude and a lot of stomping and swaying, there's a bit of clap-along and these girls can certainly play. I bet they know who Bonnie Raitt is as well! They put away the bass and break out an acoustic guitar for a jangly and haunting song that seems to showcase their Celtic roots and is like The Corrs on steroids, then they cover Simon and Garfunkel's ‘Homeward Bound’ and again the singing gives me goosebumps. They are due back over in May for their own headlining tour and while they may not technically belong on the hallowed pages of ROCKFLESH I will almost certainly be going to see them.

Kris Barras Band is, I always thought, a blues artist and I’m not that keen on the blues. I tend to pigeonhole it into two camps; the old blokes with straggly grey hair and baggy clothes who love to talk arpeggios and scales over a pint of real ale, or top-knotted hipsters with immaculately-coiffed beards and flowery shirts who worship at the altar of Gary Moore and drink craft beer. In my head I kind of stuck Kris Barras in the latter group and more or less ignored him until now. Turns out I was wrong, because Kris has cut off his top-knot, swapped the flowery shirt for a cut-down t-shirt and tattoos, and is very firmly on the way to becoming a major Rock Star. His other guitarist still has an immaculately-coiffed beard though! I am delighted to see that they have little boxes at the front of the stage, I call them pose boxes and indeed various band members pose on them superbly throughout the set. I do love a good pose box!

They start off singing some acapella vocals (without backing tracks! Although there is some enhancement throughout the set) which sends shivers down my spine, and it’s all uphill from there really. This band are seriously good, it's fast paced and slick although some of the lyrics are a bit weird – is he really singing about dead horses? As expected there's some superb noodling taking place, and Kris does some pretty awesome guitar face throughout. Kris may have lost his hipster beard but he's gained a razor sharp rock edge instead. He still does some blues but it's heavy blues, power blues, I'm loving the strength and melody. There’s a decent-sized crowd in tonight and they are fully involved in the performance from the start. The band feed off the energy and there are waving phone lights, plus Kris leaps the barrier to be part of the crowd a couple of times. Towards the end of the set there’s a stonking cover of Led Zeppelin's ‘Rock and Roll’ that segues in the bridge into ‘Nothing Else Matters’ (Metallica) and ‘Carry On Wayward Son’ (Kansas) and although on paper that shouldn’t work it absolutely does. We have a singalong moment where the crowd drown out the band, and it’s all just wonderful. The final song is, I think, called ‘My Parade’ and contains the lyric “This is my parade, don’t give a fuck what people say” Yep. That’s a mantra to live by, and I think the world could be a better place if everyone were to be just a little more Kris.