THE magic wand to be waved over Stonebow House will put paid to The Duchess and the old Fibbers, leaving York denuded of two of its principal live music bars.
Into the breach must step the likes of The Crescent, the former working men's club in The Crescent now turned into a family-run community venue with a licensed bar (two in fact) and space for creativity.
The main room has a dance floor, plenty of seating to the side and back, and lines of flags pinned across the ceiling, and already it feels like home for York's roving music devotees. Mr H, alias stalwart promoter Tim Hornsby, and Please Please You younger buck Joe Coates have both taken a shine to the premises, and judging by two Early May Bank Holiday concerts, The Crescent will become a retro favourite.
Sunday night opened with Sam Griffiths, sort of the younger soul brother to Benjamin Francis Leftwich, and surely the next to follow Ben to acclaim beyond York.
On the ticket desk by Mr H was a note asking for the audience to note this would be an acoustic night with a respectful request for quiet; so much more polite than those STFU cards now doing the rounds at London venues. If anyone could bring a full house to hushed reverence, it was Benjamin Francis Leftwich, who "probably knows about a quarter of you already" and was so visibly delighted to be back home in York, even if he has decamped to North London in recent years.
His overdue sophomore album, After The Rain, is at last on the August horizon, and here was the first chance to hear a handful of beauteous Leftwich compositions alongside the cherished paeans and growing pains of 2011's Last Smoke Before The Snowstorm, the debut that had seen so many through a broken romance.
He has none of the crippling stage shyness of Nick Drake but there is something so hymnal and poetic in his songs that reminds you of the broken Drake, his emotional radar finding the heart time after time; only Ben and his acoustic guitar, pulling away from the microphone to sing Summer into the night air. We've missed you Ben, the way you move us; welcome back, you are truly special.
Cale Tyson: the looks and the hooks
Last time Joe Coates brought Nashville singer-songwriter Cale Tyson to York, Cale was "the new Gram Parsons", accompanied solely by his utility guy Pete Lindberg. Now he returns, in de rigueur checked shirt, skinny jeans and Stetson, with this spring's Muscle Shoals country soul album, Careless Soul, plus Lindberg on drums, Andrew Hunt on bass and Smokin' Brett Resnick on sublime pedal steel.
Tyson has it all, the looks, the hooks, the patter, the songs of love lost and found, the country DNA of Parsons and Hank Williams. Yorkshire line dancers and his American parents alike couldn't resist dancing at the front; The Crescent re-born.
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