Hiro There...

Last night I went to go and see KT Tunstall play at the Hiro Ballroom at the Maritime Hotel. I only found out about the gig Monday, so it was a bit of last minute thing, but it was a chance I didn't want to miss as she was doing a solo acoustic gig.

The Maritime Hotel is a rather fancy looking place from the outside, it has lots of porthole windows dotted over the side of the building and it has a very nice looking outdoors bar/cafe bit round at the front, and there's also a tasty looking Sushi restaurant too. It's not very far away from work either, just over on 8th Avenue.

I had a wee bit of time to kill before the gig, so I went to get some tea at a place called Flight 151. It was a plane themed restaurant/bar (surprise surprise) and they did some mighty fine ribs. The best bit about Flight 151 is the loos - when you locked the door a little recording comes on with a 'Bing Bong' sound and an air stewardess tells you the the Captain has turned on the 'No Slob' sign and asks you to return the seat to it's downward position and for you to wash your hands. Then a little later the Captain makes an announcement, saying if you look to your left you'll see a loo and if you look to your right you'll see a basin... it was great little idea.

Anyway... back to the gig.

The doors opened at 7pm but the gig wasn't scheduled to start until 9pm so I got there for about 7.45pm - it was a bit empty, only a few die-hard fans were standing right up at the very front of the stage, so I went to get a drink and walk around the Ballroom for a bit.

The Hiro Ballroom is underneath the Maritime Hotel, it's another restaurant/bar/gig venue and it's one of the most beautiful venues I've ever been to I think. You walk in and there are dozens of hanging lanterns all glowing red and orange and yellow. There's a bar downstairs under a gazebo type structure, and upstairs there's a cozier loungey bit with those paper walls that you see in the films...


Eventually 9 o'clock rolled around and KT Tunstall took the very small stage. It's been about 2 years since she released her last album, so this was a little warm gig ready for the release of her new album in a couple of months. So there was no band, just her, 4 guitars and a gazillion pedals with looping effects and drum machines all built in...

I think it's the closest I've ever been at a gig... front row! It was a pretty intimate venue, I think it could have only held around 500 people or so, maybe less?

She played a lot of new stuff which sounded great, although she did have quite a few technical problems with her many many pedals, but she made a joke out of it and kept the crowd going...

I like the way she uses technology and pedals in a very inventive way, she had programmed one of her guitar pedals to play certain chords, so she put the pedal up on a stool and played it like a keyboard - just using three pedals for the three chords in the song, it sounded fantastic.

There were some very avid fans in the crowd who already knew the words to the new stuff, there was also a rather creepy cluster of balding men standing front row center stage constantly gazing up at her... She seemed to recognise them, so I think they might be the types of fans that go to every gig... it takes all sorts I suppose. Everyone seemed to having great fun though.

It was an absolutely brilliant night, and yet another completely different gig in New York, another amazing venue and another memorable performance... bloody brill.

Here's a video of her singing Black Horse & The Cherry Tree (it's a bit long, so I hope you're sitting comfortably...)

(My new phone takes videos, so that's why I'm putting more little clips on the blog... it records in really good quality, but when I upload them the videos get crunched down and become more pixelated, so I'm sorry if some of the quality gets lost a bit...)

... and here's a video of the last song she sung, a cover of 'New York I Love You'.