Cowboy Junkies – Royal Albert Hall, London

As regular readers know, I’ve been a fan of the Cowboy Junkies for a long, long time now – well, the best part of twenty years. The first thing I heard of theirs was the Trinity Sessions album (as it turned out, their second album, but the one that started spreading the word about just how good they were) and it’s still, twenty years on, always in my Top Three favourite albums. So when we saw that they were redoing the entire album live at the Royal Albert Hall, well, it was a no-brainer really.

The entire show – well, show’s not the right word, “performance” might be better – was awesome. Not just a copy of the album (although, well, I’d have been just as happy with that, to be honest) but instead it was the same songs, same order, but slightly different versions – helped along the way by the addition of Ryan Adams on guitar (and singing) and Thea Gilmore as a backing vocalist. They’re also releasing a “Trinity Sessions Revisited” album + DVD to mark the occasion/gigs/idea.

To me, seeing the performance of the full album – and to my mind, it’s still also their best album, as well as being on of my all-time favourites – was just fantastic. I’ve seen them do a fair number of the songs before, but to see the entire album was just something else.

Because the entire album only runs at about the hour, there was plenty of time for encores, and again they played a couple of old favourites as well as a couple of tracks from their latest album.

All told, it was just fantastic. I haven’t been all that great this year with gigs, but there was no way we were going to miss this one, and it was well worth it – worth paying for the tickets, the London Congestion charge, the parking, the 2.5 hour drive each way, worth all of it. Absolutely brilliant.

Long may the Cowboy Junkies continue to record, and long may they keep on coming back to the UK to play. I’ll be there.