Josh Ritter is one of my all-time favourite musicians. This marks the forth time that I have seen him live (the first being in Birmingham Alabama way back in 2009!) When Ritter announced that he was touring, I immediately set an alarm to make sure that I nabbed a ticket to his only UK show. And then disaster – tickets sold out within the first ten minutes. Thankfully, Ritter added a second London date and I was able to get tickets to that to see my favourite songwriter for the first time since 2013.
As per usual, the grins were high wattage and Ritter’s positive energy was absolutely infectious. It’s rare to experience a gig like it – everyone was absolutely humming with energy, ecstatic to see him, ready to politely request favourite songs, yet so concentrated on his performance that you could have heard a pin drop at times.
He played some big audience favourites like The Curse, Girl in the War and Kathleen interspersed with some of his newer songs. The audience was yelping with excitement throughout. Ritter played an absolutely immense set, talking over his guitar picking to maximise the amount of time that he played for (well over an hour and forty minutes, absolutely giving everyone their monies worth), he went from song to song, never stopping to take a drink of water and played over 20 songs. One man politely shouted out a request for Another New World. Ritter stopped what he was about to start playing, smiled, said he liked a challenge and segued into it instead. It was a highlight of the night.
I cannot wait for Josh Ritter to come back to the UK again, this time hopefully with the rest of the band!
Have you ever seen Josh Ritter live?
