This was my seventh gig of Brendan’s Ark tour this year and the first to take place in my home country! How nice to be only 45 km removed from the venue for a change.

The weather couldn’t have been better. Utrecht was basking in gorgeous sunshine when my friend and I arrived. It was a perfect summer’s day.

After a prearranged dinner with kindred spirits from Brendan’s on-line forum, we all headed over to the Domkerk to await the opening of the church doors.

The Domkerk is a truly beautiful building, still very much in active use as a place of worship. Its atmopsheric interior formed the perfect setting for Brendan’s pensive music.

Tonight saw a different kind of flock gather in the pews, however. Brendan was headlining the first day of the Summer Darkness festival, something the organisers had wanted to have him do since the festival’s inception.

With a capacity of 650 people, the venue was sold out. It was nice to see so many people turn out to see Brendan, and a far cry from some of the 100 person gigs earlier in the year.

The crowd were a sea of black; hardly surprising, given the nature of the festival. Some people must have spent the entire day in front of the mirror, preparing to be seen at their most vivid.

With this audience as resplendent as the church in which they had congregated, the scene was set. There was a sense of great expectation in the air, the atmosphere electric and laden with childlike excitement. This gathering were surely no less faithful than the flock that assemble here on a Sunday morning. We, too, were here to be edified, fulfilled and give praise.

Initially, we had all politely filed along the pews, but once we were neatly seated, one of the organisers announced that we were free to desert the pews and stand in front of the stage. Well, he didn’t need to repeat himself. We quickly scuttled to the front and I took up position just a couple of metres back from the front of the stage.

The pews would have been less than ideal, because they were situated at 90 degrees to the stage, so a crick in one’s neck would have been the likely result of spending the entire evening with one’s head craned to the far left.

My new position also concerned me, however, because it placed me at some distance from the PA, which was way off to the side, next to the pews.

Unfortunately, there was no way to position myself in front of the PA without being so close as to risk worse sound than I was likely to get from this new position, not to mention that that vantage point would have been significantly worse for viewing the gig, which, let’s face it, is what it’s actually all about.

So, with the PA behind me and off to the side, I decided to simply hope for the best, sound-wise.

After a short introduction by the festival organiser, Brendan took to the stage. The first detail of note was that Rachel Haden had been replaced on bass by Rory O’Brien.

The sound was crisp and clear throughout the frequency range, even from my vantage point. The people still seated in the pews, however, were initially shocked and awed by the high volume. As the drum intro to The Arcane kicked in, people could be seen clutching at their ears. When this was observed by the sound engineer, he mercifully adjusted the volume for them.

Since the last time I had seen Brendan, Tim Buckley’s Song To The Siren had been added to the set. Gone were You Never Loved This City and Voyage Of Bran.

Song To The Siren was a particularly mesmerising rendition and I could quite happily have listened to it continue for another five minutes.

You could have heard a pin drop after the applause following each song died down. Every bleep from a mobile phone and every click of a camera’s shutter swelled to an obtrusive level. The audience were remarkably reverential and appreciative, united in their appreciation of this man’s music.

As usual, it seemed to end upon beginning, but an immense, palpable sense of satisfaction pervaded the air afterwards. Brendan had quite literally thrilled us all.

This was, perhaps, the best of the seven gigs I’ve seen him play this year. The combination of venue and audience anticipation was unparalleled, I think, and the fact we were allowed to stand created a much greater sense of intimacy than had been present at, for example, the Union Chapel, which is otherwise also an atmospheric venue.

There are some excellent photos of the gig on the Summer Darkness site.

My recording of the gig is up on DIME.

This was the second of my two UK gigs, in Islington’s striking Union Chapel. The Chapel is a Grade II listed building and still in active service as a Congregational Church. It must surely rank as the most atmospheric venue that Brendan has played in thus far on this tour.

As I sat on the train to London, I watched terraced houses clad in the English flag fly by, proudly proclaiming the allegiance of their occupants to the national football team in the upcoming World Cup. My soundtrack was the recording I’d made of the previous night’s gig in Manchester.

As I listened, I thought ahead to the coming evening’s show, which promised to be something very special. Not only would Brendan be playing in a beautiful church, Piano Magic would be supporting.

When I arrived at the venue, I discovered that there was talk of cancelling the gig, due to the venue’s insistence that the noise level be kept below a rather subdued 85 dB. This was understandably causing Brendan a great deal of consternation and he was apparently seriously considering not going ahead with the show.

Thankfully for all of us, the issue was ultimately somehow resolved, but given remarks and gestures made by Brendan during the concert, I suspect that he had had to swallow his pride and compromise on the volume.

Piano Magic warmed up the audience in the chilly venue with an enjoyable 30 minute set, drawing mostly on material from Ovations. Forum speculation that Brendan might come out to sing one of the songs from Ovations on which he provides vocals turned out to be no more than wishful thinking on the part of the fans. Oh well.

Brendan and co. came on at 21:00 sharp (there was a strict 22:30 curfew), proceeding to play through the now very familiar live set.

Brendan’s Mac laptop gave up the ghost halfway through Tree Of Life, but the band saw the song through to the end. We all subsequently sat in silence while the machine was rebooted and Rachel told a lame joke to fill the dead air.

As in Manchester, Dream Letter was passed over tonight. Severance, on the other hand, resumed its rightful place as second encore after an enthusiastic crowd continued to applaud for more, egged on by various members of Brendan’s entourage.

The Union Chapel is arguably the perfect setting for Brendan’s music, prudish volume policy notwithstanding. Its acoustics richly compensated for any perceived lack of volume, giving the songs a spatial quality absent from the shoebox venues that Brendan has been playing of late. The songs soared and seemed to expand to fill the space available.

Nevertheless, Brendan gestured several times during the gig to one of his sound engineers, clearly indicating the need to crank up the volume of some piece of equipment or other. He also remarked early on that he had never played so quietly before and that it required a lot of discipline from him to do so.

To my ears, the gig wasn’t substantially quieter than any of the others I’ve been to on this tour, but the Edirol’s input meter doesn’t lie and I had to record this performance at a higher level than the others.

The audience was a strange mixture of reverential fans enthralled by what they were witnessing, and a small number of people more interested in getting drunk than in listening to the music.

Throughout the performance, these characters would walk down and along the aisles in the middle of songs, and exit via a door on the left side, which led out and up some stairs to the bar. They would subsequently re-emerge after a few minutes, visibly the worse for wear.

As the evening wore on, these individuals became progressively more inebriated, which saw them become louder and less able to remain on their feet. It didn’t reach the point of spoiling anyone’s enjoyment, but it was undesirable, particularly given the solemnity of the venue we were in.

Besides, how anyone can walk out of a room in which Brendan is performing, is quite beyond me.

I’d estimate that there were about 400 people there, but it’s hard to be accurate, because people had fanned out across the pews. The gig can’t have been sold out, though, because there was still plenty of seating to the left and right of the stage.

Highlights for me tonight were Love On The Vine, Eros and Spirit, quintessential versions one and all.

And so my English trip comes to a close. Tomorrow morning, I board a train back to Amsterdam.

I’m writing this in the train on the way down to London from Manchester. As I type, terraced houses clad in the English flag denote their occupants’ allegiance to the national team in the upcoming World Cup.

Here are some notes I scribbled down when I got back to the hotel last night after Brendan’s gig in Manchester.

Brendan Perry + Guests turned out to be + Ghosts: there was no support band this evening.

The Deaf Institute is a quirky, but very appealing venue. It did actually once serve as an institute for the deaf, but you could have been forgiven for thinking that someone had a wry sense of humour when they picked the monicker.

The venue positively oozes kitsch character with its burgundy patterned wallpaper and stepped, football terrace seating at the back. If you scoured England in search of another place just like it, I doubt you’d find one.

There’s a very inviting, though very warm downstairs bar with lots of couch seating and an excellent bar menu. I can attest to the quality of the bangers and mash, as well as the sticky toffee pudding.

This is the best kind of one-stop shopping: food, drink and a Brendan Perry concert; all in one place.

The sound tonight was excellent. The small, ceiling-mounted PA was adequate for the tiny upstairs room in which Brendan was performing.

The turnout for the gig was low, about 100 people, which I can no longer really say surprises me. It was a good crowd, though, enthusiastically applauding after the songs and, just as importantly, remaining silent during them.

There were a couple of technical hitches during the first half of the show. Brendan’s guitar wasn’t switched on for the start of The Arcane and Rachel’s bass buzzed, fizzed and eventually dropped out for most of A Passage In Time. A dodgy lead was found to be the problem and Peter Sheridan doubled as a roadie during the song to fix it.

The only set-list surprise this evening was that Dream Letter wasn’t played. Peter told me afterwards that it was felt that the set might flow better without it.

As in Galway, Severance was tacked onto the end of the first encore, making it the one and only of the evening.

I recorded the gig and hope to have it up on DIME late Friday evening or Saturday afternoon at the latest. The quality is superb. I’m listening to it now on the train.

Let’s hope tonight’s gig at London’s Union Chapel is as good as Manchester was.