Mary Spender Live at The Castle & Falcon B’ham.

“Mary Spender – Musician or YouTuber – lets find out.”

NMR – Mary Spender has seen excellent success in the YouTube arena over the last few years gaining around 750k subscribers whilst discussing her music journey in microscopic detail, but does that translate into real fans attending gigs, I went along to find out.

Introduction

I first saw Mary Spender at the Birmingham Guitar show around 2017, I think she was doing a gear demo, and having followed her progress on and off since then it was good to see her announce a Live tour of her new album, I think her Music has taken a bit of a back seat over the last few years given she has spent a lot of time on her successful YouTube channel, its good to see her devoting more time to this element of her work.

I get the impression Mary Spender isn’t quite convinced about which route to take, a full-time music career is difficult to run alongside a full time YouTube channel, it feels like one must come before the other eventually, and whilst YouTube provides financial benefits, does it give real personal job satisfaction?

The Venue

Although The Castle & Falcon is a fairly local live band venue for me, I’d never been there before, parking was a little challenging given how busy the area is, but we got sorted. Once inside, the live staged area is just at the rear behind the bar, I thought it might be a bit bigger somehow, but it was adequate.

We bagged a couple of stools at a table behind the mixing desk, which was handy as it led to a couple of chats with the sound guy Andy, and for those who are interested, it was a Behringer Wing mixer which seemed to perform well, Andy also had the lighting controller adjacent though this seemed to just do its own thing, I did feel the lighting could have been a bit more animated, with more spotlight on Mary here and there.

Whilst we waited for the gig to start, I felt the venue were missing a trick really, it would have been good to see one or two local acoustic acts to warm things up a bit, given that Mary Spender is such an advocate of supporting new talent, I don’t think they would be short of willing artists, maybe something to think about for the venue.

The Gig

Mary Spender kicked off the set with a few solo acoustic songs, guitar sounded nice a full, vocal came over well, and seeing as I hadn’t listened to the album yet, I found the songs enjoyable from the off, some nice tempos, tunings and chord arrangements, and yes, Mary is a good guitar player.

Soon after the band joined her, they were using a click track and some odd bits of backing I think, though I do prefer the good old 1,2,3,4 starter, the fixed tempo track can make things a bit too perfect for me, but overall it worked fine and sounded good, all of the band members were very competent and breezed through the tracks with confidence…on the outside anyway !

Mary’s song writing is fairly tame generally, nothing too far from the main road, though she does have a style, mainly around the different guitar tunings which make for some interesting chords and her vocal style, the pace picks up now and then which added some nice energy to the gig, plus a little crowd participation here and there.

Personally, I would have liked to have heard more backing vocals on some of the tracks, it would have added an extra layer and colour to the sound but its just an opinion, the guitarist I noted was using a Kemper Profiler and had some nice tones coming out from there.

The audience seemed to enjoy the gig and appreciated the fact the Mary was available after the show for quick chats, merch signing etc, so of course I hung around and chatted to the band and the official photographer in the bar until the end to get the last word.

Aftershow

I had about 10 minutes chatting with Mary which was pleasant, she seems quite grounded, I recalled seeing her some years ago doing guitar demos at a guitar show, back when she had a handful of Youtube subscribers, things have changed a bit since then, I mentioned this review site, Im not sure if she was particularly interested to be honest, I did reach out prior to the event but no joy there.

Anyhow,… all in all, I think she has a good thing going, can she fill big venues, maybe….some day, but back to my opening line…YouTuber ….or Touring musician…I reckon something has to give, we shall see.