Marc Atkinson

Live Stream

29 March 2020

Of all the musicians I like, Marc Atkinson probably plays more gigs than any of them, so it's criminal that I've only seen him live a handful of times. Time to do something about that ...

The format of a streaming gig suits him. His natural element is sitting down with just his voice and a guitar, although most of the time he's playing covers to a noisy pub crowd. This format gives him a rare chance to play his own songs to an attentive crowd, and he takes full advantage of it, drawing on many of the albums he's been involved in over the past couple of decades.

A lot of the songs from his solo albums are written for acoustic guitar, so all of those fit the format perfectly. The eye-poppers are the Riversea songs. Even with the big prog band arrangements stripped away (Marc helpfully shouts "keyboard solo" at appropriate moments), they still sound perfect. The strength of the melodies, the lyrics, and Marc's voice, his heartfelt, emotional delivery, are all you need. Plus subtle use of looping and some impressive e-bow solos. But overall, just Marc's voice, possibly the most beautiful voice in rock today.

He has a great rapport with the "crowd", giving stories behind all the songs and taking requests from the chat, and has the easy, friendly manner you need at a gig like this.

And, unbelievably, he played for two and a quarter hours. I don't know where the time went ... it just flew past.

He's doing another one next week. Make sure you're there. It will be the best streaming gig you've ever seen.