Andy Champion's ACV @ Queens Hall, Hexham. Thursday May 6

Paul Edis, keyboards ; Graeme Wilson, tenor & baritone sax ; Mark Williams, Strat ; Adrian Tilbrook, drums ; Andy Champion, double bass

So I forsake Emile Parisien's reportedly wonderful gig at Gateshead Old Town Hall, if Russell's lyrical Franglais blog is to be believed, for a night out in Hexham. No more election puns but this was anything but a 67% turnout ; the chef had gone home for a TV dinner and almost everyone else in town seems to have followed suit. But the show must go on and ACV gave us - me and the surprised Hexham 11 - a spirited if rather echoey performance.

"Are you ready Adrian?" asks Andy ; "I'm ready, but is the world ready?!" Then straight in with that wonderfully strident 9/8 rhythm as Andy plucks the rising bass intro of the first track on the album Fail in Wood, A Line made by Walking, leaving the chosen few in no doubt that this is no tea garden performance - more of a lightening tour of Tokyo's Shinjuku district.

After another, Andy quips, well-placed album track - You Add to My Stress, we are treated to the new enigmatic AC composition Giant Mice, punching another big hole in Hexham's wainscoting! the scale of it is beyond our metaphorical grasp. The first set finishes with that wonderfully moody track Black Embrace, which, on the album sleeve carries the in-parenthesis qualification Knight Moves, and always makes me think of some obscure defensive play, combined with the Cool style of the original 1968 Thomas Crown Affair, yet again boiling down to soft-focus sex with Faye Dunaway on a sheepskin rug surrounding an abandoned chess game, 2 empty glasses and a lipstick-traced long filter-tipped cigarette gently smoking on a heavy glass ashtray.

Only 3 people appear to have gone home to work out the prize anagram competition - Giant Mice (9) - a swing of 25% to Roluba, as the second set kicks off with the elegiac album title track Fail in Wood, Andy plucking flowers carefully before they Perish from the Hill, picking up speed until they take off like a Scarlet Freight train into the parallax of Graeme's forging tenor and Mark's iron Strat, flinging out their Nameless Pods as they tear towards what we can only imagine is the horizon. And then, no apologies required, Andy's mischievous monkey treatment of Monk's Hackensack with, I have to say, my table drumming highlight of the night - man of the match award goes to Adrian for his superb drum solo, which must have woken up even the loneliest monks in Hexham Abbey! Paul Edis comes in close with his tribute piano work - those jarring semitone 2nds and rising and falling chromatic triplets - classic Monk! We are then treated to another 2 new compositions: New Peculiar and Never Ever which are both well-received.

You can tell there's an express train approaching and it's not stopping, as Andy counts in Without Bones at 333 bpm, 'Time No Changes', Biggles flies undone on a shot of Red Bull, driving that train as our hero chucks on the proverbial coal with his great wooden shovel ; searching for metaphors, Paul turns up the percussive steam pressure on the keys like Cecil Taylor on speed, while Mark's Strat (through The Rat) and Graeme's tenor trade deafening but friendly insults in a dining car with no windows; someone off stage pulls the communication chord and the train hits the buffers on Fm7 to F - exhilarating stuff.

But now is the time to yield a sigh and ACV send us home with the beautifully written and arranged And You Do, ending like a Highland lullaby to keep us from staying up to watch the results dribble in. So it looks like the Tap and Spile!

George M.