Live review from TEN in Waterford

David Kitt may have lost out in the last Warners’ cabinet reshuffle but his return to Indieland has given him a renewed sense of calm that augurs well for the future. His leisurely stage presence is the perfect vehicle for his tender folk-rock gems and his courageously autobiographical love songs.
While the hits had the predictable effect on committed fans, and bringing out the karaoke in even the most casual observers, ‘Song From Hope Street’ and ‘You Know What I Want To Know’, the latter leavened with classy trumpet, showed how Kitt can so effortlessly reach the parts of an audience few acts reach. The Velvet-Rex treatment of ‘The Long Stares’ sent some great guitar noises soaring to the rafters and he unveiled a stunning industrial-lite treatment of JJ Cale’s ‘Magnolia’ from a forthcoming album of mainly covers. There are obviously lots of tricks in the old Kitt bag yet.
That Waterford has a new club that can attract such a fine and knowledgeable audience is good news too, the plush futurism of 10 serving as a particularly appropriate backdrop for the full-on indie rock assault of Alphastates. In Catherine Dowling they have a singer born to live on the stage, her WW11 vamp-waitress persona and honeydripping voice pulling them in from the bar from the off.
The seductively bluesy ‘Kiss Me’ revealed her voice at its most expressive before it built into an exciting guitar wig-out. The martial ‘Sometime’ and the funkyish ‘Angel Kiss’ showed a band keen to blow the electricity budget. ‘Round Here’, with its “she likes kissing girls” setting a few elbows a-twitching, is vaguely Vega-ish and ‘Last Day Of Summer’ is sombrely majestic and brimful of chunky guitars and that voice again.
All told, a night that scored an appropriate ten out of Ten.