The Blackheart Orchestra & Beth Eliza – Temperance, Leamington Spa: Live Review

By John Barlass on 4th March 2025 • ( Leave a comment )

The Blackheart Orchestra bring their multi-instrumental magic to the compact confines of Leamington’s Temperance. Two people, one great sound…

THE BLACKHEART ORCHESTRA – ON TOUR…

They claim to be the world’s smallest orchestra and, with 15 instruments at their disposal to keep them fully occupied, Rick Pilkington and Chrissy Mostyn – aka Blackheart Orchestra – might have a justifiable right to that title. Sundry keyboards, electric and acoustic guitars, a Fender Precision bass – even a glockenspiel – make for an awesome sound. And an awesome sound is what the duo brought to the close confines of Temperance in Leamington Spa.

Blackheart Orchestra are currently enjoying the first of three UK tours that they’ll be undertaking this year (summer and autumn tours will follow, so keep your eyes and ears set to ‘alert’) and, this time around, they’re focusing upon material from their albums Hotel Utopia (2022) and Mesmeranto (2019), as well as previewing a bunch of songs for a new album, expected to hit the racks later this year.

FROM BOLTON TO BRISBANE

Rick and Chrissy have been together since 2006 and they became The Blackheart Orchestra in 2016. Since then, they’ve performed just about everywhere from Bolton to Brisbane, Dublin to Dunedin and have appeared at such prestigious venues as The Palladium, London and The royal Albert Hall. But – you know what? I got the distinct impression that they thrive particularly upon the tight intimacy of venues like Temperance, where they can see the whites of their audience’s eyes, and their audience can see the strings on the band’s instruments.

Temperance was packed to the rafters with Blackheart Orchestra followers, many of whom had travelled some distance – from Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire – to be here. I felt as though I’d cheated by merely walking down Tachbrook Road….

But, before we get to the evening’s main course, there was a tasty appetiser to enjoy…

BETH ELIZA

Beth Eliza is a young, Suffolk-born singer-songwriter who is currently making significant waves in and beyond the East Anglian music scene. She’s in the process of recording her debut album and, tonight, we had a crafty foretaste of the songs that will be featured on that first record. She has a comfortable, charismatic stage presence, a strident, pleasant voice and her songs are packed with thought-provoking lyrics that can be sentimental or confrontational, dependent upon Beth Eliza’s mood at the time of writing. If Beth Eliza wants to make a point, she doesn’t hold back, that’s for sure…

AN EARLY HIGH

A few nice ‘n’ easy strums on her guitar provided the intro to her opener, Just What Lovers Do, and we were off. Beth Eliza hit an early high point with TV Screens, a song to which she’s still adding the final touches and in which she takes a mature, yet optimistic, look at the life of a gigging musician. She’s got the confidence to declare that: “I may not be Beyoncé but I know that I’m as good as anyone else.” That’s confidence for you, and the kind of confidence that Beth Eliza will, one day soon, be “On our TV screen,” as her lyrics predict.

Beth Eliza wrote Fixated Dreams when she was just 16 years old. It’s a song that nods towards the grittier edge of country music, a genre that she’s particularly fond of, and she sang it – and strummed it – hard. It was, though, Roots, a song that Beth Eliza wrote for her parents, that perhaps packed the biggest punch in her short set.

It’s a wonderfully sentimental song that encapsulates the emotions experienced on all sides of a family when an offspring ups sticks and leaves home for the first time and, with lyrics like: “Thank you for the music that courses through my veins,” you can bet that Beth Eliza’s mother won’t be able to listen to it without shedding a happy tear.

SENTIMENTAL AND SEMI-LOVE

Act Like We’re Men, an assertive semi-love song was followed by the wistful Quiet on the Western Front, before the reflective Ordinary People saw Beth Eliza “getting things off her chest” in a thoughtful, well-structured song that was another of her set highlights.

It was over all too soon as Beth Eliza closed her set with the upbeat Never Alone, another song with a distinctive alt-country flavour and a stirring vocal finish as she encouraged us to “Dance across the living room until we’re grey and old.” It was an excellent start to the evening – I have a strong suspicion that we’ll be hearing a lot more from Beth Eliza.

THE BLACKHEART ORCHESTRA – PART ONE

“This is a full little room, isn’t it?” said Rick, as Blackheart Orchestra took their places on stage, “This is the warmest I’ve been all year,” added Chrissy. But the confines of this small cellar were just right for the deluge of sound to come…

With Chrissy on Telecaster and Rick on keys, Blackheart Orchestra wasted no time in proving that the stories about their rich, fully encompassing sound are all true as they kicked off with The Tide. An awesome, slightly scary, crescendo of electronic sound was the lead-in to the mesmerizing Darling Africa. Despite the African setting, Rick’s keyboard percussion hinted at Nordic origins and they were the perfect counterbalance to Chrissy’s plaintive vocal tones. The band’s excitement in their performance was crystalized as Chrissy remarked, “I think that turned into a race!” at the end of the song.

UPLIFTING

Rick picked up his bass guitar for the first time of the evening for Under The Headlights, the lead single from the band’s Hotel Utopia album. It’s an uplifting song, with Rick playing an effective motif way up at the dusty end of his guitar neck and Chrissy’s tinkly keyboard giving the song a Yes-like quality. Rick stuck with his bass, but also managed to simultaneously hit all the right notes on his keyboard, too, as Chrissy shifted to piano – and vocals – (see what I mean about multi-tasking?) for Night Circus, another song from the Hotel Utopia album.

The forthcoming album had its first airing with the bright, glittery, Stars. Rick ticked glockenspiel off his list of instruments to visit and the duo hit some sparkling vocal harmonies on a song that could only have heightened the audience’s anticipation for the new product. And the uplifting mood was continued with Raise Your Heart, yet another slice of the Hotel Utopia album. Rick plays a light, fluttering, guitar lick and Chrissy engages with her bank of keyboards on a song billed as “A happy song about coming back from the dead.“

NEW ALBUM POTENTIAL…

The potential of the forthcoming album was given a further boost with the ethereal All The Colours . Both Chrissy and Rick indulged in a lengthy introduction that left the audience no wiser with regard to what the song was about, but the song stood on its own merits. Like several other Blackheart Orchestra songs, it has a detectable Kate Bush influence and Chrissy nailed it, helped to a huge extent by Rick’s echo-y guitar solo.

It was ‘big hit’ time next, as the mellow, quirky Violet was followed by Bloodlines, the 2024 single that hit the heady heights of #19 in the UK singles chart. OK – maybe such success doesn’t hold quite the cachet that it would have done 50 years ago when, as Rick pointed out, “We’d have been on Top of the Pops…” but it’s a great song, nevertheless. And I’ve have loved to have seen how Pan’s People would have treated it…

Interval time was looming and Chrissy and Rick took us up to The News with the folky Before. So far, so good. Now to try and extricate ourselves from this cramped cellar…

THE BLACKHEART ORCHESTRA – PART TWO

“We’re going to start Part Two of our show with with a song that we absolutely detest,” said Rick. “It’s like a musical prostate examination.” Now – I don’t know about you, but I’m actually rather fond of the resonant keyboard and pattering drumbeat that provide the drive behind Drown Me Out, the track from the Mesmeranto album that kicked off the second half of Blackheart Orchestra’s set. But, perhaps the evening’s definitive show-stopper was the revamped version of Sebastian, a song retrieved from the 2017 Diving For Roses album. Chrissy and Rick shared a keyboard and Rick doubled-up on bass for a song that’s now presented as a big ballad that retains its Kate Bush flavourings.

The tinkly, passionate, Wolves, another song from Mesmeranto, made a welcome return to the Blackheart Orchestra set, before Hotel Utopia had yet another airing, this time via the vibrant Astronaut, perhaps the song most closely associated with that all-pervading Kate Bush spirit.

THE OX LIVES ON!

Then, back to that projected new album (“8/12 complete,” promised Rick…) for the thumpy Better Than Me, a song that was propelled on its quasi-funky route by Rick’s choppy bassline. And Rick stuck with his bass to play a John Entwistle-styled lead line on set-closer, Lifetime. Chrissy returned to her piano and delivered a heartwarming vocal on a song that built steadily to soaring climax of “In another lifetime…”

It wasn’t quite over, of course. The Temperance room was too full to require Blackheart Orchestra to go through the motions of leaving the stage, then returning, so they stayed put for the encore of The Flood, the epic song that closes the Hotel Utopia album. And the flood swept through that tiny cellar as the audience were encased in a warm blanket of sound from Chrissy’s spacy keyboards – and a glorious final guitar solo from Rick drove the song – and the evening to a stunning climax.

Blackheart Orchestra – thanks for visiting my town. See you in the summer!

And – it you haven’t yet managed to get along to a Blackheart Orchestra show this time around, there’s still a few opportunities to catch them. The current tour runs until 4th April when it winds up in Halifax. Full details can be found here.

Watch the official video to Bloodlines – that 2024 Blackheart Orchestra hit single – here: