Stacey Earle & Mark Stuart live

Stacey Earle and Mark Stuart
Sage II Gateshead May 8 2010

As usual Stacey and husband Mark entered the stage looking like they felt they didn’t deserve to be up there and would rather be sitting among us playing their tunes and generally chatting like old friends do.
The opening song, On My Way was from 1985 and the rest of the set was a ‘greatest hits’ night in the broadest sense of the title, with songs spanning Stacey’s 18 year career.
All of my favourites made an appearance at one time or another; with Stacey getting the giggles in the middle of It Must be Love and Stacey and Mark trading guitar licks like rockers, in Next Door Down.
The songs and stories came thick and fast with tales of confusing a Hen Party in York with Mardi Gras in New Orleans and a long tale of a trip to Michael Jacksons’ Neverland Ranch and Stacey asking people in the first few rows what was their first ever single (hers was ABC by the Jackson 5). Arguably this took up valuable singing time but it brought some fun answers and became a running joke all night,
Let’s not forget Mark Stuart who got to sing a couple of his own songs but generally played the dutiful husband by never over shadowing his wife even though his guitar playing was subtly brilliant all evening.
Most of Stacey’s songs and stories are very personal and humourous but one particular song will live in the memory of everyone at Sage II for a long time. When she introduced it in her normal homely way, no one expected the punch line to be that only weeks after she had kissed her son goodbye at Christmas, she received a phone call from the Army telling her that her son had been killed in combat while serving in Iraq.
Forty five minutes later, the same Army person called back to tell her that it was a mistake and her son was actually still alive. I swear not one person in the packed hall took a breath as she sang Nine Months to the Date. The applause was deafening.
The encore was meant to be a series of requests, but they hadn’t played some of the songs for years and one song (Pretty Free?) ended in a bit of a mumbling shambles when Stacey forgot the words. The actual finale was fun too, with Mark telling a story about his jukebox and the records on it; which concluded with the husband and wife singing a medley of snippets from songs from the last 40 or so years.
I can’t think of a better way to end a night in the company of Stacey Earle. Alan Harrison