{"id":20961,"date":"2021-05-09T05:30:52","date_gmt":"2021-05-09T09:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=20961"},"modified":"2025-08-28T09:14:30","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T13:14:30","slug":"concert-review-peter-noone-hendersonville-nc-may-9-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/05\/09\/concert-review-peter-noone-hendersonville-nc-may-9-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Concert Review: Peter Noone, Hendersonville NC, May 9 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not counting Todd Rundgren\u2019s \u201cvirtual concert\u201d in Pittsburgh<\/a>, the last time I wrote a review of a live performance was in December 2019, when I saw Rodrigo y Gabriela<\/a> tear things up (semi-acoustically) in Asheville, North Carolina. The last time I witnessed<\/i> a live music performance was a festival my wife and I happened upon in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, in early March 2020, mere days before the world shut down. I\u2019m sure that many of my readers can claim a similarly lengthy dry spell, live music-wise.<\/p>\n

So I was quite pleased to have secured a pair of tickets to Peter Noone\u2019s concert last night in Hendersonville, N.C., at the city\u2019s Center for Art & Entertainment. As it happened, the intimate, socially-distanced show in a lively black box venue was the perfect way to ease back into the experience of, y\u2019know, leaving the house to go someplace where other people were also going.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I had interviewed Noone several weeks earlier, for a feature I wrote for Bold Life<\/i> Magazine<\/a>. I found Noone to be funny, engaging, candid, full of stories and a cheerful willingness to share them. That experience of chatting with the former Herman\u2019s Hermits teen idol turned out to be a reliable indicator of what it would be like to see him onstage.<\/p>\n

Billed as \u201can acoustic performance,\u201d the Hendersonville show was something of a one-off, not part of a tour but scheduled in between the end of one run and the start of another. For this pair of performances – a matinee and an evening show; we attended the latter), Noone was expertly supported by a pair of Cleveland musicians, each with his own impressive pedigree. Seated, keyboardist Rich Spina (a member of Noone\u2019s full-band Herman\u2019s Hermits since 2006) laid down what could be considered the musical bed, mostly providing piano sounds with the occasional string or organ patch and some deft left-hand bass work.<\/p>\n

\"\"On amplified acoustic guitar was Billy Sullivan, an accomplished journeyman musician whom I first saw onstage two decades ago as a member of Gary Lewis\u2019 touring band. Fun fact: Sullivan was also in Club Wow, the band fronted by former Blue Ash guitarist Frank Secich. Midwest rock royalty, that Sullivan; he has played with nearly every pop idol of the British Invasion era (He\u2019s a modern-day Hermit as well). In between touring commitments, Sullivan and Spina are a duo playing locally back in Cleveland as well.<\/p>\n

Last night, both men played (and sang harmony) in a manner that balanced musical expression with a clear understanding as to who the audience had come to see.<\/p>\n

That, of course, was Peter \u201cHerman\u201d Noone. Today at age 73 \u2013 younger, of course, than most of his British Invasion comrades \u2013 he still cuts a lively figure. Nattily dressed in a three-piece suit (one that, as he noted, matches the one he wore on The Ed Sullivan Show<\/i>). With a full head of hair and his trademark boyish charm wholly intact from the days of \u201cWonderful World\u201d and \u201cThere\u2019s a Kind of Hush,\u201d Noone proved that he certainly knows how to work a crowd. Second song in, he was making his way through the audience (with wireless mic) and engaging with the audience members in a way that might have caught more than a few of them off guard in the era of COVID-19. (Moments before the show began, the woman seated six feet to my left introduced herself by saying, \u201cI\u2019ve been vaccinated!\u201d So have I, I replied, and thank you<\/i>.)<\/p>\n

But amid the fun mix of Herman\u2019s Hermits classics and occasionally odd covers (\u201cJingle Bells\u201d in May?), unabashedly corny storytelling (including a mildly racy yet groanworthy joke built around a mention of Freddy Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers), three things stood out brilliantly. One was just how many hits Herman’s Hermits scored back in the day.<\/p>\n

Another was Noone\u2019s voice. The man can sing. He had no trouble at all shifting from his normal\/typical range on songs like the opener \u201cI\u2019m in to Something Good\u201d to a clear falsetto. But he also \u2013 somewhat unexpectedly displayed that he can explore the lower range, too; his reading of Johnny Cash\u2019s \u201cRing of Fire\u201d may not have made a helluva lot of sense among the evenings pop music menu, but his command of the song underscored the fact that he\u2019s quite a vocalist. Even though I\u2019ve long had plenty of respect for the man \u2013 a Tremblers fan am I \u2013 I didn\u2019t see that coming. (Speaking of Noone\u2019s early \u201880s power pop group, he demonstrated last night that he\u2019s proficient on guitar as well.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The third point is perhaps even more important and noteworthy. I\u2019ve seen enough of these traveling nostalgia gigs to be able to spot when the artist is phoning it in. Most of the time, in fact, that\u2019s the case. They\u2019ve done the shtick a million times, and they might even be somewhat bitter that after headlining The Ed Sullivan Show<\/em> and being pelted by ladies\u2019 undergarments, now they\u2019re playing at (or near) a retirement village.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s understandable. But even though Noone made more than a few \u201cold\u201d jokes \u2013 and good-naturedly did some kidding-on-the-square about how excited he was to be appearing live onstage in Hendersonville, North Carolina (population approx. 14,000) \u2013 he nonetheless made it clear that he lives for this stuff. His joy at entertaining the audience of about 100 persons seemed completely genuine. The show ran the standard 80 minutes, with no encore, but it\u2019s inconceivable to me that anyone attending could have come away feeling they hadn\u2019t received their money\u2019s worth and more.<\/p>\n

After a year-plus without concertgoing \u2013 something that had long been a major part of my day-in-day-out life \u2013 an evening with Peter Noone and his pair of accompanists was indeed the perfect way to dip my metaphorical toes back into the world of live music. Bravo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not counting Todd Rundgren\u2019s \u201cvirtual concert\u201d in Pittsburgh, the last time I wrote a review of a live performance was in December 2019, when I saw Rodrigo y Gabriela tear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20963,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,51,65],"tags":[4525,4524],"class_list":["post-20961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-live-shows","category-pop","category-review","tag-hermans-hermits","tag-peter-noone","cat-44-id","cat-51-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20961"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30011,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20961\/revisions\/30011"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}