Concert Fun in Londontown

Hi Kyohei! This post is for you in honour of your good music taste – I hope you like it 🙂

On Friday night I went to the Roundhouse theatre in London to go and see HONNE. This wasn’t a long time in the making – last week my friend Eli had mentioned he was going with some of his friends from King’s and I had made it pretty clear what to do in the case that someone dropped out….

So, as of Wednesday, I had a concert ticket!

I went with Eli, Nina, Anya and Connor, getting the 4.51pm train from Cambridge to get into London on time. I hadn’t met Eli’s friends before this point, so the train ride and ensuing card games were a good opportunity to get to know them a bit.

When we got into London, we grabbed food at London Liverpool St before getting the Tube to Camden Town. We arrived in the midst of the first supporting act, Dan Caplen, so our timing was pretty spot on.

Very happily, I knew both of the supporting acts – Dan Caplen and Liv Dawson – and they were exceptional. Nina is the chair of the committee for King’s Affair (in June, Cambridge has something called May Week whereby all the different colleges put on some sort of end-of-year celebratory ball/garden party, and King’s Affair is the one for King’s College) so she disappeared off with Anya after Dan Caplen left the stage and they came back with his phone number (mission achieved). So maybe if all works out, Dan Caplen could be performing at King’s next June…

Here a few songs by both the supporting acts. Liv Dawson’s Tapestry is just beauts, (photo above is of her) and I loved getting to see her perform it live (no one else there knew the lyrics, so not sure they got to appreciate it as much as I did haha)

https://open.spotify.com/user/manderrachel/playlist/2vbyrGpd8LaT9AJo2C1vuh

Finally, at 9.30pm, HONNE came on (to a lot of cheering haha). Their name apparently comes from the Japanese concept of ‘true feelings’ and one’s intimate self (Kyohei, is this true?) and they mix a soul sound with lots of synths. And by ‘they’ I mean James and Andy, who together make up HONNE.

They were seriously amazing live! They also brought out a gospel choir to sing for ‘Good Together’ and ‘It ain’t wrong loving you’ (the same choir that appears on the YouTube Mahogany Sessions), which was such a happy surprise. The whole thing was incredible, but perhaps my favourite point of the whole concert was their stripped down performance of ‘Woman’ at the end of the show, when the rest of the band had left the stage. It’s one of my favourite songs by them and it has this beautiful refrain near the end which goes:

‘And I thought I should tell you, how loved you are/ And if we are together, we’re going far’

Before they reached this part of the song, they paused and Andy instructed us to put our arms around the people we came with, who we loved. So everyone formed these chains of people who loved each other and those chains sorta joined onto others and everyone was happy and swaying and it was a whole lot of fun!

Sorry there aren’t more photos, but I wanted to actually enjoy the concert rather than just record it! I put together a little playlist of their songs for you though, Kyohei. My favourites are ‘Woman’, ‘Good Together’, ‘Warm on a Cold Night’ and ‘Coastal Love’. Nina’s favourite is ‘The Night’, and Eli’s favourite is ”Til the Evening’. Have a listen and let me know what you think?

Finally, it was time to head home, after a long queue in the cloakroom line and a double-checking that we’d make it in time for the last train home to Cambridge. We got a taxi back from the station, and a very tired but very happy Rachel climbed into bed at 2am. I took a photo of my watch on the train because I couldn’t quite believe I was on a train so late in the evening haha!

This is the photo HONNE put on their facebook page from the night ❤