Chris Tavener is Faking Cool – The King’s Arms, Salford
Armed with debonair wit and a trusty guitar, singer-songwriter Chris Tavener - no stranger to a gig - invites us into The King’s Arms to convince another of his audiences that he’s cooler than cool. Threatening to blow his cover, though, are those discordant, intrusive thoughts.
It’s immediately made clear just how well Tavener knows his way around a guitar: he plays with instinctive confidence, continuously filling the space with foot-tapping riffs and melodies.
His doubting inner voice plays out loud between songs, enabling the audience to hear the anxious musings that contrast Tavener’s tongue-in-cheek lyrics. This largely successful comedic device could be further deployed by using it to string a narrative; as implied by the title, the perceptibly-cool exterior battling with an i...