Hugh is and always has been terrific live. Whether playing solo or with other musicians, a live Featherstone performance is, without exception, a treat: the music, the songs, the atmosphere, the roar of the feedback, the smell of the crowd, the missing of the last bus home... all add up to a memorable experience.

Why then have we had to wait so long for a live album?

There have been recordings made of his concerts, both official and unofficial (yes there are Featherstone bootlegs out there, see discography). The two outstanding recordings are of his band Pierre le Suit at Reading University, and with Best Foot and Ed Povey at the Theatre Gwynedd in Wales. Another, very lo-fi recording captured a Red Shift gig one wintry evening in Erfurt, east Germany. Perhaps one day all the material will be collected and released as a limited edition collectors' album. You wish.

But don't hold your breath. Hugh has always been more concerned with moving forward, writing and honing new material, and above all getting it right. What a perfectionist. He is careful to present his songs and music, as well as the performances of his collaborators at their best. This can usually only be done effectively in the studio.

As with the making of a film, recording a song can require many takes and some judicious editing and mixing. Studio time is notoriously expensive, so it's no accident that Hugh's musicians are well prepared beforehand. Usually they have rehearsed and performed songs many times before they even smell a studio. And still they manage to pull out new twists and subtleties from a piece of music on the day, and can polish off tracks suprisingly swiftly, without fuss, bother or ego tantrums.

(Having said that... it has been known for Hugh to write a brand new song just days before a recording session and surprise his musicians. This was also the case at the La Chapelle gig, where two of the songs - Box-Car City and Moving to Berlin - were still hot off the biro as the band went on stage.)

Recording music live is a risky business. Once the tape is rolling, anything can happen. Apart from the acoustics of the hall, the postioning of microphones, the relative volume and timbre of each instrument and voice, the worry that each band member is on form (you're not coming down with anthrax again, are you?), that a guitar string may break, that something will go horribly wrong... there's also the audience. Will they also be on form? Are they even awake? If so, they'll probably spend much of their time coughing, sneezing, talking amongst themselves, encouraging their children to scream and cry, clinking glasses, rustling sweet packets, cursing their ringing cell phones, scraping chairs, drilling for oil and even singing along - when it's not even the chorus.

This can all result in an excellent, atmospheric recording; really, really live. But it can also result in a disaster; a really, really expensive cacophany.

Looks like it finally came time for Hugh to bite the bullet and record a live album, so it speaks volumes for his absolute confidence in his new band Hugh Featherstone and a Panel of Experts that he felt ready to do it with them. He knew they could just climb onto a stage and let it roll. And it did.

It helped that La Chapelle studios has been set up just for this kind of gig. The large, well equipped hall is a former chapel on the edge of the village of Waimes, set among the rolling hills of Belgium's Ardennes region. Outside it's picturesque, inside it's down to business.

The band arrived the day before the concert, set their instruments and equipment up in a jiffy and got to work in a business-like manner. Immediately you could see that this was a professional combo at work; on the button, on the beat, on the plot. A veritable panel of experts indeed.

Late into the evening our intrepid musonauts cut through the technical rehearsal like an F-string through Belgian butter. Hugh's producer Frank-Stefan Kimmel and La Chapelle's resident sound engineer Flavio Marredda busied themselves with the exact positioning of a forest of expensive, specialized microphones and twiddling the knobs of various amplifiers, monitors, mixers, doodas and thingies and checking the sound of the band both in the hall and in the control room. For the technically minded, none of the amplifiers go up to 11 - nearly but not quite.

The control room itself looked like something between a NASA mission control room and a log cabin. The wood panelled booth at the back of the hall is dominated by an enormous mixing desk surrounded by various computer monitors and towers of electronic amplifiers, filters, whatchamacallits and other mysterious devices, all hooked up to computer servers which hum hotly to themselves in the chapel's basement. (There is even a small TV studio down there, but that's another story.) This is the lair of the tech-wizard, this is the sanctum sanctorum of the prestidigitalist, this is Knobby Turner and Mike Stand's idea of paradise on earth.

At the end of a hard day's work the band retired to the large, well-appointed house laid on by the studio in the nearby village of Schoppen. Here they nursed their blisters and gathered their strength for the challenges of the following day. Nice day at the office, dear?

And the next day was a triumph. It was all one has come to expect of an evening with Hugh Featherstone and then some. Great music, lovely audience (we'd like to take you home with us), good vibes, and even the sandwiches afterward (hats off to the catering team) were top notch nosh.

The studio supremo, Karl Heinz got the evening going by welcoming the audience and introducing the band. A warm, friendly and funny guy.

Hugh then played warm-up man by performing solo the tender, simple, love song The circle of your arms (first recorded on his West of Eden CD), before the rest of the band came on stage and let rip.

Splendid, high-flying, spot-on performances from all throughout. Philby's crisp, precise drumming was augmented by Chris Sichert's rich and sutble percussion (he had a whole arsenal of gizmos back there which went bang, thunk, kachunk, rattle and ching), not forgetting Kim Bastian's shaker. The shaker performs the same function as the tambourine, providing a singer with some rhythmic device and giving at least one of her hands something to do while she's ululating. Kim's shaker looks dead chic and it's far more refined than a tambourine: you can't slap it against your thigh they way those raunchy rock chics do. Chris Mattar's sleek Ibanez bass alternately pulsed, throbbed and purred as luxuriously as a well-tempered motor.

Out front, Hugh had his artillery to hand in the shape of three exquisite hand-made Kraushaar guitars from which he extorted rangy twang, honeyed sweetness and edgy taughtness. Not all at the same time, you understand, only when it was right. Which it was.

Kim Bastian's voice was the surprise of the evening. It's gentle and sweet, perhaps more jazz than rock'n'roll, and her backing and harmonies proved the perfect counterpoint to Hugh's more hard-edged, sometimes staccato delivery, especially on the reggae number no regrets and the LA-tinged rocker Boxcar City, where her Twilight Zone la-las had just the right twisted eeriness. A touch of comic genius delivered deadpan. The driving backbeat and Chris Sichert's quirky cowbell also makes this song an up-beat dancer. One to trash the couch to.

As ever the emotional charge of Hugh's songs ranges widely from tristesse through schadenfreude to put-that-in-your-pipe-and-smoke-it. You get lost love, wild desire, cosmic weariness, what-the-hell-is-going-on-here, let's-party and much more. He has carefully picked a set of songs to the which the band could bring extra aural dimensions and which could challenge each member to shine. We're talking gleaming chrome and burnished gold here, folks.

Between songs, Hugh kept everybody entertained with his own seasoned brand of witty banter and snippets of info about the next number, as the band retuned their synapses and backroom boffins Frank-Stefan and Flavio adjusted their adjustments.

Well, the audience went wild, the wrap party drinks and sandwiches went west and eventually everybody went home, somehow happier, wiser and more full of smoked salmon than before.

It was a great evening and a great late-summer weekend. The band had an album in the bag. Job well done. On the Sunday some of the tracks received a preliminary mix before the whole shebang was handed over to Frank-Stefan to prepare for mastering. And that was that.

Frank-Stefan said, "the winegums were great". And you know, I think he was right.


Photos of Hugh Featherstone & a Panel of Experts
live at the chapel are in photo series 5.