I must say . . . I'm excited that Julia is coming up to SF this weekend, and performing for a whole hour on the MainStage of SFPride in front of City Hall in the Civic Center, on SATURDAY @ 2:45pm ! For free! She's also at a club here, Bimbo's ... Friday night... Gillian Welch is also in town Friday night. And there are a gazillion events going on with Pride. GAH! Anyway.... I'm going to catch her at the Pride Mainstage for sure. ~Richard
And here's what SFGate.com reviewer had to say about her new CD: Julia Fordham hardly needs the duet vocal with India.Arie, the funky keyboard touches of Billy Preston or the background vocals of Was (Not Was)'s Sweet Pea Atkinson, Sir Harry Bowens and Willie Green to give her contemporary R&B cred on her brand-new CD Concrete Love. Since her 1989 self-titled debut, and through four subsequent albums for Virgin, the blond British chanteuse has flexed one of the most soulful voices in pop. She boasts an extraordinary four-octave voice, capable of soaring like Joni Mitchell's, but Fordham makes her most seductive moves in the smoldering sensuality of her dusky alto range, especially when she's singing about taking a bullet for her lover, wanting to get laid and preferring "good old plain concrete love" over "floating cloud talk." That said, the guest artists on her first recording for the Vanguard label, plus Larry Klein's elegantly groove-savvy production, help make it both the musically richest and frankly sexiest outing of her career -- perhaps just what she needs to get her over to a wider audience beyond her rabidly devoted cult following. --D. Richardson, SF Gate
