REVIEW: Paul Armfield - Ventnor Fringe 22.7.25

I DON'T know how many parallel universes you'd need to go through before you discover it, but somewhere in almighty creation shines a spectrum with Loudon Wainwright III sitting at one end, Kurt Wagner at the other, and Paul Armfield jostling for rainbow space with John Prine right in the middle.

Which is a very name-droppy way of saying our Paul can lay claim to the giddy heights of those eminent singer-songwriter types, such is the quality of his schtick. Schtick? Yes. Album after thematic album has trickled out of his cottage industrial estate, each microscoping in on the big stuff - one continental-sized subject after another.

They're all laid out, like a spring fete cake stall, in neat order for those escaping the lunchtime sun and showers at the new loft in Ingram's Yard. Domestic bliss and family tears, trees and gypsies, found photographs, Belgian booze, books, bookselling and all other bookish things - laid bare to a simple and sympathetic soundtrack of cautious guitar plucking, reckless saw-bowing to a loop-track and shameless whistling. NOBODY whistles any more. Only Paul. And the ghost of Roger Whittaker. If, indeed, he's dead.

Bauhaus puns, a rhyming couplet that dares to match "gingerbread houses" with "bears in check trousers" and lots and lots of top notch bants make this fella a must see and a must hear.