NOT since Noel Coward performed for London's café society has a British playwright dared to sing in front of a paying audience.
 But on Saturday night, in Oswestry's The Walls restaurant, we had two, Liverpool's Willy Russell and Cheshire's Tim Firth. This was not a just-having-fun occasion but the real thing with a big band and the pair singing their own songs to great success. Russell - who wrote the words and music for his musical Blood Brothers - proved he can pen non-show tunes as well with a good selection from his recently recorded CD Hoovering The Moon. First Russell showed a Dickensian propensity for reading his own work with a very funny rendition of a chapter from his novel The Wrong Boy. He has a gift for comic timing, accents and full-blooded delivery. But it was his ability to play guitar and sing his own clever, often humorous songs which really impressed. Performed live, they have even more impact than they do on his recording. Musical director and guitarist Andy Roberts had lined up a sparkling nine-piece band, strong enough to have Ian Matthews of Matthews Southern Comfort doing duties as a backing singer. Inspired by a poem from one of Russell's great friends, the late Adrian Henri, Russell opened with Glad Town, a celebration of Liverpool life: "There's something in the air/Walking down Lime Street tonight," he sang, a number in which the vocal harmonies really pushed the song forward. In Pink Lambrusco, he managed to rhyme Lambrusco with Tesco, Dirty Little Habit was a furious up-tempo number with an angry edge, Mr King a sad song about a missed assignation and She Give Me another Henri-influenced number listing emotional things a girl had supplied. Tim Firth - writer of the comedy Neville's Island seen recently at the Liverpool Playhouse and the new film Calendar Girls - played keyboards and displayed his own singer/songwriter skills. He has a sense of humour as a song about growing old The Same Thing Twice proved but most of his numbers tended towards the love ballad, declaimed with emotion and played with great subtlety. The two-hour non-stop show hardly stopped, a broken guitar string notwithstanding. Both writers can play with words as did Noel Coward, but there any resemblance ends. Coward never backed his lyrics with heavy rock sounds, conga drums and guitar solos. And Russell's lyrics - and to some extent Firth's - had more to do with the nitty-gritty of contemporary living than Coward's ever did. This week the writers and their band perform one last time at the Galway Festival. Hopefully, it won't mark the end of what was an entertaining experience. | 
