Beth Hart // Willie & The Bandits // Live Review // Bristol Beacon // 15th May 2026

Beth Hart // Willie & The Bandits // Live Review // Bristol Beacon // 15th May 2026

Willie and the Bandits walked out, settled onto their stools and got straight into it. No rush, no big grab for attention, just a slow, grounded build. The Beacon suits that approach. You could hear the sound open out naturally, nothing forced, everything given time to land.

“Angel” was where it really clicked. The lap steel spread across the room, and suddenly everything felt wider, more confident. From there, the set grew without too much effort. Songs like “Four Million Days” and “Reina Del Mar” didn’t feel like isolated moments so much as part of a steady climb. Usually a band, they stripped back to an acoustic duo for tonight’s performance, locking in and letting things stretch without overplaying it. Having flown in for the show with very little sleep, the Cornish duo jokingly blamed their fatigue on “a lack of pasties for the last couple of weeks”.

They never pushed too hard. Even when it got heavier, it stayed about feel rather than volume, with parts coming in, dropping out, space doing as much work as the notes themselves. By the time they leaned properly into the blues end of things, the room was already with them.

“Crossroads”, the timeless Robert Johnson classic, was where they let it all go. Not rushed, not treated like a throwaway cover, but properly built with solos stretching, the groove digging in deeper, the whole thing expanding outward. It felt like a studio jam rather than a stage performance. As they stood to take a final bow, they grinned safe in the knowledge they had absolutely owned this crowd.

Review: Steve Gibbons

Photography: Emma Painter

Pacific Curd Photography

website  www.willeandthebandits.com

Beth Hart came on without fanfare and immediately twisted that energy into something else.

Strolling casually onto the stage, she opened with “Soulshine”. It’s a song that carries a lot of history, her soulful phrasing roughening the edges, making it feel immediate. From there into “Waterfalls,” completely reshaped from the TLC original, and then “Lifts You Up,” which snapped the band tight behind her again. You could feel that push and pull right from the start.

That movement never stopped. “Lullaby of the Leaves” brought everything right down, controlled and precise, before she jumped back into the bite of “Pimp Like That” and “Swing My Thing.” Just as you settled into one mood, she shifted it somewhere else.

“Drunk on Valentine” tilted the tone slightly off-centre, and “Wonderful World” didn’t smooth that out so much as deepen it. Then “Baddest Blues” came in low and heavy, grounding everything again.

“More Than You’ll Ever Know” was where the room really stopped. The Donny Hathaway song always hits, but she let it stretch properly, no rushing, no padding it out, just sitting in it until everything else dropped away.

She broke that tension with “Can’t Let Go,” then dropped straight into “No Quarter.” That one really landed. Her take on the Led Zeppelin track, coming from the astounding tribute record, leans into the weight of it, slow and deliberate, building tension instead of blowing it out. Her vocal take was sublime. Not trying to emulate Robert Plant but truly making the song her own.

After that everything pulled in close. “Take It Easy” on its own changed the scale immediately, and the soulful renditions of “Without Words,” “Broken & Ugly,” “Ugliest House,” and “House of Sin” made the room feel smaller. Each note and phrase focuses on emotional delivery.

Priding herself on never keeping the setlist generic, she had earlier explained that going off script keeps her on edge. With that in mind, she slipped away from the setlist to play possibly her darkest song, “Woman Down.” It wasn’t part of the expected flow, but it fit without effort. Her vocal warm-up trills and self-preparation showed a fragile vulnerability which was beautiful to witness. A voice, a piano and a dark lyrical truth that silenced the room.

When she came back out for the encore, sitting on a stool at the very front of the stage, she apologised for any mistakes that may occur during the final song. “If I were a brain surgeon, there’d be a big pile of bodies here, but this is just entertainment”, and went into a faultless version of the Etta James cover “I’d Rather Go Blind.”

It started intimate, but it didn’t stay there for long. The vocal built and built, pushing harder than anything else in the set. She drove it right to the edge, holding notes, digging into every line, letting it flourish into something huge. Not held back, not careful, a full release. Beth is a force of nature. She’s ‘real’. Her heart is firmly on her sleeve, and there’s no pretence or bombast. By far one of the best vocal performances I have ever witnessed.

Review: Steve Gibbons

Photography: Emma Painter

Pacific Curd Photography