Christian Lee Hutson @ St Matthias Church, London (Live Review) ^Featured

Christian Lee Hutson

St Matthias Church

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

Pews, patter, and a soft-spoken sermon from the school of sad lads

There’s something fitting about the sermonising of Christian Lee Hutson landing in a place built for sermons. On a wet Tuesday in Stoke Newington, the old bricks of St Matthias Church stood stoic, the flying buttresses throwing Gothic silhouettes across the grey sky, while inside, the pews felt like penance for sins you can’t even remember committing. We're all here, willingly numbing our tailbones in the name of indie-folk.

First, a heart-on-sleeve warm-up from Matthew Herd, who turned the keys into something soft and syrupy, like a slow-motion hug. He slipped between deadpan romanticism and cutting humour with ease: one moment lamenting the British Museum's habit of hoarding colonial loot, the next reminiscing about scrapping shirtless and snogging strangers. Earnest and awkward in equal measure but never overcooked.

When Christian Lee Hutson finally appeared, flanked by his band in coordinated track jackets, the vibe was more cultishly wholesome than rock'n'roll, like a very pretty youth group. “Never played in a church before,” he offered, as though it wasn’t the most obvious setting for a man whose songs sound like quiet confessions to an old diary.

Things kicked off with some acoustic offerings soft enough to be mistaken for sighs, his hair a gravity-defying monument to grooming discipline, his voice a clear, lilting tenor that could've floated through the stained-glass windows. If only he'd let it.

Instead, Hutson, ever the storyteller, quickly slipped into his comfort zone: talking. Anecdotes rolled in thick and fast. A tale about a snake-handling Southern Baptist uncle. A bit about wine. Then a longer one about his modern family life, which started quaint and ended up somewhere between a pillow showroom and a Netflix pitch. By the time ‘After Hours’ crept in, we’d sat through so many semi-connected tangents we were unsure if the gig had properly started or if we'd wandered into a live taping of a very sensitive podcast.

The songs, when they came, were… nice. Melodic. Pleasant. ‘Strawberry Lemonade’ and ‘Pinball’ floated by like mid-afternoon naps. But more often than not, the lyrics wandered like his stories; intriguing setups, not always followed by a payoff. There were moments where it all sagged under the weight of his own voice. Not the singing, which was immaculately delivered, but the constant need to explain, decorate, or justify the art we were all quite content to listen to on its own.

Yet somehow, in the final third, something shifted. Maybe he wore himself out. Maybe we did. But like a boxer who'd taken too many early jabs, Hutson rallied. He dropped the patter and leaned into the music, really leaned. By the second-to-last song, the room was glowing. People who’d spent half the show blinking into the rafters now whooped like they'd found religion. Which, for a set that opened in a church and nearly got buried under its own verbosity, felt like a minor miracle.

He didn’t leave the stage, but he did give us an encore, a non-encore encore, as he wryly framed it. Three extra songs slipped in at the tail end as a quiet reward for those who stuck it out through the sermonising. And honestly? It worked. No big gestures, no theatrical re-entrance; just a gentle exhale to close the night, and a reminder that when Christian lets the music speak, it often says just enough.