Last weekend, the French Supernatural convention called DarkLight Con, took place in Paris. It is the third edition and one of the most exciting highlights of the convention is always Rob Benedict’s Saturday acoustic concert. This year was no exception. During the show, Matt Cohen, Kim Rhodes, Briana Buckmaster, Sebastian Roché, Richard Speight, Jr., David Haydn-Jones, Adam Fergus and Alex Calvert, came on stage to perform with Rob.
Rob started the concert with two Louden Swain songs, “Bandaged Hand” and “Present Time”.
Matt joined Rob to cover the song “Blistered Sun” by Violent Femmes. It was followed by Louden Swain’s “Amazing”, a song that Rob after suffering from a stroke in 2013. The audience sang it with him and accompanied the song with lights. Kim came on stage next with Rob to give an energetic rendition of “Be Me”, another Louden Swain song.
DarkLight Con attendees also had the privilege to hear Rob sing for the first time a brand new song. The public was very touched by this amazing and emotional performance. Following this wonderful new song, Briana came on stage next to sing a wonderful rendition of “Wave” with Rob.
Rob also played an older song, “Walk It Off” from the Louden Swain album Suit and Tie after telling the audience a story about how Richard heard him humming it recently in an elevator and told him he should play it at a concert. The song worked really well acoustically. Before joining Rob in a duet on “Cool If I Come Over”, Ruth charmed the crowd with a beautiful bilingual version of Jacques Brel song “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (‘If you go away’). After Ruth, Sebastian and Adam were next to join Rob, performing “Desire” by U2.
The most stirring performance of the night was when Rob played an acoustic version of “Rock Song” which was recently reimagined acoustically by Louden Swain for the band’s latest album Splitting the Seams. After that, Richard came on stage to sing three songs with Rob: “I Am Superman”, “Cecili”‘ and a song about salads in French that Rich wrote himself ‘Quand je suis très très malade’.
To conclude the night, Rob invited all the guests on stage to sing ‘Mamma’s Jam’, resulting in a lot of cheers from the audience.
In the US convention circuit, Rob always plays with Louden Swain and the Saturday Night Special concert is something incredible to witness. The acoustic concert in a smaller convention like DarkLight Con has a really intimate feel about it. The crowd was incredibly responsive to the songs chosen by Rob and all the songs finished with much clapping, cheering and standing ovations from the public. With each year passing, more and more people are familiar with Rob’s and Louden Swain’s music and it is a wonderful thing to see. DarkLight Con just wouldn’t be the same without it.
