Mostly Autumn

The Crescent, York

14 December 2025

If I'm totally honest, tonight's set list isn't the one I would have wished for. It leans heavily towards newer material, and includes a lot of songs from this year's album Seawater. And though it's a great album, the songs haven't yet had time to lodge in my heart, and I would have wished for more of the older "classics" that I love. But I understand the reason for the choices. Seawater is fine album, and if you don't play the new songs live they never get a chance to become the next classics.

So the show opens with Let's Take a Walk from that album, and, magically, it feels like I'm listening to an old favourite, and I'm overwhelmed by the emotion. Somehow I know all the words, and it feels like I've been listening to it for 20 years. Bryan delivers a live lyric with so much conviction, you can't help but feel the emotion of the song, and instantly fall in love with it. And it really is a great song, a textbook Mostly Autumn song: showing off all four voices and seven instruments, and giving them space to perfectly demonstrate why Mostly Autumn are the best live band in the world. Mostly Autumn even playing a set that I wouldn't have picked still play exactly what I want and need to hear, and reduce me to tears in the first song of the night. This is, always has been, and always will be, a magical live band.

The atmosphere in the comfortably full Crescent is everything you would expect from a home-town Christmas gig by a band with a following as loyal as Mostly Autumn's. Everyone around me is singing all the songs, even the new ones, and most people are just enjoying the moment instead of waving phone cameras around.

I'm not going to pick out individual songs or performances as highlights. Everyone in the band shines, and the songs are filled with too many perfect moments to mention. They pack a lot of songs into a little over two and a half hours, sticking mainly to shorter songs, with the only real epic being White Rainbow, which is basically a mini-concert in itself, cramming every possible style, mood, virtuosic solo, and emotion into its beautifully structured 20 minutes. An example of one of those "new" songs which has rapidly and solidly become an "old favourite" that I would hate to lose from the set now.

But despite the brilliance of the main set, it's the encores we know are coming that will make this show special. Because it's Christmas, and Bryan loves Christmas like a little kid loves Christmas, and demands that we all love it just as much, and we get a full 20 minutes of Christmas classics delivered in the Mostly Autumn style, with the band in silly hats and radiating so much joy and fun from the stage, and there's no way this could be anything less than the best concert I have ever seen, and as always the true start of Christmas.