Petworth Festival - enjoy an evening with Beverley Craven & Judie Tzuke

Accompanied by the Gabriella Swallow string quartet, Bev and Jude are looking forward to sharing well-loved hits and newer material.

They recently hit the road in tandem with Julia Fordham in the show Woman to Woman which will be touring again in the autumn. It the meantime, it’s just the two of them for the Petworth Festival.

“Judie was my hero growing up, things like Stay With Me Till Dawn,” Beverley said: “I bought a couple of her albums and I knew every song inside out and back to front. She sang without vocal acrobatics. She just sang the song straight. She didn't muck the melody up. And the productions just amaze me. Her vocal harmonies were very unusual. They were not the harmonies that you would normally put on. She doesn't read music. She just works very instinctively.”

Beverley comes from a more classical background, and in a way the difference is a part of the strength of the show: “I just love working with her. It is like putting on a comfortable pair of slippers and because I have that classical background I have written the string parts for a couple of her songs. And I just can't believe that I'm playing piano for Judie Tzuke, that I have scored a couple of her songs and that I'm performing my own songs with her. It is just perfect. And it is fantastic to be performing with Gabriella. It is lovely – the purity of the sound, the vocal, the piano and the string quartet. You really can hear every note. People say that it is intimate and it really is. Everything is live. There are no backing tracks. It is just purely ourselves.

“But actually when you have been self-isolating for so long it is quite difficult to get back out, and I think it's the same for everyone, ticket sales across the board. I just hope that by the time we get to the next Woman to Woman tour in October people will be coming out more.”

Beverley, Judie and Julia Fordham first started working together because they are all with the same agent: “When I saw that Judie was on his books, I just went into meltdown and I said why don't we all three combine and then we could get bigger venues and we did that and called ourselves Woman To Woman. We did a couple of tours, sold out, in 2018 and 2019 and it was just great for all of us. We had a really good response and it was lovely to connect with other women in the music business that have had parallel lives in some ways.”

For Beverley the gig comes 31 years after her massive 1991 UK hit single Promise Me, the success of which she puts down to working with Paul Samwell-Smith, who came from more of a folk background – and was therefore just right for the song: “He was very, very careful to put me right at the centre of it and not add too much stuff. He was just wonderful. I love him and we still chat a lot!”

Tickets from the Petworth Festival.