Deborah Bonham Band plays Chichester gig

The tour kicks off in Wales and includes Poland along the way as the band heads towards the release of a live album in the autumn – a live album they didn't even know they were recording.

Deborah, who lives near Chichester, explains: “We have just played at Cleo Laine’s and what was John Dankworth's place in Milton Keynes and we recorded the album there. We didn't know we were going to do a live album but our engineer recorded it all the same. The concert was fantastic and we knew that we had something really good. People were up and dancing in the aisles. It was just a great show and we knew that magic had happened.

"I spoke to our engineer Paul Smith who is a fantastic guy and I said to him that sounded really good. I said that I thought it had been a really cracking show and he said ‘I have recorded it for you!’

“So many people have asked us about a live album and were we ever going to do one, but the point is the songs are different when you do them on stage. We never know where we're going until we're on stage and then we just do what we feel like. If we're feeling the vibe then we go there. That's part of the magic of live performance. We did a live DVD but that was back in the early 2000s so we haven't done one for ages. But it just felt like the right time.

“We are writing new material for a new album at the moment and that will be out next year. It's going really really well and then this live album just came along and we thought yes. It was meant to be. It was a great show and then we discovered that it had been recorded!

“We are quite a way through the writing of the next album, maybe three-quarters of the way through. I can't just sit down and write songs. I have to wait for them to come. I'll be doing something else and suddenly an idea comes to me and then I sing it into my phone so that I've got the melody and then we get the chords and arrange for the band to get together and we work through it.”

Working to a deadline on an album just wouldn't work: “If you had a deadline you would be wanting to put on songs that you're not 100 per cent happy with. But I'm really picky. I want to wait for the right ones.”

In the meantime there’s the matter of the summer tour, around 20 dates – contending with the cost of living crisis which remains an issue for performing bands: “And obviously there's still the issue of Covid. We know it hasn't gone. I had it at the beginning of this year and I was seriously ill with it. I got Covid at Christmas and it went into pneumonia. Covid just hasn't gone away but what are we going to do? We take the vaccines and we just try to carry on. We have just got to manage it and to do what we can.”