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The Boosh is a wonderful venture. Much like the legendary Living Room gigs in Dublin at the beginning of the nineties that unearthed such talent as Juliet Turner and Iain Archer this is a venue with an emphasis on discovering local talent. It has been going for some months now and founders and hostesses Jan Carson and Louise McFetridge deserve huge praise for the idea, the workmanlike way they put their dreams together and for how they anchor the entire show. A natural telepathy has their banter and poetry recitals bouncing off one another. Neither straight or fall guy. Both are entirely with it and completely funny. Tonight was no exception, as they read from Wendy Cope and Adrain Mitchell, slagged Seamus Heaney “nice library but not the poetry”, and generally kept the atmosphere loose and front living roomish.

Dave Magill, front man with Joshua's Promise, was the support act if there is such a thing and though nervous apparently as a result of having to support the local up and coming McNair he did well with chat and song. One in particular about learning for a vagrant in Chicago had some very smart lyrics and his worship song was not the worst, which for me is quite the compliment.

McNair however was in a different league. Gigging around Queens University now for over a year he seems to have found his patch and his confidence shows. A quiet young man he comes to life with a microphone in front of home and unlike Magill who introduces everything McNair says little and let’s the songs speak. Even then there is some work to be done. These are very finely crafted songs and though they all focus on the politics of the soul, they are far from cliches ridden propaganda. "Star" may be his hit, if you can have one without a CD released, looks at a tramp in the shadow of U2’s Popmart and asks if we can see a “star in each one of us.” "What Would You Do" is a look at Grace in the opposite way as it asks God how he would react to our constant ignoring of him. "Luckless" is about a trip to Delhi where minidisc and BBC World can help you hide from the reality but not from your guilt at hiding. Maybe his best song to date and the best one tonight is about the compromising of promises made and God loving us back to the promises.

As well as his own songs Dave has a knack of picking good cover versions. There was an older invited audience tonight mingling with the student regulars and so his "Times They Are Changing" was rightfully dedicated to them. Pity he hadn't realized that it rips the pants out of the oldies! By then I think his voice and the poise of his performance had won them over. Maybe the weakest cover was Larry Norman’s "Great American Novel." It’s been done like this by Martyn Joseph and the events of the song predate the birth of any of McNair’s regular clientele. It’s about America too! Where he really hit the spot was in doing songs by his peers, or at least those just ahead of him in age and art. Juliet Turner’s "Too Close For Comfort" is a song that needs opened up to a wider audience and it was a bold move to cover the song of a different gender. By demand, he also did Iain Archer’s "Mirrorball Moon," a gem of a new song in the Archer catalogue and surely the highlight of last year's Greenbelt festival. With a "Mirrorball Moon" on the roof it is almost as if it were written for the bush and the last chant of “the kind know how to get down” had special poignancy on a night their elders came to call. 

Maybe if anything it showed where McNair needs some work. To not sound so much like Archer. Certainly his voice has a natural similarity but to be ploughing a similar furrow and looking at the fringes of the Christian songwriter world he has to be aware of it. That he is not a virtuoso on guitar changes the product a little bit but if you closed your eyes during "Mirrorball Moon" it could have been the real thing. Which may in itself be a compliment and he is writing much better songs than Iain was at that age. All we got to do is watch and see whether he can write a "Mirrorball Moon" at 30.