Concert Review - Fables - Napier - 17th October 2025

Presented by Hawke's Bay Arts Festival

Review By - Rob Harbers

Artist/Band - Fables

Venue/City - Paisley Stage, Napier, New Zealand

Date of Event - 17th October 2025

As the end of the Hawke’s Bay Arts Festival looms on the horizon, Jessica Bailey, Fables, brought their dreamy, lush and eloquent songs to the coolest little venue in Ahuriri Napier, the majestic Paisley Stage. With a performance that was refreshingly lacking in artifice, Jessica charmed with her, honest, beautiful songwriting. Somewhere between Reb Fountain and Nadia Reid, her songs radiate emotion, drawn from the realities of everyday life, with the sweetest of musical accompaniment.

Opening with Dave Kahn’s mournful violin and Finn Johansson’s bowed bass strings, the ethereal ‘Forgiving’ led in to ‘Cacophony’, where Jessica confessed to being “tired of changes” because “change is hard for me”. Her geeky persona endeared her even more to the audience - something akin to musical ADHD and utterly entrancing.

‘Someone I Know’ saw Mr Kahn at the pedal-steel to provide texture to its description of self-revelation within relationships - an expression of the conceit that when you point a finger, there’s three pointing back at you. We heard the peephole in a motel door is called a glass eye - not something I would guess many people expected to learn on the night.

Finn took the mic to sing his ‘Devil Creeping up on Me’, with Dave providing atmospheric violin. Jess then gave the boys in the band a rest, delivering a passionate ‘We Could be All’. The players joined in again for Enough’s divorce-inspired musings, following with what she described as her “pissiest song”, ‘Eyes Closed’. Having cleared the emotional backlog, ‘Woman’ saw a vocal workout taking place, accompanied by some trademark Kahn guitar stylings. Almost at the endpoint of proceedings, Jess was reminded to introduce the players (she confessed to something of a habit of forgetting things at shows!), being the aforementioned, with local boy Arahi on drums.

Closing the main set was the current single ‘Sundown’ (the victim of another recent bit of forgetfulness, at a previous show), a brightly enjoyable and beautifully expressed tune, one that meant there was no way that that was going to be allowed to end the show, the band not even making it to the green room before Jessica changed direction. A request from the audience for an early song, ‘Pretty Little Horses’ saw her having to summon up the memory of how to play it - and kudos to her for the attempt. Where many players would have demurred, citing a lack of practice, she pushed boldly on, giving it her best shot, while admitting to not remembering all the words - and summoning Dave for string backing, all impromptu and improvised, showing what a master of melody he is. Such is her charming nature, her forgetting of lyrics compelled her to offer another song, one not yet finished, with a theme of ‘running late and forgetting shit’, so not drawn from reality, apparently!. This provided opportunity for a jam session, the band being pulled back on, with some swapping of instruments involved, in a hopeful attempt at providing the final inspiration to get the song over the line. Live creation, in front of our very eyes, indeed.

Having exhausted the repertoire and then some, it was time to close out, with a few new fans gained along the way - a straw poll early on establishing an approximately 50/50 split between people familiar with her previous work and those coming in cold, on faith, as it were - that faith more than adequately rewarded in a fine example of give and take between audience and performer; one that reinforced the ethos of the Festival. Two more days before we wrap up, with more highlights still to come!

Setlist:

Forgiving

Cacophony

Back-up Plan

Someone I Know

Minibar

Devil Creeping up on Me (Finn Johansson)

We Could be All

Enough

Eyes Closed

Hard Drive

Woman

Sensitive

Sundown

Pretty Little Horses

Untitled new song