Coba Fynn played Barfly again the other week, trying out a couple of new songs on a mostly unfamiliar audience (most of whom had been bussed in from Dunfermline to follow their leaders, Nine Circles and Val Verde) and with a secret weapon up our collective sleeves.

Now you may remember we play the Liquid Ship occasionally, as part of the nominally acoustic Free Candy Sessions. Our man Dochan, Free Candy head honcho, apparently likes our slightly ramshackle, electric blues motif and has invited us back there a couple of times to round off proceedings. The most recent session, just before Christmas, saw us on last again after a variety of singer-songwriter and earnest indie types. They were uniformly impressive, I must admit: music mag clichés like “soaring melodies” and “heartbreaking lyrics” would have been richly deserved.

Unfortunately, singer-songwriters and earnest indie types do not seem to come with an excessively generous sense of humour or even moderate thickness of skin. The penultimate act were emoting with every wavering fibre of their sensitive souls but ended up killing us rather too softly, so that the garrulous mass of Coba Fynn fans more or less drowned out their coffee shop guitar stylings. They were rather disappointingly foot-stampy about the whole thing, which seems like an unfortunate trait to display in the cutthroat market economy of free entry gigs. At one point, a particularly exercised member of their fanclub actually yelled “Shut the fuck up!” at the enthusiastic contingent of junior medics come to see Charlie, to no appreciable effect. This chap was a prize idiot, I must say.

We took to the stage afterwards, waved gaily to the backs of the departing shoegazers and rocked the fuck out. I can safely say that the Free Candy Sessions have, Dylan-like, made the jump to electric, even if some killjoy naysayers can’t handle the truth.

Anyway, back to Barfly. We watched the first act—the Springsteen-esque Alan Cassidy—open the night, then clambered on stage for our set. My parents (breaking their Coba Fynn duck by coming along to the Liquid Ship, and being just as taken aback as everybody else by all the mean-spirited shushing going on) had thought that the first half of the Free Candy gig had been a little stilted, and that we got into our stride by the second half. The same thing happened here; we plodded through the first half and finally pulled it together by the time we hit East on the Westway. We got to, and absolutely nailed, All My Secrets and then unveiled our pièce de résistance: Chris (oft-mistyped as ‘Christ’, although in these circumstances it was something akin to the second coming) took to the stage to play slide guitar for Locomotive Blues.

It was brilliant.

Chris sat atop an upturned beer crate and plucked the opening notes on his Shaftesbury with a nonchalant air, fretting with a borrowed slide. (“I was shitting myself,” he told me later.) Doug started on the hi-hat, and I joined in with the same syncopated beat. We trundled through the intro, Chris’ guitar wailing and growling down to the turnaround with us. Doug hit the kick drum to open the chorus, and then, basically, we melded together into the musical instrument of God. St. Elmo’s fire licked around the neck of Davis’ Stratocaster. Doug and I fell into a shared voodoo rhythm section trance. Charlie sang the blues of the plantations and the deltas, and Chris channelled Robert Johnson through his fingers.

Man, I’m getting misty eyed just reminiscing. If there’s ever been a more perfectly performed Coba Fynn song that either I’ve seen or played in, I can’t remember it.

After us, Val Verde and Nine Circles blew the audience away—I can see why they came all the way from Dunfermline—and there wasn’t a single mutter about “respecting the integrity of the music” or any such nonsense. What a night.

The next morning, we gathered in Charlie & Penny’s west end pad for a magnificent breakfast, and talked in hushed tones of the last night’s gig. It’s the same each time I see Chris & Leyla: almost as if last year was just yesterday, and we talk about nothing in particular until it’s time to say goodbye for another year or two. As it was, they took their leave after that breakfast are en route to Australia (via Prague) by now, but it’s going to be a long time before I forget this particular visit. Guys: you are fantastic.