Our gaze is fixed firmly this week on hometown girl and international soul diva Beverley Knight, writes Wolverhampton Civic Hall’s Jonn Penney.

The Wolverhampton chanteuse’s new album, Soul UK, is released on Monday. As with all album ‘campaigns’, Beverley Knight will be touring the UK in autumn and taking in the Civic Hall on November 22.

Ah! That’s what I really want to talk about – that unique, unforgettable and often surreal experience: the hometown gig!

My band, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, would finish every touring year of the early 90s with at least one night at the Civic Hall. You might think that a show in your own manor, attended by your own tribe might be a tiny bit less rock ‘n’ roll than the average show.

I mean, surely it’s almost a case of stepping out of your carpet slippers onto the stage just after Corrie has finished to show your mom and dad the stuff you’ve been doing all across the globe in all of those really groovy locations.

Afterwards you’d sit down in the Green Room for a quick cuppa, where your grandmother tells you how proud she is even if she doesn’t understand how such a racket could attract so many underdressed sweaty young people to Wolverhampton on a snowy December night . . . (un)fortunately the former is absolutely NOT the case!

One night I remember having to push my way through the rammed-out hall to the foyer so that I could identify my mother and assure security staff that her surname being different to mine did not merit suspicion that a random 50-something had wandered in off the street and was masquerading as the singer’s mother. All of this while a contingent of Japanese fans who had flown in from Tokyo especially were in tears because they had not yet had the opportunity to present us with the fish flavoured biscuits and Mt Fuji tea towels that they had brought for us all.

At the end of the shows our enormous tribe of guests would be shepherded into the Civic Bar for a big party, and when we’d recovered from our exertions we would join them. This is where the real weirdness would start. I always had a small nagging paranoia that when we got home from a year of touring we would play to our friends only for them to say ‘you’ve changed, you’ve lost it mate!’

On the plus side, hometown shows have that unique atmosphere to them. Everyone there is in party mood and everybody wants you to have a great gig, so it’s intoxicating and for that reason it’s not unusual for those shows to attract audiences from far and wide to join the locals.

The ‘occasion’ is often made far more than just a homecoming – it’s the gig that your worldwide fan base covet, so you end up with five girls from Japan rubbing shoulders with your dad while a Canadian contingent help your brother get to the bar and for one night only Wolverhampton makes the world feel totally at one with itself.

As John Denver once said . . . “Hey, it’s good to be back home again!”

In our case home was made all the sweeter for the presence of so many new friends we’d picked up on the way.