Intimate acoustic tribute to the music of Joni Mitchell

They will be offering This Flight Tonight – The Songs of Joni Mitchell including California, Blue, Woodstock, Both Sides Now, Coyote, Big Yellow Taxi and A Case Of You on a tour which includes The Spring, Havant on Wednesday, July 19, all at 7.30pm.

“Our song-writing partnership started about 15 years ago,” Kath says, “but we met 20 years ago in a little club in Cardiff. We were playing Joni Mitchell and James Taylor covers and we were cutting our teeth as young performers and so we discovered each other.”

Paul explains: “Since then we've been very much an originals band and we've been all over the UK and we've done five albums but during the pandemic we just felt that we really needed to get back to our roots and to shake it up a little bit and to reach new people. We've really loved playing our own music and we have built quite a cult status around our own original stuff, but we don't just want to play to the same people for years and years and years. And we also wanted to play music that we adored and that's why we're coming back to this.”

Kath recalls: “I was 17 or 18 years old and I was living on my own in Cardiff and like a lot of young people at that age I was wanting to find out where I was going and I just didn't really know my own style or my own genre. It was that transient age where you are growing but you just don't know what is going to happen. And then I heard Joni Mitchell's music and she just grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and made me think this is it. She taught me how to be a woman in music, how to represent yourself as a musician, how to have your own identity as a songwriter, as a woman and just how to be my own person. She was like my big sister musically.”

For Paul it was a similar level of discovery: “When I first heard Joni Mitchell I was a 15-year-old and just trying to get into my own interests as a singer-songwriter listening to the people from yesteryear. And when I heard Joni’s music I just thought it was a cut above everything else lyrically and melodically.

"Joni Mitchell blew me away with the album Blue and every subsequent album that I've heard has just had exactly the same effect on me, almost like every single one is a greatest hits album. Fast forward 25 or 30 years and I still feel exactly the same.

“So for this we tour we are going back to the earliest part of her career through to the mid-70s, really the acoustic years from 68 to 75, all the songs that people really want to hear.”

Zervas & Pepper are singer/songwriters that have been crafting songs and capturing imaginations with previous acclaimed albums including Lifebringer and Abstract Heart and 2017’s Wilderland which was written in a cabin in the Colorado rocky mountains.