Gig Review: Dan Whitehouse: End of Year Review with special guest Jasmine Gardosi - Justham Family Room & Jane How Room, Symphony Hall, Birmingham. Sunday 7th December 2025

The setting was magical. The show was engagingly eclectic, showered with alluring creativity. If you sought an evening of live music to bring the curtain down on a busy gig year, Dan Whitehouse and his talented team of collaborators had the perfect all-encompassing gift. From the grand tier level of Birmingham Symphony Hall, the view onto Centenary Square was illuminated by the big wheel in perpetual motion with the rhythm of the show. Inside, a packed room was transported from futuristic Tokyo Bay to the post industrial Black Country with a few stops in between. One moment beat boxing filled the air, the next it was piano ballads. The common bonds were words, ideas and imagery; music with multi-media intent.

Different facets took the performance in several directions. A solo beat boxer mixing poetry with music, a guest guitarist, a percussionist and pianist weaving their instrumental prowess plus an all-star cast finale, yet the gel was Dan Whitehouse: electric guitarist, lone vocalist, writer, enabler and creative tour de force. Nearly two and a half hours of song, message and inspired musicianship thrived under his stewardship. 

Former Birmingham poet laureate Jasmine Gardosi was the special invited guest. As well as billed on the poster, they opened the evening with a 40 minute slot of curated words set both to music and beat boxing intricacies. Gardosi and Whitehouse have worked together all year on projects such as Dudley Diva choir and Black Country Bikes: Music in Motion from which songs from both featured later in the evening. The highlight of the set was ‘Dancing to Music You Hate’; a track capable of transcending its original theme born in Broad Street’s night clubs. Infectious charisma had the audience singing back ‘pretending to be straight is like dancing to music you hate’ as the assembled backing band led by Whitehouse expertly improvised. 

The bulk of the concert enjoyed the presence of Alex Lowe on varied percussion and the impressive piano playing of David O’Brien who had flown in from Geneva for the show. O’Brien’s input was most pertinent in a four-song sequence in the main set when accompanying Whitehouse on a preview of a new album due for release next summer. The pick of this section was album title track ‘Only Love’; an archetypal ballad capable of reaching new parts and primed for a duet if the right voice was found. More of this record will fill the airwaves in 2026.

Location played a major role in the song content. The Japanese connection of Dan Whitehouse is well-documented and this show was literally days before the annual trip to see his son in Tokyo. Two particular songs expressed the theme with ‘Shizuka’, a creative explosion of working with New York-based friend Max ZT and ‘The Tide’ evoking the therapeutic spirit of water juxtaposing with the artificial glass-infused modern world. Back in 2023 the album The Glass Age was released and this evening its opening track ‘Campfire’ did likewise for the main set, while the rock-styled ‘New Love’ was one of the highlights of the closing stages. 

Perhaps Dan Whitehouse is at his most audience relatable when writing songs about his Black Country home. These are usually part of community engagement projects, a strong feature of his work in recent years. Voices of the Cones was a wonderful dive into Stourbridge’s glassmaking heritage and tonight those from the wider Midlands enjoyed impish renditions of ‘Free Beer’ and ‘The Old Savoy’. Jasmine Gardosi had earlier set the local tone with ‘After the Black’; a composition evolving from the aforementioned Dudley Diva project and shining a light on post-industrial Black Country. Another local song was one of two seasonal offerings with ‘The Bells of Brierley Hill’ joining the popular ‘A Winter’s Tale’ to serve a sprinkling of festive spirit. The former was co-written with Chris Cleverley who was invited to sing the duet. He also contributed a seasonal song of his own in ‘Lord of Chaos’ a reciprocal arrangement after both appeared at his own Birmingham festive show earlier in the week.

It was too tempting not to refer to the imposing backdrop of Birmingham’s illuminated wheel and this came up when delving into a couple of songs from the 2020 album Dreamland, a record inspired by Britain’s oldest seaside theme park. Comparing Margate and city centre Birmingham in the full throe of its annual Frankfurt market invasion stretched the imagination but you got the drift. The title track from this album and an additional song,‘Tomorrow’, reflected this phase of a busy recent career. 

The surprise of the evening came in ‘(They Say It’s Like) Riding a Bike’ where enhanced percussion came from David Viner, a legend in local cycling circles, who peddled furiously on an exercise bike in front of the stage with the sound captured. You seriously had to be there but it was certainly different. The song is an official Gardosi/Whitehouse collaboration and arose from the Black Country Bikes project.

For a musical highlight, it was hard to look past the adorable ‘Why Don’t We Dance?’, tonight dealt solo from Whitehouse on piano and containing the most glorious opening where the timing is immaculate. In a parallel universe the whole room would have been waltzing. This leads into possibly Dan Whitehouse’s greatest stage asset, an innate ability to exact movement, poise and delivery in song, chat and presence. It provides a gilded wrapping to the words and music. By the time an all-star cast of musicians, backing singers and beat boxers filled the stage for an audience assisted rendition of ‘Work’, the fuse to the festive season was lit. 

The last time Dan Whitehouse played a show in the Justham Family and Jane How Rooms at the Symphony Hall there was the glorious backdrop of a summer sun going down on Centenary Square. You knew it was job done when the lights went on the wheel as the dust of a fabulous immersive evening settled.