Anyone who’s spent a few hours in Ludlow will tell you it’s as handsome a town as you could find in Merry England (imagine all those parfit knights, codpieces and Black Death), stuffed with alleyways, timbered houses with oaken chins that jut over narrow streets and a fine castle built on a rocky mount above a gushing river. It still even has a suite of late-Georgian Assembly Rooms, as favoured by Ms J Austen and her sort when seeking social interaction. Despite being coloured an iffy crushed-blackcurrant-and-cream that Farrow & Ball must have been selling off cheap, the Assembly Rooms still serve their original function as a place of encounter and diversion in this small town. Last Saturday – a techno dance rave, next week – jazz rapper, Soweto Kinch. There are plays and concerts and other types of dances, although no White Sergeants dashing or otherwise engaged in cotillions or quadrilles or any of those high-waisted Regency dance routines where you barely have time to say, ‘Lah, me, Miss Jemma, you put me in mind of a frisky filly,’ before your partner hurls you into the solid bosom of a passing matriarch.

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When a top class musical act comes to a small town like Ludlow, it’s worth making the most of it, and I went to see Paul Ryan and Kenny Clayton twice this weekend when they appeared at the Ego Bar on Saturday night and the Charlton Arms over lunch on Sunday.

Paul Ryan is the best British singer of the great American Songbook of the 30s, 40s & 50s that I’ve ever heard. His timing, the tuning and timbre of his voice (honed by a steady intake of unfiltered Senior Service) would stand comparison with any of the great crooners (Frank, Bing, Dino or Bennett). But he’s not just a Sinatra tribute act. Performing in a double-breasted suit, ex-Chicago c.1932, with dark hair swept back and a scarlet silk brow-mopper, Paul has the air of a musical ‘Don’. With features perhaps best described as ‘well caroused-in’, he brings a cartload of personal baggage and life experience to his delivery of some of the great songs of the last century, with his own distinctive interpretation of the clever, sophisticated lyrics of Jerome Kern, Ira Gershwin or Lorenz Hart which no X-Factor teenage wannabe could dream of achieving.

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