BUILT for comfort, not for speed… the Bewdley boogie boy would appreciate the blues terminology if not the sentiment.

Well, the former lean hillbilly cat from the Wyre Forest backwoods might be more like Fats Waller these days, but there’s still no let-up with a frantically delivered set that skirts post-war R&B, heads into early rock ‘n’ roll, and flirts with 1950s smooch.

Everything’s thrown into this gumbo, from the chocolate-toned Brooke Benton to the jungle beat of Bo Diddley, meeting Prince Buster’s bluebeat somewhere along the way.

The beauty of the Mike Sanchez Christmas Show is that the music is seasonally frozen in time, Chuck Berry’s Almost Grown quite possibly being the most contemporary, clocking in just before 1960 or thereabouts.

Otherwise, it’s Sapphire, a Jerry Lee cum Little Richard floor-scorcher, Kidio by the aforesaid Benton, and a honking version of Deep in the Heart of Texas, first heard in England when the GIs arrived in 1943.

However, the older this material becomes, the greater the appetite for it. While the rest of the planet seems to have forgotten, Sanchez fans can’t get enough of soaring saxes and over-driven guitar served up on the steaming bed of a four-four beat.

But if Sanchez is the icing on the Christmas cake, then drummer Mark Morgan is the very rich filling. A band’s sticksman is so often overlooked as the lead instruments push their way to the front, but it is Morgan’s instinctive empathy with the Big Bossman that ensures this music rolls as well as rocks.

It was also good to see Mrs Sanchez nee Wynn onstage, although there was a bit of a domestic – shrugged off as a ‘rehearsal’ - at one stage over the delivery of a song chorus.

The night ended with some polite dancing in the aisles, a far cry from the sweaty, smoke-filled rock joints of my youth. Nevertheless, we should rejoice that we have Mike Sanchez to inject just a bit of wild abandon in the otherwise prissy, uptight age in which we live.