Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Leeds Academy, 29/11/09
Perhaps I’m just being nostalgic for days gone by, but you don’t seem to get amazing support bands any more. There’s plenty of competent ones, and the once in a blue moon stunner, but more often than not the opening act do nothing more but increase your trips to the bar.
I wrote out a whole piece slagging the support from tonight into little dirty pieces...but decided against it. There’s enough trolling on the internet as it is. Let’s just leave it at They Weren’t Very Good and move on.
Thank fuck for Karen O.
A giant eye looked out over the proceedings, as shadowed shapes took to the stage, one of them unmistakably wearing a giant rug of some description. The hushed refrain of Runaway brought a quieter opening than I was expecting, although the song does rumble upwards into a climax that merges into Rich, and then we’re off.
Karen O is all teeth and eyes, the impression of that mile wide grin staying with you long after the night is over. She skipped and bowed her way through a set that contained nothing but highlights. Seeing them at Leeds Festival this year was bloody beautiful as previously mentioned, but this was the full show I was waiting for.
The crowd was full of lots of mini O’s-In-Training, perfect bowlchops and liberal make-up agendas, screaming adulation at their heroine and her trio of sonic superheroes.
Skeletons probably got the biggest reaction from me, a few tears and a phone call to the girl who really should have been with me that night. It’s a song for the sunrise on the morning after, equal parts hope and regret.
Cheated Hearts got extended with some audience participation, Maps got a full band airing (as much as I love the acoustic version, you can’t beat the thump of the drums and Nick Zinner’s soaring guitar line) and Zero quite literally got the leather on.
Then, in one of the more perfect encores I’ve ever witnessed, Y Control, Turn Into and Date With The Night made good use of the glitter and ticker tape cannons placed in strategic stomping points around the stage.
Their sound may have matured from the garage into the Discotheque, but each era slots next to the other, expertly sown together with an effortless cool.
Because that’s what the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are. Cool. In look, in sound, in everything.
Tuesday 1 December 2009
Tuesday 17 November 2009
Was it worth all that war just to win?
Patrick Wolf + Micachu & The Shapes, London Palladium, 15/11/09
I’ve gushed about Patrick Wolf many times in this blog already. I’m about to do it again, so make sure you’re sitting comfortably.
This was to be The Show To End All Shows. A one-off performance to celebrate Patrick’s seven year career to date, and topping off a 2009 which saw him take another sequined step towards the mass adulation that everyone attending tonight knows he deserves.
The setting was the Palladium, taking a night off from Sister Act – THE MUSICAL!!! and providing home for a couple of thousand extroverts and bohemians. I’ve not been in a room of so full of gay men since Ice Cream rolled out of town. It was the perfect venue. Ornate, classical and echoing with history.
Starting the night were Micachu & The Shapes, taking up a small area in the centre of the stage. Starting with a clanging drone that shuffled its way into a tune, each track swerved between abstract catchiness and what my Mum would describe as “just a load of noise”. Micachu herself reminded me of Justine Frischmann’s semi comatose androgyny. I’m still a bit undecided, but they shared the same uncompromising spirit that has been at the core of Patrick’s work since the very beginning.
So that got us in the mood for something a bit different, which is what tonight was to be all about. To add to this, the pre-performance music ranged from classical to gypsy folk to Cheryl Cole. Surely, somewhere in this myriad sonic triangle lies Patrick Wolf.
After new (I think) song Divine Intervention is sung behind the closed Safety Curtain, the all too familiar tribal thump of Overture begins. The curtain raises. The strings soar. He appears. And, not for the first time that night, the tears begin.
This gig put a few things into perspective for me. Is there any other artist or band that could draw this reaction from me? Radiohead, very possibly, but however much I love them, they like to keep a certain distance from their audience. Blur and Pulp also have the means, but I’m unlikely to see either of them live any time soon. Maybe it just doesn’t take much to make me cry these days, after a combination of relatives passing away, pets being put down and friends leaving town. God help me when The Doctor regenerates in the new year, I’ll probably need therapy.
I’m rambling.
The set had an understandable focus on The Bachelor, with debut Lycanthropy also healthily represented. As my main love falls for the middle two records, it would have been nice to hear a few more from them, but seriously this was not a performance you could fault. Other than that it ended and I had to go back to dull reality afterwards.
The highlights were numerous. Florence bringing the house down for a lusty rendition of The Bachelor. Wind In The Wires and its hushed fragility. Oblivion unveiling a horned leather jacket as well as The Voice Of Hope, and Hard Times finally getting people dancing in the aisles, as well as Alec Empire attacking what appeared to be a cybernetic ironing board.
It was this call to arms that made the whole night really kick off. There was a rush to the front of the stage, sporadically broken up by the theatre’s ushers, but the delirium was never truly quashed from then on. After a fiddle with the set list, The Libertine arrived and transformed into a stomping ukulele-off. The divine Damaris has now joined the ranks of Classic Wolf, meaning that Tristan felt like a bit of an afterthought in its wake.
Arriving at the end of the main set, which had lasted almost two hours, The Magic Position came with Patrick sporting a shiny new top hat and a tear in his eye. Its very telling that there are no decent videos of this on You Tube, as the hysteria among us all reached its peak. Some things are just impossible to document on camera phones. The performance of this song and what it means to me is hard to put into words, so I won’t.
Returning for a touching rendition of The Sun Is Often Out, dedicated to a lost friend, the end came with Vulture. Tonight’s outfits included a black feathered ensemble followed by something involving bamboo and pantaloons, but the finale was delivered in see-through trousers and a liberal application of silver body paint, emerging from behind the curtain on a rotating disco ball. I fucking love that I wrote that sentence and every word of it is true.
Tonight we watched a man throw his very essence into a show that he has been preparing for his entire life. Over the years Patrick Wolf has been occasionally outspoken and often uncompromising to the point of career destruction. Was it worth all that war just to win? Yes it was.
I’ve gushed about Patrick Wolf many times in this blog already. I’m about to do it again, so make sure you’re sitting comfortably.
This was to be The Show To End All Shows. A one-off performance to celebrate Patrick’s seven year career to date, and topping off a 2009 which saw him take another sequined step towards the mass adulation that everyone attending tonight knows he deserves.
The setting was the Palladium, taking a night off from Sister Act – THE MUSICAL!!! and providing home for a couple of thousand extroverts and bohemians. I’ve not been in a room of so full of gay men since Ice Cream rolled out of town. It was the perfect venue. Ornate, classical and echoing with history.
Starting the night were Micachu & The Shapes, taking up a small area in the centre of the stage. Starting with a clanging drone that shuffled its way into a tune, each track swerved between abstract catchiness and what my Mum would describe as “just a load of noise”. Micachu herself reminded me of Justine Frischmann’s semi comatose androgyny. I’m still a bit undecided, but they shared the same uncompromising spirit that has been at the core of Patrick’s work since the very beginning.
So that got us in the mood for something a bit different, which is what tonight was to be all about. To add to this, the pre-performance music ranged from classical to gypsy folk to Cheryl Cole. Surely, somewhere in this myriad sonic triangle lies Patrick Wolf.
After new (I think) song Divine Intervention is sung behind the closed Safety Curtain, the all too familiar tribal thump of Overture begins. The curtain raises. The strings soar. He appears. And, not for the first time that night, the tears begin.
This gig put a few things into perspective for me. Is there any other artist or band that could draw this reaction from me? Radiohead, very possibly, but however much I love them, they like to keep a certain distance from their audience. Blur and Pulp also have the means, but I’m unlikely to see either of them live any time soon. Maybe it just doesn’t take much to make me cry these days, after a combination of relatives passing away, pets being put down and friends leaving town. God help me when The Doctor regenerates in the new year, I’ll probably need therapy.
I’m rambling.
The set had an understandable focus on The Bachelor, with debut Lycanthropy also healthily represented. As my main love falls for the middle two records, it would have been nice to hear a few more from them, but seriously this was not a performance you could fault. Other than that it ended and I had to go back to dull reality afterwards.
The highlights were numerous. Florence bringing the house down for a lusty rendition of The Bachelor. Wind In The Wires and its hushed fragility. Oblivion unveiling a horned leather jacket as well as The Voice Of Hope, and Hard Times finally getting people dancing in the aisles, as well as Alec Empire attacking what appeared to be a cybernetic ironing board.
It was this call to arms that made the whole night really kick off. There was a rush to the front of the stage, sporadically broken up by the theatre’s ushers, but the delirium was never truly quashed from then on. After a fiddle with the set list, The Libertine arrived and transformed into a stomping ukulele-off. The divine Damaris has now joined the ranks of Classic Wolf, meaning that Tristan felt like a bit of an afterthought in its wake.
Arriving at the end of the main set, which had lasted almost two hours, The Magic Position came with Patrick sporting a shiny new top hat and a tear in his eye. Its very telling that there are no decent videos of this on You Tube, as the hysteria among us all reached its peak. Some things are just impossible to document on camera phones. The performance of this song and what it means to me is hard to put into words, so I won’t.
Returning for a touching rendition of The Sun Is Often Out, dedicated to a lost friend, the end came with Vulture. Tonight’s outfits included a black feathered ensemble followed by something involving bamboo and pantaloons, but the finale was delivered in see-through trousers and a liberal application of silver body paint, emerging from behind the curtain on a rotating disco ball. I fucking love that I wrote that sentence and every word of it is true.
Tonight we watched a man throw his very essence into a show that he has been preparing for his entire life. Over the years Patrick Wolf has been occasionally outspoken and often uncompromising to the point of career destruction. Was it worth all that war just to win? Yes it was.
Sunday 18 October 2009
To be lost in the forest
Bloc Party, Lincoln Engine Shed, 12/10/09
To be honest, I wasn’t paying support act Grammatics the attention they deserved. You try concentrating on a band when you’ve got a two pinter of cider in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. This being the seventh time I’ve seen Bloc Party, I think I’ve written about the ins and outs of their live show several times already, so let’s talk about the past...
2005. It was a very good year.
On a personal level, it was exactly halfway through my time at Uni. After a muted start, I was finally starting to get out a bit more. This was partly motivated by living in a house full of people who were only living together because we couldn’t find anyone else to live with. You can imagine the chemistry. Oh, the fun times. We communicated via angry notes left in the kitchen. I hid my saucepans from them. That sort of thing. But something else was pulling me outdoors. The music. 2005 saw a rash of debut albums that provided dozens of spiky indie pop tunes, mostly produced by Paul Epworth, that made the sticky floored indie clubs (well, club) in Lincoln the most desirable of locations.
It was all coming together. A bunch of bright young things from various ends of the country were picking up guitars and actually making a decent racket again. Because “they” had to give it a name, “New Britpop” was coined, but that was doing it a disservice. Britpop of old can be boiled down to a North v South façade engineered to sell magazines (remember them?) and caused a million shit bands to get record deals (remember THEM??). Don’t get me wrong, Blur will forever be the soundtrack to this young Essex boy growing up, and Pulp’s Different Class will always be one of my favourite albums, but the rest of it? There were some good moments, but there was a lot of tack too. Enjoyable but a bit dated. Uniform.
Plus, I was 10 in 1995 so wasn’t really old enough to consume it all. By the time that I properly started getting into music – you know, buying NME and Melody Maker every week, recording sessions off Steve Lamacq, falling asleep to John Peel, taping pound coins to cardboard and sending off for rare vinyl singles I couldn’t even play – it was the end of the century, the arse end of Britpop. There was the occasional spark of brilliance, but nothing that inspiring.
Cut to 2005 and Bloc Party, Futureheads, The Rakes, Maximo Park, Editors, The Killers (I stand by Hot Fuss, ignoring what came after) and fucking hell even Kaiser Chiefs brought out debut albums just as I was getting into dancing on the heady rush of two 99p pints (I was a lightweight. Much has changed, of course). Without boring you with too much more of my life story, I wasn’t a happy boy before I left home, and my first year or so at uni was a hangover from this. But getting out more was the making of me, even if it was for being known as that tall guy who gets pissed easily. But at least I had a good soundtrack to it. Apply Some Pressure, Helicopter, Hounds Of Love...these formed the background noise to me finally getting a life.
Out of all of these albums, it’s Silent Alarm that I hold in fondest regard from that time. Bloc Party always did look, talk and act like they were the ones who would be doing something interesting for the foreseeable future. Maximo, Rakes and Futureheads all released sophomore efforts that were beyond decent, but they have offered diminishing returns since then. Then there were the also-rans. The Others. The Dead 60s. Hard Fi. The Ordinary Boys. Where are they now? Fuck knows, but there was that one song we all liked, and will probably still dance to it if the cider is doing its job.
I put on Silent Alarm for the first time in ages the other day, and my God it certainly still packs a punch. It instantly transported me to that lofty house in Lincoln’s West End (Leeds folk, think Hyde Park but a quarter of the size and more horse shit on the streets) with its blocked drains and faulty heating (“It’s so cold in this house” never rang more true). There isn’t a duff song on there, and that’s before considering the two singles that came either side of the album, Little Thoughts and Two More Years. The former being the sound of young men writing a song together for the first time, and sounding all the more fresh and spunky for it, and the latter being a gorgeous ode to a decaying relationship. Two of their best songs, and they don’t play either of these at this gig. Nor do they play Blue Light, Halo, I Still Remember, Two Months Off...obviously, there is only so much time that they are allowed to play, and it’s best to leave wanting more. They are, essentially, A Big Tease*.
Bloc Party are finally becoming the band they always promised to be. Kele Okereke has gone from a shy geekboy mumbling insults to indie nobodies, to beefcake showman, owning us all with just a raise of his eyebrow. He is now confidence personified, backed up by his boys who have a lot more toys to play with these days. Russell Lissack is all fringe and pedals – a Johnny Greenwood in the making – and Gordon Moakes spends most of the gig prodding at keyboards and glockenspiels.
It’s the encore, Flux is coming, we all know this. Then I hear it, in the background. A noise. Is it my ears ringing? They did just play Ares. “We dance to the sound of Sirens”. No, it’s the fucking fire alarm. Ignore it, one more song, come on. The tour manager comes on stage. Kele lets him give the announcement. We have to evacuate the building. Now. Balls.
Not hearing Flux is equal to that time I saw The Chemical Brothers a couple of years ago and they didn't play The Private Psychedelic Reel. There was no excuse of a fire alarm to hide behind, they just didn’t play it. The fuck? Flux is a vital song. It’s important. Urgent. It rescued the tail end of the Weekend In The City campaign from slipping off into the night unnoticed. It is, to be frank, The Tits. We had all had a good dance that night, especially me on my ankle that I thought I’d broken. It would have topped an immense gig and made it a borderline classic. Instead we were left with the nagging feeling of being a bit short changed.
We shuffle out doors, swapping conspiracy theories, fed by some twat being roughed up by the heavies after fucking around with a fire extinguisher. Turns out it was one of the smoke machines that set it all off. The fire engines have shown up. We head off to The Glasshouse to dissect the evening.
Still, I got to watch a band I have loved for a long time yet again deliver the goods. I hear there will now be a hiatus, and there’s even mumblings of a split. If they do, it would be an incredible shame. Let’s hope this is just careless talk, and it won’t be too long before they come back to save the universe once more.
Kebab Watch: I think I’ve mentioned several times about Poppins, and the times we spent there, feeding our fat faces. Wherever we went that night (Topkapi? Somewhere on the High Street anyway) well it was never gonna come close. Most of mine ended up all over my mate’s floor. Sorry about that.
*I’ve just seen a site that compiles all the set lists from this tour, and they played pretty much all these tracks across several nights, so I guess it’s just luck of the draw. Fair play for mixing it up, the material is certainly there.
To be honest, I wasn’t paying support act Grammatics the attention they deserved. You try concentrating on a band when you’ve got a two pinter of cider in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. This being the seventh time I’ve seen Bloc Party, I think I’ve written about the ins and outs of their live show several times already, so let’s talk about the past...
2005. It was a very good year.
On a personal level, it was exactly halfway through my time at Uni. After a muted start, I was finally starting to get out a bit more. This was partly motivated by living in a house full of people who were only living together because we couldn’t find anyone else to live with. You can imagine the chemistry. Oh, the fun times. We communicated via angry notes left in the kitchen. I hid my saucepans from them. That sort of thing. But something else was pulling me outdoors. The music. 2005 saw a rash of debut albums that provided dozens of spiky indie pop tunes, mostly produced by Paul Epworth, that made the sticky floored indie clubs (well, club) in Lincoln the most desirable of locations.
It was all coming together. A bunch of bright young things from various ends of the country were picking up guitars and actually making a decent racket again. Because “they” had to give it a name, “New Britpop” was coined, but that was doing it a disservice. Britpop of old can be boiled down to a North v South façade engineered to sell magazines (remember them?) and caused a million shit bands to get record deals (remember THEM??). Don’t get me wrong, Blur will forever be the soundtrack to this young Essex boy growing up, and Pulp’s Different Class will always be one of my favourite albums, but the rest of it? There were some good moments, but there was a lot of tack too. Enjoyable but a bit dated. Uniform.
Plus, I was 10 in 1995 so wasn’t really old enough to consume it all. By the time that I properly started getting into music – you know, buying NME and Melody Maker every week, recording sessions off Steve Lamacq, falling asleep to John Peel, taping pound coins to cardboard and sending off for rare vinyl singles I couldn’t even play – it was the end of the century, the arse end of Britpop. There was the occasional spark of brilliance, but nothing that inspiring.
Cut to 2005 and Bloc Party, Futureheads, The Rakes, Maximo Park, Editors, The Killers (I stand by Hot Fuss, ignoring what came after) and fucking hell even Kaiser Chiefs brought out debut albums just as I was getting into dancing on the heady rush of two 99p pints (I was a lightweight. Much has changed, of course). Without boring you with too much more of my life story, I wasn’t a happy boy before I left home, and my first year or so at uni was a hangover from this. But getting out more was the making of me, even if it was for being known as that tall guy who gets pissed easily. But at least I had a good soundtrack to it. Apply Some Pressure, Helicopter, Hounds Of Love...these formed the background noise to me finally getting a life.
Out of all of these albums, it’s Silent Alarm that I hold in fondest regard from that time. Bloc Party always did look, talk and act like they were the ones who would be doing something interesting for the foreseeable future. Maximo, Rakes and Futureheads all released sophomore efforts that were beyond decent, but they have offered diminishing returns since then. Then there were the also-rans. The Others. The Dead 60s. Hard Fi. The Ordinary Boys. Where are they now? Fuck knows, but there was that one song we all liked, and will probably still dance to it if the cider is doing its job.
I put on Silent Alarm for the first time in ages the other day, and my God it certainly still packs a punch. It instantly transported me to that lofty house in Lincoln’s West End (Leeds folk, think Hyde Park but a quarter of the size and more horse shit on the streets) with its blocked drains and faulty heating (“It’s so cold in this house” never rang more true). There isn’t a duff song on there, and that’s before considering the two singles that came either side of the album, Little Thoughts and Two More Years. The former being the sound of young men writing a song together for the first time, and sounding all the more fresh and spunky for it, and the latter being a gorgeous ode to a decaying relationship. Two of their best songs, and they don’t play either of these at this gig. Nor do they play Blue Light, Halo, I Still Remember, Two Months Off...obviously, there is only so much time that they are allowed to play, and it’s best to leave wanting more. They are, essentially, A Big Tease*.
Bloc Party are finally becoming the band they always promised to be. Kele Okereke has gone from a shy geekboy mumbling insults to indie nobodies, to beefcake showman, owning us all with just a raise of his eyebrow. He is now confidence personified, backed up by his boys who have a lot more toys to play with these days. Russell Lissack is all fringe and pedals – a Johnny Greenwood in the making – and Gordon Moakes spends most of the gig prodding at keyboards and glockenspiels.
It’s the encore, Flux is coming, we all know this. Then I hear it, in the background. A noise. Is it my ears ringing? They did just play Ares. “We dance to the sound of Sirens”. No, it’s the fucking fire alarm. Ignore it, one more song, come on. The tour manager comes on stage. Kele lets him give the announcement. We have to evacuate the building. Now. Balls.
Not hearing Flux is equal to that time I saw The Chemical Brothers a couple of years ago and they didn't play The Private Psychedelic Reel. There was no excuse of a fire alarm to hide behind, they just didn’t play it. The fuck? Flux is a vital song. It’s important. Urgent. It rescued the tail end of the Weekend In The City campaign from slipping off into the night unnoticed. It is, to be frank, The Tits. We had all had a good dance that night, especially me on my ankle that I thought I’d broken. It would have topped an immense gig and made it a borderline classic. Instead we were left with the nagging feeling of being a bit short changed.
We shuffle out doors, swapping conspiracy theories, fed by some twat being roughed up by the heavies after fucking around with a fire extinguisher. Turns out it was one of the smoke machines that set it all off. The fire engines have shown up. We head off to The Glasshouse to dissect the evening.
Still, I got to watch a band I have loved for a long time yet again deliver the goods. I hear there will now be a hiatus, and there’s even mumblings of a split. If they do, it would be an incredible shame. Let’s hope this is just careless talk, and it won’t be too long before they come back to save the universe once more.
Kebab Watch: I think I’ve mentioned several times about Poppins, and the times we spent there, feeding our fat faces. Wherever we went that night (Topkapi? Somewhere on the High Street anyway) well it was never gonna come close. Most of mine ended up all over my mate’s floor. Sorry about that.
*I’ve just seen a site that compiles all the set lists from this tour, and they played pretty much all these tracks across several nights, so I guess it’s just luck of the draw. Fair play for mixing it up, the material is certainly there.
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