Oh Internet

John Spencer Blues Explosion - at Liquid Room - I went along to this as a last minute “Nothing better to do” thing on Monday night, and I’m pretty glad I did. I’ve only got a couple of their albums, but I still enjoyed it even though I didn’t know a lot of the stuff they played. They were very energetic and the crowd seemed really into it too; any gig involving a Theremin automatically gets bonus points. This was the Liquid Room though, so the sound wasn’t the best. The vocals were almost impossible to make out at times. The whole thing was pretty loud though, so it was possibly just my battered eardrums rebelling over their working condidions again.

I enjoyed the support band, Gamma V Delta, too, though I only got into the venue a while after they’d started. They were a 3 piece band who played a lot of Stevie Ray Vaughan-esque twangy blues things. I’d provide a link to them, but I’ve no idea if they have a website, and they’ve given themselves a name that’s really difficult to Google for.

Manic Street Preachers - at the Corn Exchange - I’ve seen a few of their live sets on TV, and they always seemed pretty hit or miss, plus I haven’t really liked any of their recent stuff other than Lifeblood, so I was a bit dubious about going to this. It was a lot better than I was expecting though.

They sounded really good, but it depended a lot on where you were standing in the hall. It was the first time I’d been into the Corn Exchange since it had been redone (so, years,) and it’s now got two suspended ceilings on either side of the stage. The sound quality was awful there, but got a lot better once we moved into the centre of the hall (or more to the point, once we moved in line with the sound board.)

The crowd went absolutely nuts for them, even though there was a fair mix of different types at the gig, from the leopardskin/eyeliner/feather boa fan- boys/-girls at the front, moving through the generic indie kids in the middle, to the aging leather rock guys at the back.

This was the first time they’d played in Edinburgh for about 10 years (after a tiff with Avalanche Records apparently) and it did lead to a crack from Nicky Wire that riled up the Glaswegians in the audience. Ian also pointed out that they fluffed the “I wonder who you think you are…” bit at the start of ‘Archives of Pain’ but I’ll let them off. I’d forgotten what a good guitar player James Dean Bradfield is. I was also surprised at how many of the crowd managed to sing along to every word, but I guess they’re all a lot more dedicated than me at deciphering high-volume Welsh accents.

The support band were, apparently, The Delays, though I had to look that up afterwards since there were no obvious hints about their name either during or after the gig. They were utterly generic. They had quite a good line in catchy intros, but after that every song degenerated into standard indie strumalong nonsense. May have been better if they understood that songs are allowed to have dynamics, and don’t have to be solid treble-y noise. I think they would have been more enjoyable if they’d just stuck with their big drum and farty bass synth intros, even though it would have cut their set down to about 7 minutes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2005 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Media Consumption, The Big Room. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.