Concert – Page 2 – It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One

The Stone Roses, Finsbury Park 7 June 2013

On Friday we headed into London to see The Stone Roses play at Finsbury Park. We’d seen them for the first time last year at Heaton Park (their reunion gigs), and jumped at the chance to see them again this year.

We got there pretty much at gates, and were surprised how close we could get to the stage. Could’ve been at the barrier, but decided that given how nuts the crowd had gone at Heaton Park discretion was the better part of valour & we stood a little way back – maybe 10 people from the front (ended up a bit further back by the time The Stone Roses came on, as is always the way coz people push forwards). Crowd was a bit rougher with more fighting & less pleasant than at Heaton Park, and I kinda felt security were more concerned with security theatre than actually doing much useful. Like early on we saw 5 big burly guys come to tell a couple of lads they needed to put their cans of beer into paper cups, yet when a couple of fights broke out during Dizzee Rascal’s set they took ages to react & sort it out. The other way it was less pleasant was there were more chaps peeing on the ground & a lot more paper cups of liquid being chucked across the crowd. Most of it was cold & hence probably beer, but lets not dwell on that – suffice to say I washed extra specially thoroughly when we got back to the hotel that evening :/

First band on were Rudimental. We really drew the short straw for support acts, to be honest – the next night had acts that were much more to our tastes. Rudimental are very current – they have had a recent number 1 hit. Wikipedia lists them as drum and bass which isn’t really my thing, musically speaking they performed well (bonus points for having a trumpet player!) but they didn’t really grab our attention. I felt like I was too old and have never been cool enough to be into them, if that makes sense 😉

Next were The Courteeners, who I also hadn’t heard of before. They were a five piece rock group & much more to my taste, and I need to try & remember to find out if they’ve got anything on Spotify & give it a listen. The atmosphere for their set was good – there seemed to be a lot of people who were there as much for them as for The Stone Roses.

And our third support act was Dizzee Rascal (a rapper, who I had heard of before). His set was marred by at least two or three fights in the audience but I’m not sure it would’ve gone down all that well even without stopping a couple of times while security broke things up (eventually). I’d listened to a couple of his recent albums on Spotify a few days before and thought it seemed fairly samey, but when the set started I thought I’d maybe misjudged it and this was going to go well. He & the rest of his band (er, the other guys on stage, it’s not really a band) had presence & managed to get the crowd going along with it for a while. Then it just fizzled – partly I think because he played a load of new unreleased songs & it’s not like most of the audience knew his older stuff so we couldn’t care less about the new stuff.

And finally it was time for the band we were actually wanting to see! The Stone Roses came on at about half-eight, and played for nearly 2 hours without much chat or even many pauses between songs. The set list was a bit different to the one at Heaton Park (I particularly noticed the lack of Sally Cinnamon coz we’d been talking about it earlier in the day), but pretty much all the classics were there 🙂 The crowd were all into it, singing along even with the guitar & bass riffs when there weren’t any vocals to sing. It did kick off a bit (and at times I found it hard to keep my feet) but apart from a few assholes it was people who were enthusiastically enjoying the gig, so that was OK. (I gathered from conversation around us that further in it was rougher & people weren’t being as courteous as they should – not picking up people who fell for instance – so it was wise that we didn’t push further forward.)

After the gig we walked back to the hotel – I’d got us in a Travelodge near Kings Cross, so that was quite a long walk but the queues at the tube station were apparently taking an hour to clear. Much nicer to walk for that time & talk about the gig. As with after the Heaton Park gig I had “Something’s Burning” stuck in my head with the first bit of the lyrics looping over & over:

Don’t count your chickens
Coz they’re never gonna hatch
You can’t catch a monkey with a shotgun and a sack
Coz you’re too dull baby
You can’t see the wood for the trees
Coz you’re too slow baby
You just couldn’t get off your knees

(Although it appears I always mishear the fourth line, coz I remember it as identical to the sixth.)

A fantastic gig! Hopefully they’ll release new material some time too, apparently they’re writing so there’s hope for that 🙂

Marillion Weekend 2013

Marillion Weekends are held every 2 years, and on March 8-10th was the 10th convention – J and I have been to every one of them so far 🙂 This year, as with the last 3, it was held at the Center Parcs at Port Zélande, in the Netherlands. The current format is the band play 3 gigs, one each on Friday, Saturday & Sunday, complete with support bands and a long set from Marillion. There’s also stuff during the Saturday & Sunday afternoons, including a pub quiz about the band where the final is the fan winners vs. the band. And Swap the Band where fans get to play on stage with the band in place of one of the band members.

As I said, J & I have been to all of these conventions, from the first one which was just an evening in a small club in Oxford (The Zodiac) in 1998. (At first they were more frequent than every two years, as well as smaller.) We’ve had a selection of different people join us over the years. This year there were seven of us in our group – me, J, Paul, Ady, Ellen, Avi and Gordon.

Photos are up on flickr, I’ve just put some highlights in this post. I only took the point & shoot camera with me, not my DSLR – too faffy to have the big camera in a gig, and harder to hold over my head to take the pictures. J took most of the photos of our group, btw.

Friday 8th March

My notes emphasise beer … funnily enough 🙂 Those of us coming by car (Paul drove himself, me & J and Ady from Ipswich) got up at brutal o’clock (ie 4am) and got to Center Parcs around 1330 local time, in time for lunch and BEER! 🙂 We met the others (who came by plane and shuttle bus) afterwards, while we were buying merch, then got settled in at the chalet before our dinner.

The evening’s concert started off with a set from DeeExpus (who we’ve seen support Marillion before). And as was the case then – I enjoyed the set while they were playing, but I still haven’t listened to the album at home.

And then it was on to the main act 🙂 Marillion came out and played through the whole of their album Radiation – which was released in 1998, so is 15 years old. I think it was the first album released after I’d got into the band, so I feel a trifle old now 😉 It’s an album that’s not had all that good a reaction from “fans in general” in the past, because the mix is thought to be a bit sub-par – but live the tracks have always rocked, so they’ve re-released it this year with a new mix. This set included several tracks I like live – and one that’s gradually becoming a favourite of mine: A Few Words for the Dead. Since they toured Sounds That Can’t Be Made h has been doing some playacting with a fake rifle during this song & it adds something to it, to me.

The second half of the set after a short break was very much the bouncy set of the weekend – and could’ve been designed for me. Several Fish era songs (including Script for a Jester’s Tear which is one of my favourite Marillion songs), and the h era songs included both Hooks in You and Cover My Eyes. I bounced up & down till my feet hurt, and sang so much my voice went a bit 🙂

Afterwards those of us that were staying out (me, J, Paul, Ellen & Ady) walked briskly to the Adventure Factory (yeah, that’s the name of the bit where the bar was) and got beer. There was a queue from hell for beer from the bar, so we won’t dwell upon that – aggravating tho it was, we did end up with a sufficient quantity of beer 😀 About 1am we headed back to the chalet and I think in the end we stayed up till 3am chattering away – only 22hrs since we’d got up in the morning!

Saturday 9th March

Funnily enough, I started the day with a mild hangover, can’t think why 😉 Didn’t stop me having a few beers during the afternoon – although perhaps it should’ve done coz the hangover came back for the evening, oops :/ Gave away the beer I’d bought at the start of the gig and drank coke for the rest of it – caffeine, sugar, liquid, perfect hangover cure, shame about the taste!

The first of the support acts was Pete Trewavas doing a “solo” set – I put it in quotes because he had someone whose name I forget come on stage with him for a couple of the songs. But it was all his own music, and mostly himself singing and playing guitar. He kept saying he was nervous, but it didn’t really show. And obviously he got a good reception, because he’s part of Marillion. The second support act were Sweet Billy Pilgrim, who I have to confess passed me by entirely. Pleasant yet un-memorable would be my take on them, but everyone else really liked them. Perhaps the previous paragraph explains it, and I just wasn’t in the right head space for the band?

The first half of Marillion’s set was a play through of the album Brave in it’s entirety. Previous conventions have normally done an album play-through on the Friday night, this is the first time we’ve had a whole album on the Saturday night as well. And this is the first time we’ve had a repeat of an album as well – they played Brave at the convention at Pontins back in 2002. Brave as an album is a pretty emotional (and bleak) piece of work – it’s inspired by a news story about a girl found wandering about on/preparing to jump from the Severn Bridge who refused to tell her rescuers who she was or why she was there. The songs on the album are possible stories for how she ended up there. To be perfectly honest, this is not one of my favourite Marillion albums. Everyone you talk to about it says it’s an album to sit down and listen to – lights off, volume up, read the lyrics, give it your full attention. And I don’t really interact with music that way – I stick it on as background, and sing along with the stuff I know or dance round the living room (depending how many people can see me …). So Brave passes me by a bit on record. It’s still a powerful experience live. And it’s enhanced when the band play it as a whole album because the stage show to go with it involves h acting out some of the bits as well as the music playing. So there were bits with a girl in a white dress (Jennifer Rothery, the guitarist’s daughter) lighting candles round h during an atmospheric bit, masked men pulling h off stage etc.

We’d known for weeks that Brave would be played on this evening, so we’d been speculating about what the second set would consist of – I was assuming (and asserting) that it’d be all the more emotional songs, to continue the theme. And I wasn’t entirely wrong, this was the evening they played Out Of This World complete with the film of the Bluebird crash – always an emotional moment. But they did play some other stuff like Warm Wet Circles which was more upbeat and bouncy 🙂

After the gig we split into two groups like the previous evening (tho not quite of the same composition – Paul had caught the lurgy so headed back to the chalet), and thankfully the queue for beer in the Adventure Factory was better managed this time and we got drinks quicker 🙂 (And I was feeling up to beer again!) We met up with Tim, who works with J, while we were there and after a few beers headed back to the chalet for more. Tim provided us with the weekend’s lasting joke, I think 🙂 While we were all sitting in the living room we heard footsteps on the top flight of stairs & all the lights dimmed. Tim said “who’s that? Beelzebub??” … given where people were, it had to be Paul letting his cold affect his masking of his dark powers 😉

Sunday 10th March

Started the day without a hangover, always a plus 🙂 We spent lunch in search of vegetables, but still failing to find much – always the problem at that Center Parcs, the food isn’t great. J also took charge of the camera over lunch because he’d noticed I wasn’t taking enough photos of the people we were with, so we have a few from this morning/afternoon.

Then it was off to the main tent for the afternoon – the temperature was dropping from the almost spring-like temperatures it had been down to the more arctic weather we’ve had since, so queueing was particularly chilly today. There’s a youtube vid of the queue for this (sped up) – look for us around the 0.44 mark.

The afternoon’s delights included the final of the quiz, which included a round on prices of various “collectibles” on e-bay – stumping the band more than the fans, unsurprisingly. Then there was the Q&A session with the band, which was the normal sort of thing – one question that stuck in my mind was someone had asked Rothery 10 years ago in a convention Q&A where he saw the band in 10 years, so they asked again this year. The answer was much the same, too “hope there is a band, see no reason why not, hope we’re still doing conventions”. In answer to another question h also let slip that he’s touring with Richard Barbieri later this year, so that gave us the next gig we needed to sort out tickets for 😉

We then had a public proposal (… I hate these, I think they’re generally cringe making, and I feel it unfairly puts the poor woman on the spot), and people having their photos taken with the band on stage which went on for ever and ever. (There’d been a sweepstake for it, we didn’t enter.) Then it was Swap the Band which is always cool 🙂 People enter by sending demos of themselves playing/singing Marillion songs, and a selection are chosen to come up on stage and play with the band. So it’s an extra mini-gig in effect, we got 6 extra songs and even if it’s not the whole band the replacements are always astonishingly good 🙂 Also funny was watching Pete when he was the one swapped out – he didn’t know what to do with himself. First he sat at the back of the stage, then he started playing air bass, then air drums, then some more fidgeting around … eventually h took pity on him & gave him a tambourine or something to shake so he had something to do 🙂

Dinner was brisk, as the afternoon stuff had been running late. And the queue afterwards for the main tent was very cold – and unsurprisingly they were running late for that. When we were let in the support act, Harvest, were still sound checking, which felt a little odd, and must’ve felt even odder to them. When they came back out they got a really good reception – I enjoyed their set, but I couldn’t tell you much about it now (and sadly my notes just say “Harvest were good” which isn’t enough of a memory prompt to tell you why when I’m writing this more than 2 weeks later).

Then it was time for the last Marillion gig of the weekend. We’d spent the day speculating about what they might play – there’d been no hints dropped by the band beforehand, so we were just working off “what haven’t we heard yet”. We had two main bit of speculation – one of which was right and one of which was wrong. The right bit was that we hadn’t heard anything off the most recent album, Sounds That Can’t Be Made, so we were wondering if they’d play the whole of that – and it turned out to be true, although they didn’t play it straight through in the order it is on disc. Instead the songs were scattered through out the whole of the set. So that was cool, it’s a good album 🙂

Our wrong bit of speculation was that we’d get all the big “crowd favourites” that we hadn’t had yet – like Easter or Fantastic Place. But we didn’t – and we didn’t miss them either, still a very good set. Including one of the first times This Strange Engine has worked for me as a song (I generally find it too bitty & broken up, but this time it worked). And they ended with Garden Party – gold foil fluttering down through the air & lots of bouncing up and down 🙂

Afterwards we went back to the chalet & chilled out for a while – drinking up the beer (had to be done, obviously 😉 ) and playing cards & chatting till about 1am.

The trip back on Monday went OK, although it was brutally cold when we left and there was snow falling from around when we entered France all the way back to Ipswich. Ady was staying over at ours afterwards, but Paul had to get home so that Nat could have her car back (due to an unexpected work trip meaning she needed the one she was insured to drive for work purposes on Tuesday). Which didn’t work out all that well for him as the traffic apparently looked at the snow & stopped moving. Still he made it in the end, so that’s OK.

It was an awesome weekend 🙂 Roll on the next one … in 2015 when we might just about’ve recovered 😉

Steven Wilson at the Festival Hall, London 4th March 2013

A couple of weeks ago we went into London for the day & in the evening we went to see Steven Wilson playing at the Festival Hall. Not a venue I’d been to before, although I suspect I’ve seen it on the telly as it looked familiar. It was all seated, which is a rarity for rock events & even though it means I get a better view it still doesn’t have quite the same atmosphere as a “proper” gig. Due to a degree of organisational fail when booking tickets (ie no-one talked to anyone before they bought them) we ended up all sat in different places – J & I were together and Ady a few seats away in the cheaper seats & Ellen & Paul both in the further forward ones but not in the same place.

There wasn’t a support band, just the main act – although this is Wilson’s solo stuff he has a band to record with & tour with, it’s just that he’s the one that writes the music & sets the direction (unlike with Porcupine Tree which was more collaborative). The various musicians are all very good so fascinating to watch. And they had some good video visuals to go with the music. I do have one quibble about that though – the lighting for the band meant you couldn’t always see the visuals & it seemed a shame to’ve taken the time to make the little films and then have them not always visible. There was also a return of the curtain in front of the band trick from the last tour – just for a couple of songs in the middle this time including Watchmaker, with the visuals projected onto the curtain rather than the screen at the back. Even by the standards of visuals for a Steven Wilson song those were pretty creepy!

They played most, if not all, of the new album (The Raven that Refused to Sing) plus highlights from previous Wilson solo albums. Including Postcard, which I like (J is a bit tired of it as a song). And finished up with an encore of an old Porcupine Tree song – Radioactive Toy – which I haven’t heard at a PT gig in years & years (and nowadays it fits better with Wilson’s solo stuff than what PT became). Wilson’s solo stuff is odd for me – I rarely if ever listen to the albums, pretty much never via me actually choosing to put them on. But I do like it live, and I know startling many of the songs when they’re played.

Wilson wasn’t all that talkative, he rarely is, but there was one bit in the middle where he was introducing Raider II that sticks in the mind. He said he’d been looking at amazon reviews and there was one that said the person liked the new album and it had all the Wilson trademark things including Tolkein-esque lyrics … “Tolkein-esque?!?”. Wilson said his mother had brought him up to write songs about serial killers, not about hobbits! And pointed out his mother who was at the concert, in the royal box.

A good gig 🙂 And here’s the video for the title track of the new album – and it was shown on the screen behind the band while they played the song at the gig:

Niyaz at Rich Mix, London (23 November 2012)

Niyaz are one of the more esoteric bands that J and I listen to – fairly different from our normal rock/pop/metal staples. The core of the group is a trio of musicians who come from the Middle East originally, and play music that is based on the folk music of that part of the world – modernised, but not westernised. Their singer, Azam Ali, has one of the most gorgeous voices I’ve ever heard. Despite not understanding any of the words I enjoy listening to the music, it’s very beautiful.

We didn’t think we’d get a chance to see them play without travelling, they don’t tour extensively in Europe – Paris & Istanbul are the places we’d heard of them playing before. So when we saw there was a London gig in November we bought tickets immediately 🙂 Rich Mix is a venue we’d not been to before – in the Bethnal Green area of London, to get there we ended up walking past quite a few places that looked far too “cool” for us 😉 The venue itself was a nice space – it was a combination of a small cinema and a performance space (and a cafe). And the bar was a step up from a normal venue – much more interesting beers (I had a bottle of Asahi) and they clearly trusted the clientèle because we got real glasses and bottles, not plastic ones. The crowd weren’t quite the same sorts of people we see at the concerts we go to – a lot more women, and a lot more people who weren’t speaking English or weren’t white (or both). It made it rather obvious how non-diverse the average rock crowd is in the UK.

The concert was organised/promoted by a charity that is aiming to build artistic relationships between the Middle East & Europe (called Arts Canteen), so the concert opened with a couple of words from one of their people. There was no support band, so after that Niyaz came on and played for about an hour to an hour & a half. Most of the songs they played were from their most recent album, Sumud. The band are infectiously enthusiastic about the music they are playing and clearly were enjoying themselves, and had soon created a good atmosphere.

They didn’t speak much between songs beyond brief introductions, the exceptions were the band introductions at the end and a moment early on in the concert when Azam Ali explained some of her philosophy – that the world would be a much better place if people could concentrate more on the similarities between themselves & their neighbours and not on the differences. That peace comes first from the heart, not from the politicians. As an Iranian born woman, who spent some of her later childhood in India before emigrating to the US (and then to Canada) she has a fairly personal perspective on both the similarities between cultures and the ways that people divide & demonise the “other”. Niyaz artwork

I found the visuals projected on the screen behind the band to be fascinating, but they’re not on the video I found (from the Paris show a few days before the London one), which is a shame. They were intricate line drawings of abstract patterns that were first built up then stripped back to the initial seed again. Much like the artwork for the album that we have a signed print of but animated. J didn’t notice the visuals much at all though, he was watching the musicians too much!

At the end of the concert we got a bonus encore – they invited a fan up on stage with them to play “Beni Beni” again. The fan had previously recorded herself playing along with the song on a bouzouki and the band had liked her playing so much that they’d invited her to play with them if they ever played in her town. It seemed like they hadn’t actually met or rehearsed anything with her, they just asked her to get up on stage with them at the end and then played the song – it was really good (and I really like the song so nice to hear it a second time 🙂 ).

And finally here’s a video of “Beni Beni” from the Paris gig:

Marillion at The Forum 16/9/12

Marillion did a (fairly short) UK tour just after the new album came out and we went to the show in London on 16th Sept. We did a bit of museuming beforehand (which I’ll write up another time), then met Ady & Pete at Kentish Town to find dinner before the show. Paul was supposed to join us too, but his trains were all screwed up so he had to give it a miss 🙁 Ended up eating in Nandos, which I haven’t done in probably a decade … and it would’ve been that Nandos last time too, before a Marillion gig!

Unusually I had a camera with me, a few years ago most concerts tried to stop you taking photos but things have moved on a bit. Didn’t take the big camera, obviously, if nothing else it’s awfully hard to take photos at arms length above my head with that one. And despite taking quite a lot of photos (coz only a few would come out) I didn’t watch the whole show through the viewfinder either 😉 All the pics are on flickr, so click through for a larger version.

The support band for the evening were DeeExpus – Mark Kelly (keyboards in Marillion) plays on the album, but didn’t come out and play on stage with them. We do actually have the album, but I haven’t listened to it much so I didn’t know the songs. They sounded good at the time, but haven’t really stuck in my head at all.

And then on to the main act! They started with a little fake-out of the intro to Splintering Heart, followed by explosions and then into Gaza – the opening track off the new album (which is called “Sounds That Can’t Be Made”). A bit of a politically charged song, as it’s about the humanitarian side of the situation in Gaza, and it made for a powerful start to the show.

I think I’ve said before I’m bad at remembering setlists. As well as four songs off the new album, this one had some old classics like This Town and Great Escape, some of the newer classics like Neverland and You’re Gone. Oh and a rendition of A Few Words for the Dead where h waved a gun around, with a flower in it for the bit where the lyrics kick in with “or you could love”.

The (last) encore was Sugar Mice which is a favourite of mine (starting with a slightly ropey crowd sing-along), and in a nice touch the final song – Estonia – was dedicated to Neil Armstrong. The show was recorded, and they’d organised it so that you could buy the CD after the show, which was kinda neat 🙂

No-Man playing at Islington Assembly Hall (2/9/12)

No-Man are one of those bands that I like, but never really listen to much on record unless J plays it. For ages they didn’t tour, but the last few years they’ve played about a gig a year in the UK and I think J & I have been to all of them. This one was at the Islington Assembly Hall which isn’t a venue I’ve been to before, quite nice inside although not terribly memorable. It did have good beer on offer, though – bottles of Hobgoblin, Adnams Bitter or Fursty Ferret. As it was a seated gig without assigned seats we’d organised to meet Paul in the queue about half an hour before doors, he got there just a little before us & had got a spot nearish the front of the queue. We ended up a couple of rows from the front 🙂 Surprisingly so, as it was apparently a sold out gig but most people hadn’t shown up early it seems.

The support act was one of the guys from Anathema, Danny Cavanagh. I’ve never bought a ticket specifically to see Anathema but nonetheless I’ve seen them or members of them nearly a dozen times doing support slots for various bands (mostly Steven Wilson related ones in some sense, like this one as he’s in No-Man). I do like some of their stuff, but not enough to want to go see them play so for a while I’d got rather burnt out on having them as the support act. But I’ve got over that, and this was just the one guy with a guitar so it felt quite different. It was a good set, and he did some neat stuff with loops to provide percussion & additional layers of guitar. And ended with a cover of a Pink Floyd song 🙂

Then it was No-Man, who were awesome. I thought they seemed more relaxed as a band this gig – probably because this was at the end of a (short) European tour, rather than the first gig for several months. Their aesthetic for the evening was clearly black-shirts-with-dark-trousers, and the simplicity of that fits the music which I tend to think of as sparse even tho often it’s not. (I don’t know if that makes sense outside my head 😉 ). There weren’t any flashy visuals or showy lights, just the band playing – but they still kept everyone’s attention focused through the gig.

I’m not good at remembering set-lists for gigs (I’m generally not good at naming songs even if I know them well …), but I do remember that they played “Time Travel in Texas” which is one of my favourite tracks live. Here’s a youtube vid of it recorded at their gig in 2011:

They also played a brand new track, which sounded very promising for whenever they next release an album.

A good evening 🙂