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 \ud83d\ude42 Surprisingly so, as it was apparently a sold out gig but most people hadn’t shown up early it seems.<\/p>\n
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 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
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 \ud83d\ude09 ). There weren’t any flashy visuals or showy lights, just the band playing – but they still kept everyone’s attention focused through the gig.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n