http://theduchessyork.co.uk/whats-on/detail/1050Picked, as I'd never heard of them, almost entirely on the basis that I had nowt on this weekend and it was local, pretty cheap, and they were Scottish. I do like an accent, y'see. Having bought the tickets I Spotified a little, found two albums that I rather like and decided that it might not be a bad random pick. And it was at The Duchess - we saw Simone Felice there a few weeks back. Basement venue. Sticky floors, crap beer, smiley and pretty humorous doorstaff, insufficiently numerous barstaff. I rather like it.
After a pint or two in town with Mr Bunbury, That Deano and I headed venue-wards and wandered in to a near empty room where a bloke on the stage with a blue guitar and harmonica was singing, whose name I didn't get but who was OK. Next up were "Captains of Industry" who I believe are locals - definitely a warm up band, I felt. Then "Olympic Swimmers" who have a lead singer who has both A Voice and An Accent. *Charlotte-esque little moment* The rest of the band can go home though - they were OK, but they made it hard to hear her as well as I'd have liked, and just her on her own would have been sufficient
Despite the lead singer's grumpiness, I rather liked Admiral Fallow too - well, they have Voices and Accents and a flute and a clarinet and they aren't afraid to use 'em. Oh, and some splendidly impressive guitarist facial hair. A nice slight surprise was that the vocals felt more balanced between lead singer chap and the accordion/keyboard/flute playing female vocalist than I'd expected from the albums, which worked for me. The burly beardy clarinettist was my favourite, by a fair margin, mind. And when he stopped playing and came in with the "It harks back to" line on the vocals on Tree Bursts, which they played as their opening track, it was a proper tingle moment. Liked him.
They had a couple of technical problems (of the loud bang and, I suspect, escaping magic smoke variety) but coped admirably and carried on tunefully. Good sounds, a fair mix of tempos and tones in the fairly dynamic set list, nice wordy lyrics. Beetle in the Box talks of dictionaries and nouns and verbs and the gaps and the spaces in between - and more use should be made of words like timorous in lyrics, I feel. Linguistic trickery and an appreciation of liminal spaces. In good accents too. It was always likely to be a winner for me, really. It did start to feel a bit flat in the middle, possibly when the lead singer announced a couple of songs as 'drinking songs' that, well, weren't really. And seemed a bit narked at the polite appreciation that greeted them. But a rousing rendition of "Guest of the Governement" seemed to get them back on track.
Next Big Thing lead singer (who, instinct tells me, has been reading his own reviews a bit too much) just really needed to understand that this is York. So the audience is terribly nice, and just a bit polite, but will start off pretty much on your side and it's up to you what you do with that. Telling us off for not being whoop whoop enough was never going to work. If you want Yorkies to jump up and down and clap and sing along and stuff, tell them so. If we like you (standing in the middle of us it was really obvious that we mostly did plus I wasn't the only one who knew the words so there were clearly a few actual fans there, as well as us accidentals with nowt better to do on a Friday night) then we probably will, because we are nice like that. As he finally discovered in the encore, when they made us wait just a slightly irritating minute or two too long but then delivered up a rather splendid rendition of "Isn't this World Enough".
I'd go see 'em again. I'd even happily pay more than the 9 quid it cost for last night's ticket. Slightly perturbed at seeing a gig where I knew every track on the set list and most of the words mind...
