overlap

Poor tour planning sees The Wildhearts coming to my city on the same night that I've already had my ticket for another gig for months, so it's a short trip up the road and a reminder that making an early start on driving over is a necessity for almost every gig there these days. Last time I was over there was a special gig for very other reasons, and this is almost as much obligation or habit as something promising new and exciting delights. With the new album released the day before and having not had time to let it fully grow on me, anything is possible. * G U Medicine, the first support band have nothing all that special to commend them, beyond being remarkably loud, but they're out of the way soon enough. * Sign, remarkably poor name for a band. The lead vocals are a slightly strained mix of Klaus Meine of the Scorpions and Jon Deverill, but there's something else in there that I can't quite pick out. "Hello, we are Sign and we come from Iceland, and yeah we live in snow houses and shit..." Suddenly it all makes sense! They play a little over half an hour and are clearly having a ball, and the other thing they remind me of becomes clear when they do a cover of Skid Row's Youth Gone Wild - you can see how the roaring/screaming vocal style has more than a hint of Seb. A band that I end up liking because they amuse me rather than one that has me rushing to buy the whole catalogue, though I may well nick a tune or two off their myspace. * The Wildhearts then - turns out they've been through about fifteen different line-ups now, and though I've seen them more times than that over the years, I've probably only seen about half of those line-ups, and I'm also not completely up to date quite who's the latest recruit to the revolving line-up. And if I had been paying attention I might have known to try and get a couple of pictures of new bassist Scott Sorry for the amusement value of the fact he has his surname tattooed in inch high letters across his throat. No, quite. It's a substantially more hits-based set than it might have been for a band with a shiny new album freshly released, and it's a cracker. I don't listen to them much from one gig to another these days, so it's really nice to be reminded what cracking rock-pop stormers songs like TV Tan and Vanilla Radio, Sick Of Drugs and I Wanna Go Where The People Go are. Scott Sorry fits in fine, Ritch being back on the drums makes a thunderous racket, and both CJ and Ginger look like they are entirely happy to be there, which bodes well for the tour being completed with this line-up at least, but nothing can be taken for granted with this bunch. And if this wasn't an extra super special show, I was particularly interested in messing about with the camera and reasonably pleased with the results, and the sensible curfew that saw me out and in the 24 hour supermarket at ten to eleven, and home just before midnight.

Labels: Ginger, The Wildhearts