overlap

I've sat on this for a couple of weeks, in the hope it might come out in a slightly more fully formed manner. Being sat on a train and realising that I was coming into Waterloo for a gig for the first time in quite a few years was a brief reminder of my early trips to the big city, mostly to the old new Marquee on Charing Cross Road. The landmarks of the lego effect colourful blocks of flats and Battersea power station are still there, but the addition of a fair number of new buildings, and at least three CCTV cameras for every pigeon show how much has changed, and not necessarily for the better. 

As is becoming something of a routine, I headed out onto the South Bank, this time to visit an exhibition that a friend of mine had something in, wandered around taking clichéd tourist pictures (as you may have seen on flickr), knocked off a few light trail shots of the early evening rush hour along the Victoria Embankment, and ended up passing in the street a well known celeb with the initials TPT in Pimlico. Making the most of the opportunity to do stuff in London over and above go to the gig suits me and there's plenty of it to see, though it does sometimes mean getting to the gig already tiring after a couple of hours of brisk walking. It's a long way to go though, and the travel-pub-venue-home routine seems a bit restrictive to me, so if I can fit something else into the time, so much the better.

I only been to Brixton Academy a couple of times, the last being four years ago, so it's not one of those venues I'm especially familiar with. After their brief reformation in memory of Wiz, the full scale two-off Carter USM 90s revival extravaganza was much awaited in many quarters. And while I wouldn't have missed it, I went with slightly mixed feelings. Despite my concerns about getting inside on schedule to miss nothing, we made it with enough time to see Sultans of Ping deliver an all hits support set, and it was superb to be reminded what a great frontman Niall is.

As a flavour of the moment big band, in the early 90s Carter somewhat pre-dated Oasis when they moved into the multi-thousand capacity venues. One of my least favourite gig memories is of a venue that holds about three thousand, overfull of beered up lads in sweaty Fred Perry shirts, exercising their rights to barge into people. One of my more favourite memories is the last time I saw Carter in the olden days, at that point with a fully expanded line-up of six people, playing to little over seventy people in support of their fantastic but not commercially acclaimed album I Blame The Government.

Against this background, it's a little rich to say the least, when some obnoxious fat legend in nobody's lunchtime introduces them by slagging off another band of that generation, indeed the one I first saw Carter with, for still touring and sometimes playing to crowds in only three figures.

There are other places you can find two week old setlists posted on the web, and with a freshly minted greatest hits double CD in the shops, the content of the set was pretty much what you might expect. The Pet Shop Boys cover (Rent) was great, Fruity's drink-free regime had paid dividends, and Team Carter had obviously spent a lot of time, effort and money on the lights and the sound. Getting the visuals of the videos from those tracks which were singles on screens in the background was great fun, if something of a lightning trip through history, and there was nothing in almost two hours that felt obviously missing. To hear the songs Jim's been doing some of in his solo incarnation back in their fully souped up electrified glory was great, and for a brief period it was 1993 all over again.

And that may be precisely why for me there was something just slightly missing. Maybe it's that I've not been to enough gigs with thousands of people in a while, maybe my natural disinclination towards getting barged in the middle of huge crowds of people was set to a higher than normal level, and/or maybe my recollection of the over-exuberance of beered up lads in sweaty Fred Perry shirts was rather accurate and the passage of time hasn't been fully accompanied by people growing up. It doesn't suit me to stand in the middle at the front, where stagediving muppets can be expected, so I don't do it. Perhaps due to the one-off nature of Wiz's gig, and of course the very fact it was Wiz's gig, I think I enjoyed four songs of Carter there more than I did the two hours of Brixton.

An hour or so later, back in suburbia collecting my car from a commuter belt station where even the car park prices are eye-watering, it seemed like I've come a very long way since those days, and while change for the sake of it is really no change at all, I can't imagine wanting to go back.

// posted by uber @ 3:04 pm