First of a busy few nights, so I'd better get up to date before I'm weeks behind.
Somehow I missed Midway Still entirely back in the day, but I was reasonably impressed with them earlier this year so I wanted to see more of them this time. Sure enough, I got to the venue a quarter of an hour or so after doors to find they were already on and I'd missed a couple of songs. Melodic trio powerpop-punk is probably broadly the category they fit, it's roughly the sort of thing that has made Green Day into a major global name, but with better guitar solos! I've also added to my links becausemidwaystillaren'tcomingback which is an excellent name for a blog, even if briefly an inaccurate one. I should look a bit harder for some of their stuff really.
The Seers are a band I did see a very long time ago. In fact they were the first band I ever saw at a festival, just before The Wonder Stuff came on and changed my life. I remember The Seers as being perhaps not best suited to an afternoon outdoor slot, and they didn't really grab me. This time around, it's a one-off reform job, which Danny later says was Chris' condition for this gig happening, that he'd only do it if The Seers played. Spider tells us they did an hour and half of rehearsal the day before, and for that they turn in a remarkably tight set. If anything, they remind me of early Eat, and with the stage all his own Spider is rather an engaging frontman, even if the peroxide job makes him look rather like an albino Mick McCarthy.
In between chatting with some people I know and some I don't but who now know that Wolfsbane are back - more on that next week - the stage gets changed around a tiny bit, and then once again it's the Mega City Four tribute version show. In some ways, it's that chatting to people I don't see from one gig to the next and from one month to the next that's what it's all about. Danny mentions several times that keeping the people you care about close is the important thing about the gig, and indeed it's something of a theme in Wiz's songs too.
Now filling someone else's shoes, Spider is a bit less of A Presence on the stage, as Chris sings Finish, Danny sings Cradle and Gerry sings parts of Severe Attack Of The Truth. The full set is as follows: Who Cares, Awkward Kid, Props, Severe Attack Of The Truth, Finish, Iron Sky, Android Dreams, Peripheral, Messenger, Shivering Sand, Cradle, with a final encore flurry of Thanx and Miles Apart. On that note of people you don't see all that often, it turns out that the gig made a profit, which goes into Wiz's charity and Danny says that although he said in London that that would definitely be it, enough people had come out and maybe there would be another one-off show for the same reason this time next year. The nuts and bolts of how the set goes is perhaps less important than the event, but I'll have some barely lit stuff on youtube in due course.
As a wise man once said, if you've got the songs, then you've got the songs, and you can't argue with that. And while Wiz may be gone, his songs will always live on.
Labels: gigs, Mega City Four, Midway Still, The Seers
