Music Blog

My third gig in nine days at the half-finished building site of a venue known as Manchester Academy 1. This time I noticed the lack of a cloakroom all the more because it had been tipping down with rain all day, so I had to spend the gig clutching a wet coat. Oh well.

Support was an great 45 minute set from Liverpudlian rockers Anathema. They hit the stage so soon after the doors opened that I missed the very start of their set; they were in full flow with ‘Fragile Dreams’ by the time I’d got into the venue. A lot better than they were the last time they supported PT in 2005. The quite atmospheric new material from the forthcoming album “Angels Walk Amongst Us” sounded interesting, and the older material rocked hard.

On paper, Porcupine Tree don’t seem to have the ingredients for a great live band. They don’t interact with the audience much, Steve Wilson is hardly the worlds greatest frontman, and their songs don’t turn into singalongs. But if they weren’t any good I would not have been seeing them for the fifth time in three years. PT gigs are all about the music rather than the band; they’re all great musicians. Steve Wilson has claimed in interviews he’s not a virtuoso guitarist, but with the fluid solos he reels off, who does he think he’s kidding? Colin Edwin and Gavin Harrison have to be one of the tightest rhythm sections I’ve heard this year; in the best tradition of prog-rock a lot of their music is in complex time signatures, which they play flawlessly. Richard Barbieri on keys and John Wesley on second guitar and backing vocals might not take much of the limelight, but they make a big contribution to the rich multi-layered sound.

The sound mix was an order of magnitude better than it had been for Within Temptation nine days before; it was very loud, possibly one of my loudest gigs of the year, but this time there was no muddy bottom end; we had good separation with every instrument heard clearly, especially the drums. The set still drew heavily from this year’s superb “Fear of a Blank Planet”, with much of the rest from “Deadwing” and “In Absentia”. But they also found space for a couple of real oldies, “Dark Matter” and “The Sky Moves Sideways”, and some material from their new EP, “Nil Recurring”. Highlights were many; the epic “Anaethetise”, a brutally heavy version of “Sleep Together”, the Zeppelinesque riffing of “Blackest Eyes”, and a great version of “Trains”.

They promised to be back next year with more brand new material. I’ll be there!

This is the first time I’ve seen any of the current wave of European ‘Lady Metal’ bands live. I’ve bought my ticket months ago, which was just as well, since the show had completely sold out a considerable time in advance, with a queue stretching back to Academy 2 an hour before the doors opened.. Earlier at Piccadilly Station on the way in I spotted two teenaged girls wearing Within Temptation T-shirts, which made me worried that I’d be the oldest person there. But the long snaking queues outside the venue contained a trememdous mix of ages from teenaged Goths to middle-aged rockers like myself.

Manchester Academy 1, closed for much of the year, still has the builders in. They’ve now got a stage, a roof and a bar, but the place is still lacking things like toilets, cloakrooms and a proper entrance foyer. We had to enter the building through what will eventually become one of the fire exits, and brave the elements to use the festival-style portakabin toilets outside. One inside, it was a little disorientating to find that they’ve turned things through 90 degrees, with the stage on what had been the left-hand wall, and the bar where the stage used to be.

The support band 69 Eyes didn’t impress a lot, I’m afraid to say. They’re one of those bands who seem to put more effort into image than music; a sort of Ramones-meets Alice Cooper glam-punk look, with one of the guitarists sporting a mohican from circa 1978. The music was pretty forgettable generic metal, with irritating programmed keyboards. Get a real keyboard player, guys!

At 9:10pm they rolled the intro tape, the imaginatively-titled “Intro”, and Within Temptation strode on stage, with Sharon den Adel making a dramatic entrance last of all, wearing an elaborate bright red ballgown.

For the uninitiated, Within Temptation sound a but like the missing link between Enya and Rammstein. Instrumentally they’ve got the symphonic keyboards and crunching metal guitars making a huge wall of sound. On top of that is Sharon den Adel’s remarkable voice and she demonstrates the same range and power on stage as she does in the studio. They can certainly cut it live most of the time, although things faltered a little bit during the single “What Have You Done”, which doesn’t really work live without the guest vocalist Keith Caputo who appeared on the record. Showing a video of him (at least I assume it was him) on the back projection screen seemed just a little bit jarring.

Much of the set, not far short of two hours, came from their two most recent albums, “The Silent Force” and “The Heart of Everything”, with a few older songs I didn’t recognise towards the end. Perhaps their biggest weakess is a lack of variety; many of the songs fall into a similar pattern, very strong melodies with big sweeping choruses,no real guitar solos, but requently a middle eight where the guitars drop out leaving Sharon’s vocals accompanied just by keyboards. In many ways she uses her voice as the lead instrument in the band.

The only real complaint was the mediocre sound mix. While not quite bad enough to ruin the gig, I’ve been to this venue many times when the sound has been an awful lot better than this. Sharon den Adel’s vocals came though clearly enough, as did the keyboards, but the bottom end frequently turned into a mush, with little separation between the guitars, bass and drums. I may just have been at the wrong place, two thirds of the way back, with echoes from the back wall muddying things. Or it may just be that they’re still in the learning curve for the acoustics of this venue.

Still a very good gig, which only suffered in comparison with some of the truly great ones I’ve been to this year.

It’s been a long time. The last time I saw Twelfth Night was the 1983 Reading Festival, when they were the opening act on the Sunday, and the late Geoff Mann was the singer.

I wrote a potted history of the band a few years back on this site. At the time, it looked as though the story was over. Since then, continued interest in their music has seen their entire back catalogue reissued and remastered on CD. And finally the band themselves have come out of retirement and taken the stage once more.

The Albany Theatre is not your typical rock venue; the circular venue looked like a cross between the Globe Theatre and a miniature version of The Roundhouse, and is more used to theatrical productions than rock shows. There was an air of anticipation as we waited for the band to hit the stage; what would they be like after all those years?

The opener “The Ceiling Speaks” dispelled any doubts over whether or not they could cut it live. This was actually the first time I’d ever seen Andy Sears fronting the band, and he cut a compelling figure, both a charismatic frontman and a strong voice. I was impressed with the way he interpreted Geoff Mann’s material; he made the songs his own while keeping to the spirit of the originals; not an easy thing to pull off.

The setlist had everything you could want. The first half ranged through the highlights of their career, from the instrumental “Afghan Red” to their last ever recorded song “Blondon Fair”. For the second half, they played the whole of the “Fact and Fiction” album.

High spots were many; a spine-tingling “First New Day” played solo by Andy Sears on piano, really powerful versions of “Sequences” and “Creepshow”, and an emotional final encore of “Love Song”.

It was also one of the most enthusiastic audiences I’ve seen all year (Who says London audiences are jaded and cynical?). Who would have thought complex prog epics such as “We Are Sane” would turn into singalongs? This made for an incredible atmosphere, and made it one of those gigs that will be remembered for a long time.