It’s been a hectic weekend. First it was Mostly Autumn at Bilston Robin 2 on Friday night, followed by two days at the Warley MRC exhibition at the NEC.
I stayed with an old friend, Dreamlyrics member HH, who had never seen MA live before, but evidently concluded that if I kept going on about how great they were, they can’t be all bad.
Bilston is either in the heart of the Black Country, or the arse end of Wolverhampton, depending on how you look at it (Rhyl, Bury and Crewe; they sure know the salubrious places to play). Once you get inside, the Robin 2 is actually quite a nice venue; a fair bit bigger than some other places I’ve seen them play.
This was quite a momentous gig; the first time they’d played material from the forthcoming new album “Heart Full of Sky” live, a warm-up for the showcase performance in York the following night. Having seen the band perform two almost identical setlists of oldies this year, I’m sure I wasn’t the only person eager to hear the new songs.
In fact, almost half the set was new, something like nine songs in total, interspersed with enough old favourites like ‘The Dark Before the Dawn’, ‘Evergreen’, ‘Carpe Diem’ and ‘Heroes Never Die’ to keep the fans happy. The band were all on pretty good form; Brian’s guitar and Heather’s vocals as great as ever; Heather has now added the triangle to her repertoire of instruments; is there no limit to her talents? Liam’s slide guitar was much more prominent on some of the new songs, and new boy Chris Johnson sang lead vocals for one song, adding yet another dimension to the sound.
The new songs will probably take a while to sink in, but first impressions are that they’re continuing further in the direction taken with ‘Passengers’ and ‘Storms’, rather than playing safe by retreading their past. Interesting that HH, who had never seen MA before, preferred the newer, more harder-edged songs to the oldies that got the big reactions from the fans.
I’m looking forward seeing them again in two weeks time at Crewe, on the 20th December.
Saturday saw me at the National Model Railway exhibition at the Birmingham NEC, organised by the Warley MRC. In some ways, this show is to model railways what GenCon is to RPGs. It’s part exhibition, part trade fair, and part general meetup of people with a common interest from all parts of the country, and beyond.
There were 40-odd layouts on display, varying from small highly detailed ones like the excellent ‘Hedges Hill Cutting’ (5’5′ x 2′, but with three pubs, all accurate models of real sarf London watering holes) to a couple of massive O gauge monsters. I don’t think the quality was quite up to the standards of some years; some very good layouts, but a fair few rather mediocre ones as well. Impressive ones were the US N gauge ‘Oceanside’, and the 2mm finescale ‘Wansbeck Road’.
On the trade side, when it comes to N gauge products, Dapol pretty much stole the show this year, with the launch of their Virgin Voyager, Ivatt 2MT 2-6-2T and Gresley coaches. Bachmann only had the EWS HTA bogie coal hopper on sale; although the pre-production versions of the class 57s look very nice, especially the Porterbrook ‘Purple Monster’ No 57601. Supposedly due out in January (in Bachmann time), I’ll be having one of those! Modern stock sold out fast; with both the Voyager and the HTA sold out from all traders by the end of the show.
The show is also the big annual meetup of the Ngauge and Ngauge-Modern mailing lists. Over the weekend I saw Grahame Hedges, Mat ‘Who ate all the Panniers’ Peacock, Nick Meredith, Stu from Swindon, Roechard Wibd, Bryn Davies, Ben Ando, Bernard Taylor and Robert Shrives among others. Dave Jones appeared on the Dapol stand; where did George Smith manage to find an XXXL purple shirt for him?
I didn’t spend quite as much money as on some years; although I did manage to get my hands on one of the last Dapol Voyagers on sale at the show.
