| home |
I go in and take a look at the merch stall. Sadly the t-shirt designs are somewhat uninspired considering how good the album (and some of the single) artwork is. There are some bags, which have much better designs on, but they’re a bit pricey at £25 - especially considering that they have no zip to keep what you put in them secure - us Londoners have to watch for pickpockets you know. Kaito: this band is rather good, in a post punky sort of way. The second (male) guitarist seems to specialise in weird sound effect noises, and yelping (particularly in choruses). At certain times they remind me of a couple of other bands, but it’s not derivative enough for the names to obviously spring to mind. After a while all the songs do seem to be very similar, but a band to keep tabs on/investigate further. Yeah Yeah Yeah's: the drummer is good. Very good. I probably watch him most of all. He gets through at least 8 sticks during this show. Most of all even though just a trio (with loop accompaniment for two songs one of which is ‘Rich’) they manage that rare thing - to perform the songs while adding something so you don’t feel that you might just as well have stayed at home listening to the album. Karen O captures and holds the attention of the audience, possibly there is more screaming/screeching/use of her distinctive vocal style and so on than on the records, but mostly she cavorts around the stage like some mischievous goddess. Early on there is a feeding frenzy by photographers which the security has to calm down, but luckily no crowd surfing, which means from my vantage point near the back that I get a good view, and only miss seeing the occasional writhing on the stage (assuming that’s what’s going on). In one song Karen seemingly has an attempt at sex with the speaker stack. 'Bang' is well received by the audience, and rightly so. At one point Karen leaves the stage, but its not the end, it looks as if she may have left in order to be able to make another entrance. There is some banter with a dedication, names are mentioned, but I couldn’t say exactly what was said. At one point the audience gets the microphone (though they don’t make good use of it) while Karen takes a swig of some alcohol to spray back out at the audience – she does this a few times and I am glad I am not in the front. In fact, there is something about Karen O that makes me decide she is probably drunk, and also that rock stars are not necessarily nice people... however, we do get an encore in which Karen divides up her stole/prop - sadly no 'Black Tongue'. As I leave I hear someone say that he loves how Karen is obviously enjoying being up there, I suspect there are other female artistes who envy her current adulation Sapphire |