I’ve been writing live reviews as far back as I’ve been writing about music – indeed my very first was covering downset. for ROAR (the King’s College London Student Newspaper) back in Autumn 1996.
The live reviews here go back to about 2003, and while most were first posted here, some others appeared in the (short-lived) Alternative Magazine, others on Black Harvest, Connexion Bizarre and even once on the BBC website. This archive is every live review I’ve written between 2003 and the present day.
The title of this section comes from a track on Testament’s album The New Order.
There are few bands that could justifiably claim that as they pass thirty years of existence as an active and still-recording unit, they remain a source of reference and perhaps reverence to many music-lovers and indeed other artists. One band that certainly can is Einstürzende Neubauten, whose second stop on their “30th Anniversary tour” was […]
I think it took until the dawn of this year’s Infest until I realised just how much I missed the festival in its year off last year. All it took was a few minutes of being back in (nearly) familiar surroundings, of which more in a moment, with various familiar faces of friends new and […]
I did wonder whether my evening was going to be cursed, after the heavens opened in biblical fashion while standing in the queue, with nowhere to shelter from the pouring rain. And then there was the poorly organised queue, with a lengthy wait to collect tickets that had been pre-booked. Surely, with all the technology […]
I’ve recently been raving about Concrete Lung‘s debut EP (my 9/10 review here), so I have been keen to see them live to see how it translates in the live arena. Happily, the answer is resoundingly positive.
Long-lived bands in industrial music are nothing unusual – it sometimes feels like few of the big names in the genre have ever really gone away since the 80s – but to have a band still sounding as vital as Skinny Puppy frequently do is a rare thing indeed. This was the third time I’ve […]
My girlfriend and I didn’t manage to get tickets, so we were resigned to listening from our balcony, just the other side of the railway line from the park. The warm and still Saturday evening had meant we could hear the RATM soundcheck in perfect clarity, but on Sunday sadly the wind was blowing the […]
The queue to get in was big, they opened the doors late, and as we were a bit of a way down the queue, we missed most of the first act Bitter Ruin, who were a theatrical male-female duo who were both vocalists, with he also playing acoustic guitar, and she danced a bit too. […]
I’ve at least started heading to gigs in 2010 rather earlier than I did last year, and I picked a good one to start with, too: Rammstein at Wembley Arena. I’ve never been to Wembley Arena before, and I’d not heard a lot to recommend it, either, with many stories of atrocious sound. Of course, […]
2009 has been an amazing year for gigs (how I’m going to pick a best of some of them, I have no idea), and having already seen a shorter, festival length set from Alice In Chains at Sonisphere in the summer, I had a good idea of just how good this was going to be. […]
I’ve been wanting to hear more of Amnistia since I first heard them on a compilation (Advanced Electronics Vol.6, in fact), after a friend pointed me in the direction of it, suggesting that it might be just the kind of thing I’d like.
Back from Whitby for two days – where the sum total of live bands I saw was zero – and off to the first gig of what could be a busy November.
This year’s variant was in the same location as last year’s very busy one, but with some much-needed changes to the way things were run. The good news, for a start, was that the stage times over the main two stages were at least partly staggered so that not everything clashed, and with a reduced […]
It was of course the return of VNV Nation to the venue, and a big, big crowd – it can’t have been far from selling out – as there always seems to be whenever they come to ‘town.
I’d never even set foot in the Royal Festival Hall before, so I was most impressed with it’s spacious layout, and even during the very, very varied “support” DJ set from Ashley Wales of Spring Heel Jack the sound was impressive.
Yet another gig which was running horrendously late from the start. We didn’t see the whole set of any of the support acts – our need for food in particular saw to that. But then, some of the supports tried our patience somewhat, too.
Last night took me to a small, back-of-a-pub gig for the first time in a long, long time. Those nice folk at Drowned In Sound have been running a small handful of “DiScover” gigs at The Harley in Sheffield’s university district over the past year or so, and this gig on the latest DiScover tour […]
After a night DJing at Autonomy, my girlfriend couldn’t make the next day, so one of my best friends joined me to head south to Sonisphere instead. I’d declined the recently-won tickets earlier in the week, but much to my surprise they arrived on the Saturday, and the decision was taken that we should go […]
The early start – doors at 1800 – meant that Leech Woman played to a half-empty room, which was a damned shame seeing as this was billed as their last gig in the UK for some time – main man Alex is moving abroad. There was no room for sentiment, though, as LW roared through […]
It took bloody ages to get there – two hours from Sheffield to Manchester, via Woodhead, thanks to Snake being closed and awful traffic in Manchester city centre, and I managed my first longer distance drive without any problems – but last night’s gig was worth every single minute and then some.
Last night’s Gothminister and Das Ich gig was pretty strange. The turnout wasn’t too bad, although as always the small room at Corp got uncomfortably warm over the course of the gig.
