Manic Street Preachers – Blood and Porridge

October 10, 2024October 10, 2024

A bash with Ash

The passage of time is a strange and frightening thing. When they first got airplay on Britain’s Radio 1, the three members of the indie-pop-punk-rock band Ash were still at school in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland. At that point the combined ages of their three members, vocalist and guitarist Tim Wheeler, bassist Mark Hamilton and drummer Rick McMurray, must have added up to a number in the low 50s, similar to (perhaps less than) the average age of a member of the Rolling Stones back then. In other words, they seemed stupendously young to me.

So, it was a shock when I went to see Ash perform at Singapore’s Hard Rock Café last Friday night and discovered that suddenly all three are now well into their 40s. How did that happen? Surely, it was only a few months ago that I bought their first album after reading a good review of it in Q magazine?

But actually, that was back in 1996. Where does the time go?

I think it was also in the now-defunct Q magazine, in the 1990s, that I read how Ash were rumoured to be the favourite band of a young Prince William. Well, it has to be said that Ash in 2024 have weathered the years rather better than their royal fan, who these days is first in line to the throne. Unlike the follicly-challenged Prince William, Wheeler and Hamilton still have full heads of hair – although, suspiciously, McMurray sported a baseball cap throughout the gig.

The many Western expats present in tonight’s audience looked of a similar vintage to Ash and Prince William — teenagers back in the 1990s but now middle-aged. Incidentally, the crowd also contained a fair sprinkling of Singaporeans. From what I can gather, this was Ash’s fourth visit to the city-state, so they’d evidently acquired a few local fans too.

Tonight was the first time I’d attended a gig in the Hard Rock Café. I’m not a fan of this particular dining franchise, though I have to admit they did a good job of transforming it from a restaurant to a concert venue – a venue with an old-fashioned ‘small, sweaty club’ vibe, which was especially welcome in Singapore, where too often you have to watch bands in sedate, sit-down establishments, stuck among endless rows of seats, unable to move about and shake a leg. The café could have done with a higher stage, however. I felt sorry for the shorter Ash fans. Jammed behind taller folk, probably all they could see of the band were the tops of Wheeler and Hamilton’s still-hirsute heads.

One other feature of the Hard Rock Café I wasn’t thrilled by was its bar prices. A small glass of Carlsberg beer cost 14 dollars, which meant you’d be paying in the region of 30 dollars for something approximating a pint, a costly sum even by Singapore’s standards. Presumably because the café wanted to do some normal Friday-evening business beforehand, Ash didn’t come onstage until ten o’clock, with the doors opening for the gig at nine. I arrived shortly after nine, saw the prices, popped out again and headed along the street to the craft-brewery bar-and-restaurant Brewerkz, where a pint cost me a slightly less eye-watering 23 dollars.

When I returned to the café just before ten, it was mobbed. Since I wouldn’t see much of the band from the back, where the bar was, I decided to forego further boozing, burrowed my way through the crowd, secured myself a spot about two yards from the barrier before the stage, and stayed there for the show’s duration. Even there, my view wasn’t perfect – I saw Wheeler and Hamilton’s upper halves, though they often vanished when excitable people in front of me waved their arms in the air, and I needed to stand on tiptoe to see McMurray at his drumkit.

And mounted on the wall above my head was an example of the rock-and-roll memorabilia that famously decorates the Hard Rock Café franchise all over the world. This was the drumkit of Rob Blotzer, drummer with the 1980s hair metal band RATT. I’d completely forgotten about the dreadful, poodle-headed RATT until I saw that drumkit. But now I remember them again. Thanks for that, Hard Rock Café.

The omens were not good when Ash began the gig. Firstly, a forest of hands shot up around me, clutching smartphones, all filming, and I had a sickening premonition of being surrounded by dozens of tiny glowing screens, each showing a tiny glowing image of the band, for the next hour-and-a-half. Secondly, it quickly became obvious that there were sound problems, with Wheeler’s vocals almost buried by the noise of Hamilton’s bass. Thankfully, most of the phones were soon lowered again – the crowd had just wanted some footage of their heroes coming onstage – and, a few songs in, the sound-mix became more balanced.

And what followed was very enjoyable. The crowd, at least where I was, had fun and Ash looked like they were having a good time too. Unlike a number of bands I’ve seen at gigs in various parts of the world, this band gave the impression that they knew, and appreciated, where they were. For example, at one point, McMurray told the audience a funny anecdote from the previous time they’d played Singapore.

Also, due to the fact that I was standing near one of the main speakers, I was left partially deaf for the next 24 hours. Which was a pain in the arse at work the next day, but surely a sign that I’d been to a good gig.

The 40-something Ash fans in attendance must have found it a nostalgic treat, because half of the 18-song setlist came off the two hit albums of their early years, 1977 (1996) and Free All Angels (2001). These songs included Angel Interceptor, Goldfinger and Girl from Mars from the former and Shining Light, Burn Baby Burn and Sometimes from the latter. Oh, and the famously Jackie Chan-referencing Kung Fu from 1977 got an airing too. (I’m sure Ash were delighted when Kung Fu actually got used in a Jackie Chan movie, playing during the bloopers reel at the end of 1995’s Rumble in the Bronx.) To give proceedings a slightly more up-to-date feel, they also played three tracks from their most recent album, 2023’s Race the Night. When, between songs, Wheeler mentioned the album they’d ‘recorded last year’, an Ash fan behind me remarked in a loud and serious voice: “Surprisingly good!” So maybe I should check it out.

Alas, the Ash album I like best – the guitar-heavy Nu-clear Sounds (1998), which was released between 1977 and Free All Angels, got a mixed reception from the critics and had disappointing sales – was represented by just one song tonight, Wildsurf. I would have loved to hear them play more songs off it, especially the singles Jesus Says and Numbskull, which I think are cracking tunes. The same thing happened last November when I went to see the Manic Street Preachers (they played only one song from my favourite Manics album, 1993’s Gold Against the Soul) and Suede (ditto for my favourite Suede album, 1994’s Dog Man Star). Maybe this is a quaint Singaporean curse I’ve fallen victim to.

May 13, 2024May 18, 2024

My favourite gigs

© Chrysalis

My previous blog-post was about seeing Deep Purple live in concert. This was the most recent of many gigs I’ve been to. Indeed, by my calculations, I’ve seen about 160 musical acts perform live, starting with veteran Scottish hard rock / heavy metal group Nazareth, whom I saw in Aberdeen in 1984.

Anyway, this has got me thinking about the best gigs I’ve ever been to. Here are my favourite eight.

The Proclaimers – Aberdeen Ritzy, 1987

I didn’t know what to expect when some mates got me along to a concert by Craig and Charlie Reid, better known as Scottish folk-pop duo the Proclaimers. I liked the Reids – their hit song that year, the politically charged Letter from America, was already becoming Scotland’s great anti-Maggie-Thatcher anthem – but I had no idea what they’d be like live. Also, they were performing at Aberdeen Ritzy, a place I had an aversion to because I’d once worked there as a member of the floor-staff and it was the least enjoyable job I’d ever had.

I had no reason to be apprehensive. The gig felt like a giant, joyous football match where the entire crowd supported the same team and that team was winning 10-0. I suspect one reason why the Proclaimers went down so well that night was because the Aberdonian audience could relate to their song Throw the R Away, which is about the frustrations caused when standard English-speakers can’t understand your accent. Which is a common hazard if you speak Aberdonian.

The Jesus and Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr, My Bloody Valentine, Blur – the Rollercoaster Tour, London Brixton Academy, 1992

From Craig and Charlie Reid to two more Scottish siblings called Reid. These were Jim and William Reid of the feedback-drenched East Kilbride noise-niks the Jesus and Mary Chain. Their Rollercoaster Tour date at Brixton Academy in 1992 offered not only excellent support from American alternative rockers Dinosaur Jr and dreamy, swirly shoegazers My Bloody Valentine, but also a chance to sample a young, up-and-coming band called Blur. Though my reaction when I saw Damon Albarn onstage wasn’t that he was destined to be an icon of the future Britpop movement but that he resembled a very young, musical version of Norman Wisdom.

© Blanco y Negro

Meanwhile, the headliners blew me away. Promoting their recent album Honey’s Dead (1992), which was packed with behemoth tunes like Reverence and Sugar Ray, the Jesus and Mary Chain performed in silhouette against a giant blood-red backdrop. This made them look like the imperious Masters of the Universe.

The Manic Street Preachers – Sapporo Penny Lane, 1993

Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers were promoting their album Gold Against the Soul when they turned up in the Japanese city of Sapporo, at whose Hokkai-Gakuen University I worked at the time as a lecturer. Though in Britain they were seen as having a punk edge, the Japanese took their fondness for glam clothes and eyeliner as meaning they were another Guns n’ Roses. Thus, their gig at Sapporo’s Penny Lane drew a lot of Japanese girls wearing silk scarves and floppy hats, who kept squealing “Rich-ee!” at the Manics’ guitarist, Richey Edwards. The gig was both excellent and dramatic – the drama coming when the highly-strung Edwards freaked out about an illuminated fire-exit sign at the other end of the auditorium that he claimed was putting him off his performance.

Since then, that gig has haunted me in two ways. Firstly, around the same time, I bought the Japanese edition of Gold Against the Soul. Years later, long after Edwards’ tragic and never-explained disappearance in 1995, I listened to it again and discovered the CD case contained a second tray that I hadn’t noticed before. In it was a bonus CD, a live one of them performing in Japan. When I played it, I felt poignantly transported back in time – for there, in the crowd, were those Japanese girls shouting “Rich-ee!” again at poor, doomed Richey Edwards.

From wikipedia.org / © Masao Nakagami

Secondly, when I saw the Manic Street Preachers again last year, in Singapore, they played a new song called Still Snowing in Sapporo, which I learned was inspired by that long-ago gig in 1993. How weird, I thought, to be in the audience listening to them playing a song about a concert 30 years earlier… knowing I was were probably the only person in the audience who was at that concert.

The Beastie Boys – Sapporo Jasmac Plaza, 1995

I almost didn’t attend this gig, which also took place while I worked at Sapporo’s Hokkai-Gakuen University. The show was due to begin at 7.00 PM – concerts in Japan tended to start when the tickets said they would – and the same evening I had to give a late lecture until 7.20 PM. Plus I calculated that by the time I got from the university campus to the venue, the Jasmac Plaza, the Beastie Boys would already be an hour into their gig. It didn’t seem worth it.

However, a few weeks before the concert, it was announced that work had been completed on a new Sapporo subway line, which had a station called Gakuen-Mae directly below the campus where I was working. I also discovered that the next station along the new line, Hosui-Suskino, had an exit that was only a block from the Jasmac Plaza. And a subway train left for Hosui-Susukino from Gakuen-Mae every evening at 7.30. I figured that if I caught the 7.30 train, and moved very fast, I could be at the concert hall in the Jasmac Plaza ten minutes later – hopefully not yet halfway through the Beastie Boys’ set. Fate seemed to be urging me to buy a ticket, so I did.

That evening, I finished my lecture on the stroke of 7.20, ran like hell for the subway station and charged down what seemed like half-a-dozen escalators, descending deeper and deeper into the earth. The train was already at the platform and I ran and jumped through its about-to-close carriage doors. At Hosui-Susukino, I sprang out of the train, ran up more escalators, ran along a city block into the Jasmac Plaza and up several staircases to its fourth floor, where the concert hall was. Live music blasted out of speakers above me. I dashed into the hall, gasping for breath, my university lecturer’s suit, shirt and tie soaked in sweat… And I discovered that the Beastie Boys weren’t on stage at all. What I was hearing was a support act that hadn’t been mentioned on the bloody ticket. The Beasties didn’t appear until forty minutes later.

After that, it needed to be a superb gig to justify all the hassle and indignity I’d suffered. Which, thankfully, it was.

© Mute

Nick Cave – Edinburgh Princes Street Gardens, 1999

During the 1999 Edinburgh Festival, goth-rock troubadour Nick Cave – without his band the Bad Seeds – performed in Edinburgh’s Princess Street Gardens, which meant he had the craggy Edinburgh Castle rock, crowned by the battlements of the castle itself, as a spectacular backdrop. But there was a problem. Taking place in the castle was the Edinburgh Tattoo, that celebration of tartan-swathed, bagpipe-wailing Scottish military kitsch held every August; and the Tattoo organisers were not happy about having to compete against a concert below in the Gardens. Indeed, a few evenings earlier, the Gardens had hosted the psychedelic / space-rock outfit Spiritualised and their percussive beats had caused the Lone Piper – the bagpiper who appears on the ramparts at the Tattoo’s finale to play the lament Sleep Dearie Sleep – to lose concentration and mess up the tune. This evening, to placate the Tattoo, Cave wasn’t allowed to start playing until it had finished, meaning the audience turned up at the time specified on the tickets but then had to wait an hour. To keep us entertained, some local performance-poets were brought onstage, including the late, lamented Paul Reekie.

One consequence of this was that when Cave finally did come on, the end-of-Tattoo firework display was erupting above the castle. Talk about a spectacular entrance. And the ensuing gig was worth the long wait. The songs, mostly stripped-down versions of stuff from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call and 1996’s Murder Ballads, were wonderfully enhanced by the gothic surroundings – the rock, the castle and finally a gorgeous full moon ascending into the starry Edinburgh sky.

The Waterboys – Newcastle, Tyne Theatre and Opera House, 2003

In the mid-1980s, there was a considerable buzz about the Waterboys, who were expected to go stratospheric and join U2 and Simple Minds as one of the big Celtic rock bands of the era. Instead, under the leadership of Edinburgh man Mike Scott, they decamped to Ireland, became a folk band for a while, and rock superstardom never arrived. I actually preferred their folky stuff (like 1988’s When Ye Go Away) to their rather bloated rock stuff (like 1985’s The Whole of the Moon).

For this 2003 gig in Newcastle, the band did an hour of gentle, melodic music, kicking off with a version of the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses, which Scott decided to play because he’d “had it in his head all day,” There was an interval during which the Geordie crowd enjoyed a pint or four in the Opera House bar. And then it was back into the auditorium for a second hour of up-tempo rock music. The relaxed and nothing-more-to-prove Scott clearly wanted to have a good time and wanted to give his audience a good time too – which he did, in spades.

© Geffen Records

Alabama 3 – Newcastle, University of Northumbria, 2005

This was the best blues / country / techno / electronica / indie / trip-hop / acid-jazz gig I’ve seen, courtesy of the best (and possibly only) band in the world whose music ticks all those boxes, the Alabama 3. They’re not from Alabama, but from South London. Also, there’s eight or nine of them rather than three. With so many band-members onstage, and such a stew of different sounds, this gig at the University of Northumbria was inevitably a bit of a shambles – but what a glorious shambles. Their track Woke Up This Morning, which at the time served as the opening theme for The Sopranos (1999-2007), was particularly epic.

Primal Scream – Norwich UEA, 2009

I wasn’t expecting a great deal in 2009 when the Bobby Gillespie-fronted alternative rock band Primal Scream turned up at the University of East Anglia, where I was in the middle of doing a full-time MA. Feeling creaky and long in the tooth by then, I assumed my best gig-going days were behind me. I was too old for the mosh-pit, for jumping around and getting into the exuberant spirit of things. Meanwhile, I’d seen Primal Scream a few times before and found them a bit hit-and-miss.

But I ended up really, really enjoying myself. I managed to snag a position right at the edge of the stage, giving me a perfect view. And Gillespie and the gang were in blistering form. Primal Scream concerts can feel schizophrenic because their music veers between harsh, experimental electronica (like 2000’s Kill All Hippies) and loose-limbed, traditional Rolling Stones-style rock ‘n’ roll (like 1994’s Jailbird), but here it didn’t matter. They just alternated. They’d do one hardcore electronica number (accompanied by a brain-frying lightshow), followed by a Stonesy number, then another electronica one, then another Stonesy one, and so on. Somehow, tonight, it worked brilliantly.

From wikipedia.org / © Phil Guest

November 29, 2023November 30, 2023

The per-Suede-er

At first glance, the pairing of the Manic Street Preachers and Suede at the concert I attended at Singapore’s Star Theatre on November 22nd seemed the musical equivalent of Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple (1965). Famous for their left-wing politics, the Manics got together as a band while they were at a comprehensive school in south Wales and they’ve forged a sound described by their Wikipedia page as variously ‘alternative’, ‘hard’, ‘punk’ and ‘glam’ rock. The founders of Suede, on the other hand, put their band together while they were at University College London. They were influenced by David Bowie and Roxy Music and their Wikipedia page describes their music with, among other things, the dreaded term ‘arthouse rock’.

Yes, as a former London university-student, Brett Anderson, Suede’s singer, lyricist and general lynchpin, seemed to me far removed from James Dean Bradfield and the other working-class Welsh lads in the Manic Street Preachers. Which is unfair of me, as Anderson is actually the son of a taxi-driver. (Maybe the name ‘Brett’ makes me biased. The only other Brett I can think of is Lord Brett Sinclair, the posh playboy aristocrat played by Roger Moore in that dreadful / brilliant old TV show from 1972, The Persuaders.)

Still, in certain ways, the two bands are similar. Both achieved success in the early 1990s, shortly before the advent of the Britpop movement that briefly set the world – or, at least, set those excitable hacks in the English media – on fire. And instead of worshipping 1960s outfits like the Beatles and the Kinks, like the Britpop musicians did, the Manics and Suede were inspired by other things, such as the aforementioned punk rock and David Bowie.

Anyway, having experienced the Manics on the evening of the 22^nd, I then sat through an hour-and-a-half of Suede. And I was surprised. I’d never seen the band before and I’d assumed that Brett Anderson was a cerebral, aesthetic type, not given to extroversion. At least, that was the impression I’d got from interviews with him I’d read. (I also seem to remember reading an interview that he’d conducted once, with one of his heroes, Brian Eno.) So, I didn’t expect him to be the showman that he was tonight. He strutted around, dropped dramatically onto his knees, perched himself on top of the front stage lights, and a couple of times descended into the stalls, where he prowled between the stage and the barrier holding back the audience. He even went behind the barrier and into the audience. He was a pretty belligerent in his showmanship too, constantly getting the crowd going, goading them to sing along and clap their hands. This was Freddie Mercury with attitude.

The set-list was weighted with songs from their eponymous first album, released in 1993, and their most recent album, 2022’s Autofiction, which between them accounted for more than half the numbers played. Autofiction has been described as a ‘back-to-basics triumph’ and its songs slotted in seamlessly with the jagged, urgent sound of early 1990s classics like Animal Nitrate, Metal Mickey and So Young. Since Anderson is now in his fifties, with So Young he must be starting to feel like the Who’s Roger Daltrey every time he sings the ‘Hope I die before I get old’ line from 1965’s My Generation.

I was slightly disappointed that almost nothing was featured from 1994’s Dog Man Star, Suede’s second album, which is my favourite thing among their output. Mind you, the one item from Dog Man Star that was played, The Wild Ones, was certainly memorable. Anderson performed it by himself, on acoustic guitar, and made it even more memorable by preceding it with a rant at certain members of the audience who were filming the show on their phones. He pleaded: “It’s so much better if you could possibly put your phones down… Put your f**king phones down. If you want to film, go to the back. Don’t take up space out here. These people want to have fun. If you want to stare at you f**king phone, go to the f**king back. Am I right…? It just kills the gig.”

Being at the rear end, and at the very top, of the auditorium – from where the theatre’s lower level had looked so densely flecked with dots of phone-light that I sometimes felt I was flying over a city at night-time – I hadn’t been able to see precisely what Anderson was doing during his forays into the stalls. However, according to the following day’s report in the Straits Times newspaper, he’d “tussled with a front-row male audience member, demanding that he put down his device” and “leapt over the barricade… confronted those in the front section of the venue who were busy filming him… started pushing fans’ hands down, grabbing phones off them, and putting them on the floor.”

Well, good on Brett Anderson, I say. These days at concerts there seems to exist a great divide. On one side of it are folk who simply want to experience and lose themselves in the live-music performance. On the other side are numpties with one arm permanently hoicked up in the air, with a hand clutching the latest slab of technology from Motorola, Sony, Apple or Nokia, with eyes fastened on a tiny screen where tinier figures move around on a stage, with a mind focused only on getting the clips despatched to social-media platforms as swiftly as possible to show off to their ‘followers’. I know which side of that gulf I’m on. The other side can just f**k off into the sea.

Anyway, that piece of drama merely added to the emotionality and intensity of the Suede experience. The band produced a glorious clangour of noise that, thanks to the Star Theatre’s excellent acoustics, reached me and rattled me even at the very back of the venue. I still had ghostly reverberations from Animal Nitrate in my ears while I travelled home on the Singapore MRT.

This being my first-ever Suede concert, and not having heard their music for many years, I hadn’t known what to expect during the second leg of tonight’s show. But yes, I ended up per-Suede-ed.

November 27, 2023November 27, 2023

Old against the soul

One week before November 22^nd, the evening I went to see Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers perform at Singapore’s Star Theatre, I read John Niven’s satirical 2018 novel Kill ‘Em All.

Kill ‘Em All is a sequel to Niven’s Kill Your Friends, written a decade earlier. It continues the adventures of Steven Stelfox, a record-company A&R agent so devoid of things like conscience, empathy or decency, and so determined to climb the corporate ladder and make pots of money, that he’ll countenance doing anything, murder included. In Kill ‘Em All, Stelfox has become a millionaire through helming a hit reality TV show called American Pop Star – I wonder if Niven had a real person in mind when he constructed that scenario? – and the immoral, money-grasping monster has taken to the late 2010s, the era of President Donald Trump, like the proverbial pig to shit. He’s particularly enamoured with the phenomena of fake news, online conspiracy theories, social-media rabbit-holes, and bot-farm-generated misinformation and propaganda, which the Trump presidency elevated to a new level. At one point, referencing the title of the Manic Street Preachers’ 1998 album, he sneers: “This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, those Welsh socialist miner f**ks sang, way back in the day, before all of this happened. Nowadays? This Is My Lie Prove Me Wrong.”

That wasn’t the only coincidence I experienced with the November 22^nd show. I’ll explain the other coincidence later.

Anyway, the backdrop for the Manic Street Preachers’ gig in the plush, sweeping amphitheatre of the Star Theatre seemed in defiance of Stellfox and the rapacious, corporate world he represents. It was a reproduction of the cover for their 2011 compilation album National Treasures – the Complete Singles, depicting a girl clutching a French horn, clad in a brass-band uniform (presumably a colliery band) and standing in front of a pithead (presumably a Welsh one). Reassuringly, this suggested the Manics – who in 2000 released a single called The Masses against the Classes (2000), which begins with a quote by Noam Chomsky and has the Cuban flag on its sleeve – remained proud ‘Welsh socialist miner f**ks’.

© Columbia

Nonetheless, I felt apprehensive about what lay ahead of me. I’d only seen the band once before, in 1993, when they were promoting their album Gold Against the Soul. They turned up in the Japanese city of Sapporo, where I’d recently started a job, and delivered one of the most memorable live-music shows I’d ever attended. It was also rather odd. In Britain they might have had a reputation for being radical, shit-stirring retro-punks, but in Japan they were seen as a sort of Guns n’ Roses-lite, possibly thanks to their predilection for wearing eye-liner and slightly glam clothes. Accordingly, their gig at Sapporo’s Penny Lane attracted a squad of young Japanese ladies dressed in floppy hats and silk scarves who spent their time squealing ‘Rich-ee!’ at the band’s iconic but troubled guitarist, Richey Edwards. Tragically, Edwards was to disappear, and never be seen again, two years later.

That 1993 gig was emblematic for me. The young Manic Street Preachers had throbbed onstage with a brash, youthful energy that mirrored how I felt too at the time – I was young, full of beans, ready to take on the world. And later, looking back, the memory of it made me feel a little melancholic in a wistful, where-did-my-youth-go? sort of way. This was emphasised by something that happened a decade afterwards. I listened to my copy of Gold Against the Soul, which I’d bought in Japan, for the first time in ages. It was only then that I discovered the bulky CD case contained a second tray I hadn’t noticed before. This tray held a second, bonus CD – a live one of them performing during their 1993 Japan tour. I played it and immediately felt a nostalgic sadness, for in the crowd I could hear those ladies shouting “Rich-ee!” again at the Manics’ now-vanished guitarist. It wasn’t so much a CD as a time capsule.

So, how would the band strike me in 2023, now that they and I were well into our middle-age? And in the Star Theatre, a venue that seemed the antithesis of the small, intimate and cheerfully dingy place that Penny Lane had been? (One major point of difference between them was the purchasing of alcohol. In Penny Lane you got tins of Sapporo beer out of a cheapish vending machine at the back of the little auditorium. At the Star, where your bags were painstakingly checked before you entered the premises to ensure you weren’t bringing in any food or drink – not even water – you joined a long queue for the privilege of buying a pint of beer for 24 Singaporean dollars, which is about 14 British pounds. Phew. Steven Stelfox could have been running the catering.)

But enough of the brooding introspection. The Manics came onstage just after half-past-seven and launched into Motorcycle Emptiness, from their first album, Generation Terrorists (1992). And undeniably, they sounded good. They didn’t show the raw, sometimes-nervous, sometimes-ragged energy that they’d shown in 1993, but played with the confidence and professionalism you’d expect from an outfit who’ve been together for more than three decades.

Yet it wasn’t the slick, on-autopilot, by-the-numbers performance of a jaded old rock band. The Manics retained their pleasing idiosyncrasies of old. Sporting a white dress-jacket and (for a bloke his age) an astonishingly skinny pair of jeans, tall, gangling bassist Nicky Wire still looked like he’d been assembled out of pipe cleaners – and still ambled about like a man with a new pair of legs who was testing out what they could do. Meanwhile, vocalist / guitarist James Dean Bradfield, during those moments when he let himself go, behaved like a dad secretly dancing to his favourite music in his bedroom, twirling around, pogoing on one leg, attempting a Chuck-Berry-style duck-walk.

When the Manics had played Penny Lane in 1993, their set had consisted entirely of numbers from Generation Terrorists and Gold Against the Soul, the only albums they’d released by then, so tonight I was treated to much broader palette of music. There were five songs from Generation Terrorists: Little Baby Nothing, Slash ‘n’ Burn, Stay Beautiful and You Love Us, as well as Motorcycle Emptiness. Wire dedicated Stay Beautiful to the memory of Richey Edwards. From Gold Against the Soul – an album that, despite me really liking it, has never been highly regarded in the Manics’ oeuvre – only From Despair to Where got an airing. From the late 1990s, when the band were perhaps at their commercial and critical peak, they played A Design for Life, Everything Must Go, Australia (all 1996), If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next and You Stole the Sun from My Heart (both 1998), while the band’s 21^st-century career was represented by a smattering of singles like Your Love Alone is Not Enough (2007), Walk Me to the Bridge (2014) and International Blue (2018).

Thus, it was almost a greatest-hit package, which went down well with the audience. Many of them seemed to be long-term fans. Despite the constraints of the Star Theatre, with its wall-to-wall seating, a lot of folk were soon on their feet, jumping about as if they were in an open venue. Two big, macho-looking guys a few rows in front of me, obviously well refreshed, got extremely emotional – arms wrapped around each other, bodies swaying precipitously from side to side. If the gig had lasted another half-hour, they’d probably have shagged each other in public. I even thought I heard a distant, communal chant of “Wales! Wales! Wales!’ at one moment. (In addition to the backdrop’s picture of a Welsh colliery, a Welsh flag was draped over one of the units behind the band, and Bradfield and Wire mentioned their home country several times during their between-songs banter.)

Most bands who are still recording would pepper their set-list with ‘new songs’ off the ‘new album’. But the Manics trotted out only one number from their most recent offering, 2021’s The Ultra Vivid Lament, an album I’d never heard and knew nothing about. I was really surprised, then, when the song they played from it turned out to be called Still Snowing in Sapporo. Later, when I researched the song, I discovered that it’d been inspired by the concert they’d done in Sapporo 30 years ago – the one I’d attended. According to songfacts.com: “When the Manic Street Preachers toured Japan in 1993 they played a gig there. The song is a reverie of a magic moment, when they felt they could pretty much do anything.” Wow! That was how I’d felt about myself, that I could do anything, when I saw them. And how weird to hear them perform a song inspired by a long-ago gig and realise I was (probably) the only person in the audience who’d been at that long-ago gig.

So, now, I feel more psychically attuned to the band than ever… Strictly speaking, though, the Manics’ Sapporo concert was on October 22^nd, 1993, which makes the song-title Snow Falling on Sapporo redundant. Snow wouldn’t have started falling on the city yet. But I’ll allow them poetic licence.

When the band finally trooped off the stage, they left behind an extremely satisfied crowd. A man beside me remarked, “Suede will have to be bloody good to top that.”

Oh. Did I say Suede were playing on the bill too? Well, they were. But that’ll be the subject of another blog-post.

June 6, 2023June 22, 2023

Live bands behaving badly

I see the rock band Royal Blood have landed themselves in hot water. They took to the stage at Radio 1’s Big Weekend event in Dundee on May 28^th and reacted to what they felt was the crowd’s lack of energy and enthusiasm by impersonating Victor Meldrew in the TV sitcom One Foot in the Grave (1990-2000). They behaved like curmudgeonly old farts. Vocalist and bassist Mike Kerr berated the audience, who mainly consisted of folk come to see the also-on-the-bill popstars Niall Horan and Lewis Capaldi, with such cantankerous remarks as: “Well, I guess I should introduce ourselves seeing as no one actually knows who we are. We’re called Royal Blood and this is rock music. Who likes rock music? Nine people, brilliant…” And: “We’re having to clap ourselves because that was so pathetic…” Plus, he flipped the crowd off while leaving the stage.

Small wonder that the band has been roasted on social media since then. Particularly brutal was a Twitter posting likening them to the long-running British TV glove puppets Sooty and Sweep.

Now I quite like Royal Blood’s music and I have a copy of their eponymous 2014 debut album somewhere in my record collection. Also, not being a pop fan, I would probably find a concert featuring Niall Horan (who was once in One Direction) and Lewis Capaldi (who I admit does have an awesome second cousin once removed) about as pleasurable as poking a sharp stick into my ear and twisting it. But if you’re in a rock band and find yourself lined up to play at an event that’s obviously going to be thronged with pop fans, you should know what to expect, leave your prejudices offstage, get on with the show and make the best of it… Or just cancel your appearance.

Come to think of it, I did once attend Radio 1’s One Big Sunday event in Ipswich in the summer of 2002, while I was working in the area. That was because I wanted to see two bands on the bill, Edinburgh rockers Idlewild and Bristol electronica outfit Kosheen. I didn’t let the fact that the bill also contained Liberty X, Ms Dynamite and Natalie Imbruglia, whom I had zero interest in, interfere with my enjoyment. As I said, at an eclectic do like this, you make the best of things.

Anyway, the recent stushie involving Royal Blood has made me look back over my gig-going career and wonder… What instances of bad behaviour by live bands have I witnessed in my time?

The most memorable onstage meltdowns came while I was living in the city of Sapporo, in Hokkaido, northern Japan, during the 1990s. Visiting Western performers frequently got annoyed at what they saw as the passivity of Japanese audiences, forgetting that there were obvious cultural reasons why a Japanese crowd might seem less extrovert and exuberant than a Western one.

The number-one musical misery-guts during my Japanese years was Ian Brown, frontman of the Stone Roses, who performed at the Sapporo Factory venue in 1995 to promote their recently-released album Second Coming. Brown soon got riled by what he perceived as the audience’s inactivity. “Sapporo,” he snarled, “wake up!” At this point, some New Zealand guys whom I knew yelled from the back of the hall, “Oh, you’ve remembered which city you’re in! Well done!” Brown then commented sourly about “those people at the back with faces like well-skelped arses.” I was standing a few yards from the front of the stage and couldn’t help shouting back at him, “That’s rich coming from you!” My comeback seemed to rattle Brown and I saw him both gesturing towards the side of the stage and pointing furiously down at me. “Oh shit,” I thought, “he’s trying to get the venue’s security staff onto me!” I decided I should make myself less conspicuous. This was difficult because I was rather taller than the average Japanese person and my head and shoulders stuck up prominently above the crowd. I spent the rest of the gig with legs awkwardly bent at the knees, trying to reduce my height, so that Brown and his security goons wouldn’t notice me.

To be fair, Brown had recently been beaten up in a club in Tokyo, supposedly by a trio of Australian bodybuilders, which’d no doubt left him in a foul mood for the rest of his band’s Japanese tour. Still, he behaved like a dickwad that evening and put me off the Stone Roses for a long while afterwards.

Also losing it with their northern Japanese audience were the punk band Fluffy, who in 1996 supported the Sex Pistols (in the middle of their Filthy Lucre reunion tour) at the Hokkaido Koseinenkin Hall. Singer Amanda Rootes sneered at the end, “Thank you, Sapporo, for your boring hospitality!” But it was hardly the crowd’s fault. The Hall seemed designed to strangle any atmosphere at birth – as far as I remember, it was an all-seater venue, which limited one’s ability to get up and bop and jump around to the music, and it was brightly lit. Also, the tickets had said nothing about a support band and people were still filing in to take their seats while Fluffy performed onstage. The band continued to fume about the experience later. A mate of mine who worked in a pub in Susukino, Sapporo’s nightlife district, reported that the band came into his establishment for a drink after the gig and had a moan about how horrible the city was.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a Japanese audience – well, a Japanese audience sprinkled with a number of foreigners – have a go at a band for not being lively themselves. In the mid-1990s the American outfit Sugar played at Penny Lane, Sapporo’s best small venue. Their singer, guitarist and leader Bob Mould was so intense, wrapped-up-in-himself and non-communicative between songs that, eventually, someone with a North American accent roared at him, “Why don’t you speak to us!” I should say that years later I saw Mould again, performing solo at the Oran Mor arts / entertainment centre in Glasgow, and he seemed way more chilled and looked like he was enjoying himself much more.

Penny Lane was also where I witnessed a meltdown by Richey Edwards, the iconic but doomed guitarist – two years later, he’d disappear, never to be seen again – with the Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers. This was in 1993 and the Manics were promoting their new album Gold Against the Soul. The gig was excellent, but Edwards was clearly on edge. At one point he raged against an illuminated fire-exit sign at the auditorium’s far end that he claimed was distracting him. In a typical face-saving Japanese compromise, the venue manager didn’t turn the sign off. He just tied a big strip of cardboard over it so that nobody, including Richey, could see it, but it stayed switched on in accordance with fire regulations.

Away from Japan, I’ve observed some unprofessional behaviour onstage that was the result of physical or emotional dysfunction within the band. In 1995, in New York, I went to a gig by Shane MacGowan and the Popes. The famously raddled MacGowan – who’d already parted company with his earlier and more famous band the Pogues because of his ongoing state of dissolution – lasted all of two songs before sinking onto his haunches, clutching his head between his hands, and then slinking offstage. The rest of the band, the Popes, gamely played a few instrumental tunes for another 25 or 30 minutes. Then they buggered off too. And then there was a riot. Happily, when I saw MacGowan on two later occasions – with the Popes at the 1998 Fleadh Festival in London’s Finsbury Park and together again with the Pogues in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2004 – he was in better physical shape. Well, a bit better.

Meanwhile, by the time I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain in Edinburgh in 1998, the relationship between the band’s founding members, brothers Jim and William Reid, had become toxic. It showed onstage. (Jim Reid once said of the Jesus-and-Mary-Chain experience: “It’s like being locked in a cupboard with somebody for 15 years. If it wasn’t your brother, you could kick him out.”) At one point, in front of the audience, Jim roared, “William, just shut up!” when his sibling started singing a song intro off-key. It was no surprise when, the following year, the news came through that the band had split up.

I’ve also seen folk, full of boisterous, joking bonhomie, fail to read the room and say something they regretted. Most notably, I remember Primal Scream playing on the bill at a one-day event on Glasgow Green in 2000. While they were limbering up to play the song Sick City from their new album XTRMNTR, bass-player Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield cheerfully barked into the microphone, “This is dedicated to Glasgow because it really is… a sick city!” That went down like a cup of – appropriately enough – cold sick among the multitude of Glaswegians assembled before them. So pissed off were they that, later, Mani felt obliged to announce that he was only jesting and, really, “Glasgow isn’t a sick city at all!” Incidentally, this was in the days before ‘sick’ acquired its modern, slang meaning of ‘amazingly good or impressive’. (I should add that I think Mani, most famous for playing in the Stone Roses alongside Ian Brown, is a decent bloke. His surname even inspired the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, which I use when I write horror stories. That day, he just let his mouth run a little bit ahead of his brain.)

Elsewhere, I recall seeing the Subways in Norwich in 2008. Singer Billy Lunn didn’t endear himself to me or the rest of the audience when, sporting a cheesy grin, he raised a hand and exclaimed at us, “Aha!” in the manner of Alan Partridge – Steve Coogan’s gormless, idiotic TV-presenter character who, of course, is supposed to hail from Norwich. “What a knobhead,” I thought.

Finally, I can think of a few examples of the opposite happening – when the audience behaved badly and the people onstage managed the situation with admirable skill. Back in 1984, I saw the late, legendary Mark E. Smith’s band the Fall at Aberdeen Ritzy, with support provided by abrasive post-punk / noise-rock band the Membranes. The audience was populated with serious Fall fans desperate for the support act to exit the stage as quickly as possible so that their hero Smith could come on. Accordingly, they kept yelling “F*ck off!” at the Membranes between songs. Bassist / vocalist John Robb took it in his stride and started doing funny impersonations of the abusers. “F*****ck off!” he drooled into his microphone.

And in 1997 in Melbourne, I was at a gig by the Henry Rollins Band when a woman at the edge of the stage got a little too vociferous in telling the band which songs she wanted them to perform. The fearsomely muscled Rollins declared, loudly, patiently, contemptuously: “Lady, we decide what songs we play, when we play them, how we play them. Sometimes you get what you want in life. Sometimes you don’t.”

It’s been a long time since I saw a live band behaving badly. This is probably because I spent most of the 2010s living in Sri Lanka, where the only option for seeing live rock music (away from the country’s holiday resorts, where hotel bands played cover versions of the Eagles and Bryan Adams to audiences of sweaty middle-aged Western tourists and local would-be hipsters) was to indulge in the thriving Sri Lankan heavy metal scene. And many of those heavy metal bands had an amusing habit of showing boundless Sri Lankan politeness and gratitude to the audience for turning up to see them. In between songs, they kept saying, “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you for coming, thank you so very much…” Then, a half-minute later, they were emitting blood-curdling, throaty black / death metal gurgles and screaming “F*CK! F*CK! F*CK!”

The pandemic obviously ended my gig-going for a few years. Now that I’ve relocated to Singapore, I’ve been able to see a couple of Western bands again and they’ve been impeccably well-behaved. Even Guns N’ Roses, who had a reputation for being dicks and subjecting audiences to some notoriously poor concerts over the years, were perfect gentlemen when I saw them at Singapore’s National Stadium last year. They even treated the crowd to a three-hour set. Maybe they were simply happy, post-Covid-19, to be on the road again. Actually, considering how expensive concert-tickets are here, the last thing I’d want would be to find myself in a pricy gig with the performers being arseholes onstage.

Mind you, if one of those Korean pop bands like BTS or Blackpink, massively popular in Singapore and elsewhere in East Asia, were to play here and sign up Royal Blood as the support act… I might pay money to see that.