Where Worlds Collide

Just after he released a blinder of an album (I’ll post a review tomorrow), things start going pear-shaped again.

Tonight’s gig at Manchester was cancelled 15 minutes before he was due to go on stage, because he’s lost his voice yet again. It’s been rescheduled for Monday 1st October, which little compensation for anyone that’s paid a lot of money for travel and accomodation.

Update: The full story on Fish’s website

I knew I had to conduct an extended warm up and ran through a 15 minute session which didn’t fill me with confidence. At this point it was 7.30 and doors were open. I had 90 minutes to pull it together. I left it for twenty minutes and ran through another warm up. The voice wasn’t opening up and in fact it was shutting down even more. I let my concerns known to Yatta. It was now 8 o’clock. The support band was on and they were told to extend their set to give me time. I tried again to loosen up and by this time my voice was fading quickly and I was struggling to speak. I lost my entire top range in a matter of fifteen minutes. I made the decision to pull the gig and to pull the Sheffield show as I knew from experience that whatever I had was not a simple vocal strain.

I’ll be there for the rematch on 1st October. Hopefully his voice will behave itself for the remainder of the tour.

Music meme from John Kovalic.

Copy this list. Leave in the bands you’ve seen perform live. Delete the ones you haven’t and add new ones that you have seen until you reach 25. An asterisk means the previous person had it on their list. Two asterisks means the last two people who did this before you had that band on their list.

My list is skewed towards acts I’ve seen live in the past few years, with a smattering of legends from festivals in the 1980s

• Anathema
• Blue Öyster Cult
• Breathing Space
• Bryan Adams (I only went to see the support act!)
• Deep Purple (Once with Blackmore, twice with Morse)
• Def Leppard
• Dweezil Zappa
• Hayseed Dixie
• Iron Maiden
• Jethro Tull
• Journey
• Karnataka
• Marillion (4 times with Fish, 5 with Steve Hogarth)
• Mostly Autumn (14 times!)
• Odin Dragonfly
• Opeth
• Pink Floyd *
• Polish October
• Porcupine Tree
• Queensÿche
• Rammstein
• Rory Gallagher
• Styx
• The Reasoning
• Thin Lizzy (with Phil Lynott!)

Just one act in common with John’s. My list is marked by the complete absence of 80s new wave or current indie/alternative bands; genres that just leave me cold.

Friday night saw The Reasoning’s first gig in central London, at the Borderline.

The Borderline is a small club just off Charing Cross Road, quite a bit smaller than Crewe Limelight where I’d seem them back in April. As seems usual for just about every gig I go to nowadays, I recognised quite a few familiar faces in the crowd, both from previous Reasoning gigs and from the Mostly Autumn fanbase. I also put a lot of faces to names for people from the Reasoning forum and TheStorm mailing list. By the time the band hit the stage, the place was pretty much packed.

It didn’t take very long to show just how far this band have progressed in the eight short months since their first gig in Swansea. They’ve really gelled as a live act now, and have the perfect combination of tightness, energy and emotional intensity. The band were clearly enjoying being on stage, and feeding off the tremendous enthusiasm of the crowd. They were also blessed with a good sound mix, which meant you could hear every instrument and each voice clearly. I noticed Gareth’s vocal contributions a lot more this time.

Naturally songs from “Awakening” made up the bulk of the set, although their version of Karnataka’s magnificent “Talk to Me” is still one of the high points of the show. They also introduced two new songs from the forthcoming album “Dark Angel”, the title track, and “Breaking the Fourth Wall”. Both sounded impressive on first listening, the former reminding me a little bit (but not too much) of Dream Theater. This augers well for the new album.

In short, The Reasoning rock. If they keep up this momentum (and I’m sure they will), they’ll be playing much bigger venues than this in a year or two’s time.

I’ve just got back from a week in Switzerland, travelling all the way by rail, with a stopover in Luxembourg on the way out, and Köln on the way back.

I haven’t got time for a full writeup, but here are a few random observations:

• You know you’re a Mostly Autumn fan if you use the phrase “The weather was absolutely Murrayfield”. It didn’t rain all week, fortunately.
• Now I know why travellers don’t recommend the EC “Vauban”. 5 hours from Luxemboug to Basel with no catering. Argh!
• Only serious delay was on the way back, where the Deutche Bahn ICE-3 from Köln to Brussels broke down. So much for the wonders of German engineering promoted in all those car adverts. Fortunately I managed to get on board the following Paris-bound Thalys TGV and make the connection into the Brussels-London Eurostar with just a couple of minutes to spare.
• Rosa Klebb has a new job as the sleeping car attendant on the Frankfurt to Moscow sleeper that I saw departing from Köln on Wednesday night. The contrast between the shiny red Russian sleeping cars and the absolutely filthy German locomotive wasn’t something I would have expected to see.
• Swiss beer is good. Cardinal, Gurten, Eichhof and Walliser Beir all taste great. It’s not just the atmosphere and ambience that makes it seem good; I ate at one restraunt in Brig where the house beer was Heineken. And it tasted, well, like Heineken

And now I’m off to see The Reasoning at The Borderline in London, for the final gig that bookends the holiday.