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Alfie
Alfie were pleasant, but in the kind of way that you wouldn't mind it if you were watching them halfway down the bill of the opening day of a festival. Having said that, there was something enjoyably shambolic about their onstage banter, and the fact that they had dressed the stage with household appliances. However, they didn't seem to amount to any more than the sum of their influences. Whether it was the E.L.O. pastiche of their opening track, the Pete Fowler / Super Furry Animals style visuals, the track that just sounded like The Charlatans, the one with the unanticipated Gallagher brothers style nasal drawl, or the epic set closer "Hey Mole" (which featured Elbow onstage as backing vocalists), they seemed to have, as my friend Stuart put it, "anybody else's style but their own". My verdict: Competently Entertaining is unfortunately me damning them with faint praise Elbow Elbow are an unlikely success story. They don't look like a successful band, and they make very intense emotional music that is difficult to distil into the kind of 2'30" pop mantras daytime radio now demands. When even XFM in London can't cope with the tempo change of Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" and start the track when the safe beat kicks in, you wonder how Elbow's early singles got any airplay at all. Nevertheless Elbow have really carved a place for themselves with two spotlessly excellent album releases. "Fallen Angel" was about as uptempo as Elbow get, and was delivered with gusto. "Bitten By The Tail-Fly" was brutally effective, how you would imagine Joy Division may have delivered "Atrocity Exhibition" live, with the same tribal drumming and intensity. Mostly though the band seemed in good spirits, in a contrast to their lyrical content. There was an unexpectedly high-level of between song banter. "Fugitive Motel" and "Scattered Black & Whites" were both particularly effective, successfully evoking a sad nostalgia through the mix of lyrics and video backdrop. Actually one thing I took away from this show was the now seemingly ubiquitous presence of video backdrop at gigs. Even in a venue the size of Brixton Academy it is now a kind of given that you are going to get projections and video footage of the onstage action. Without wanting to sound like an old man, it was a quite exceptional occurrence when bands used video or film projection during gigs when I first started venturing out of my small mud-hut in the early 80s - I particularly remember seeing the Butthole Surfers, God and the four-piece psychedelic guitar-driven version of The Shamen precisely because they used a high level of film & video in their live shows. On the whole I think it is a good thing, and provides for a greater level of immersion in the spectacle - although I kept finding myself fighting the temptation to watch the video and instead to actually concentrate on watching the physical presence of the band. From their first album Elbow delivered the highlights of a stunning version of "Powder Blue" - all the better for being gently ushered in by the bass guitar riff rather than opening with the bluster of the recorded version - a very tight version of "Any Day Now", and a monumental version of "New Born". To be honest on record I had always though the last track to be one that dragged on a bit, but live it all fell into place and made sense. They finished with the Glastonbury crowd sampling "Grace Under Pressure" which has become their anthem, and tonight it was accompanied by members of the London Gospel Community Choir. I have to confess that it is not a particular favourite of mine, so I took the opportunity to make a quick final trip to the gents whilst they were relatively empty, and then headed off to catch the tube before the gig-frenzied masses arrived. My only disappointments: Firstly, Mrs Currybet wasn't very well, so had to leave the gig after around 25 minutes of Elbow's set. Always a gut-wrenching moment when you are torn between escorting her home to make sure she is OK, and her saying "There's no reason for you to miss the gig just because I'm ill". I don't believe there is any fully satisfactory answer to that dilemma. Secondly, Brixton Academy was *so* cold I ended up buying a t-shirt from the merchandise stall just to stave off creeping hypothermia. Thirdly, the most recent Elbow single, 'Not A Job', includes a cover version of Massive Attack's "Teardrop" which I was dearly hoping they would play live. They didn't. Related Links: Elbow http://www.elbow.co.uk... Alfie http://www.alfie.net...
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