Concerts I've seen

I knew this was going to be a tiring show, coming as it did directly after a weekend away for MFVF. What I wasnt expecting was to get home and to have to make an emergency trip to the vet, causing me to miss the gig and end up with one cat fewer than I had at the start of the weekend :-(

The evening started out with Awake By Design. I'd been reasonably impressed when I first saw them, but when I subsequently saw them again, they'd lost whatever they previously had that had piqued my interest, and tonight was more of the same. The lead singer clearly has a decent voice, and the musicianship from the band seems fine. It's just the songs that are lacking. My notes from the day claimed the songs were dull as dishwater, and I ended up bored and waiting for the next band, which isn't a good sign.

Pythia had put on the best performance I've seen from them at Bloodstock, and I had reasonably high hopes for this show. This wasn't, it must be said, one of their better shows. While Sophie is starting to grow into the role of lead singer and has a bit more stage presence than she's had in the past, it's not all good news. She needs to concentrate on her voice. She can hit the notes well enough, but she really needs to learn enough control to hold them, and there was little evidence of that tonight. She's been better in the past, so it's tempting to write this off as just an off night. That's not to say the performance was bad, and I still enjoyed it, with highlights coming in the form of "Betray my heart" and "My perfect enemy". But they're capable of better.

This was Stream Of Passion's last ever London performance. After 11 years and 4 albums, the band have decided to call it quits. This is obviously disappointing, not least because for me, the band are better now than they have been at any point in their career. But they said they wanted to go out on a high, and this point in time definitely counts. The performance was very strong, probably as good as I've ever seen them. The band were very tight, and Marcela's voice was fantastic. I was slightly disappointed that she limited her violin playing to a couple of short intros, but that's a minor complaint. The highlights were "In the end", their cover of Radiohead's "Street spirit" and a song that they ackowledge has become a bit of an anthem for them, "The curse". The band pulled a very respectable and appreciative crowd for their final London performance, and this was a great way to bow out.

Dorja were the fourth band in which I've seen Becky Baldwin perform (the other three being Control The Storm, Triaxis and IDestroy). Dorja are a multinational band, with members from the UK, Belgium, America and Kazakhstan. Which makes it a little strange that this, their first ever gig, was on my doorstop in Watford. Given that, it seemed rude to miss it! I'd heard one track from before tonight ("Fire"), and on the basis of that, I was expecting a decent performance and I wasn't disappointed. Singer Aiym had laryngitis and was struggling to sing, so while she took lead on the first song, the other band members took it turns to sing the leads while Aiym joined in for the choruses. The band play what I guess you could describe as bluesy rock. Although not at 100% tonight, Aiym was the real star of the show here, with a rich, whiskey soaked voice that fits the music perfectly. As a new band without a full set's worth of material, they threw in a few covers to bulk it up a bit. The highlights were the aforementioned "Fire" and a medley of "Helter skelter" and "Whole lotta love". Dorja are definitely a band that I'll be following from now on.

I'd come to the gig to see Dorja. Until a couple of hours before the show, I wasn't even aware that they were a supporting act and that there would be a headlining band playing after them. That band turned out to be Guns 2 Roses, who as the name implies were a GnR tribute band. So how were they? Mostly OK. The singer, while apparently from Wales, managed to affect a reasonably convincing American accent, but sadly I think he was playing the role of Axl a little too convincingly, slurring his words and failing to sing half of the lyrics. His voice was good, though, and he did justice to most of the songs. The rest of the band were a bit sloppy. Not bad, mind. But they came across very much as amateurs with little desire to be more than that. The highlights for me were "Think about you", "Civil war" and a shortened "Paradise City" after they ran out of time at the end of the set. But ultimately, for a GnR tribute to succeed, they really need to nail two songs; "Welcome to the jungle" and "Sweet child o' mine", and they failed to do that. It was an enjoyable performance, but nothing exceptional.

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I thought when this festival was first announced that they'd perhaps been a bit ambitious with the choice of venue. However, I wasn't expecting it to be quite as sparse as it turned out. The venue holds 20,000. I'd be suprised if there were even a quarter of that present, and for the opening bands it was considerably less than that.

Blackberry Smoke were much as I'd remembered them from the last time. A southern blues rock band, bordering on country music at times. The problem here, as with the last time, was that they were just a bit too laid back and lacking oomph. They did little wrong, but I won't be going out of my way to see them again.

It had been a while since I'd last seen Apocalyptica and I was looking forward to seeing them again. However, they were frankly terrible, and it was largely not their fault. The mix was abysmal. The drums completely overpowered the very muddy cellos and the snare drum in particular was drowning out everything else. If there was a highlight, it would be "Master of puppets", but sadly this probably ranks as the least enjoyable Apocalyptica performance I've seen.

I'd never managed to see The Darkness before. I'm not their biggest fan but at the same time, I quite like some of their music. The performance wasn't bad. But I did feel Justin Hawkins' between song banter was very weak. Someone mentioned that his comments seemed LSD induced and that while he was clearly being impressed by his own attempts at humour, the audience largely weren't. Their mix was fortunately a little better than Apocalyptica's, but still some way from where you'd want it to be. They complained that they'd had to cut their set short due to Apocalyptica overruning, but that had in turn been caused by a late start due to Blackberry Smoke overruning. The highlight of the set, unsurprisingly, was "I believe in a thing called love".

Tonight's headliner, Alice Cooper, was the reason why I'd got a ticket. While I might have seen a handful of the other bands playing over the weekend in their own right at a cheaper show, Cooper was the only real draw that made me want to part with the amount of money being charged for tickets here. I've seen him many times over the years, and he's never failed to put on a good show. The same was true here. If there's one criticism, it's that his setlists have become a bit predictable, and that was also true here. Which is why it was great to see him throw a curveball and add in a bunch of covers to honour dead rock stars that he's known (Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Lemmy). Other than those, "No more Mr Nice Guy", "Billion dollar babies" and "Ballad of Dwight Fry" all stood out, along with perennial set closer "Schools out" and "Elected" in the encore.

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Reprisal were Andrew's backing band for this show, but had a short set of their own near the start of the evening. Sadly, they were just as bad as when I'd last seen them. Average death metal musically, with abysmal shouty vocals layered on top.

This show was billed as Andrew O'Neill's History Of Heavy Metal. It was a mixture of stand up comedy and musical interludes, with the aforementioned Reprisal. The evening was a journey through time, charting the origins of heavy metal and the many subgenres into which it later evolved. Starting with Black Sabbath and moving on to Priest, Maiden, Dio, Metallica et al. It was largely good, but he's clearly a product of his generation. He likes way too much terrible death metal, bizarrely thought the mid-'90s were a great time for heavy metal and even gave a free pass to Korn. His tastes in metal are gratuitously different to mine. But that aside, it was an enjoyable evening.

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