OK, OK, I’ll admit it. We really wanted to go to Saturday’s The Best Disco in Town Live 2007… But somehow M and I found ourselves standing in the spring sunshine of a Warrington Tuesday evening waiting to see these blokes called Editors instead - and no, Sec C, it’s nothing to do with books! ;-)
Last night, two years on from The Back Room, those nearly-Brum boys made their comeback appearance at the Parr Hall in Warrington. Yes you read that right – one of the UK’s bands of the decade playing in a municipal hall in a small northern town sandwiched between the urban corridor of Liverpool and Manchester. You may well ask why…
Tom Smith was on fire – the comparisons with Ian Curtis are fair, but he’s much much more as well. It’s like he’s got an electric pulse running through his veins, making him convulse and twitch. His guitar’s more like a piece of armour AND a weapon, than an instrument. Chris Urbanowicz wouldn’t be out of place playing guitar with Franz Ferdinand or Placebo, and Russell Leetch as part of Robbie’s backing band (sorry – it was the jeans and suit jacket). And Ed Lay just sits out there at the back, getting on with the real business of bashing your heart into the rhythm of his drumming…
But as ever when you're trying to convey something no-one else experienced, all of that completely undersells them. This unstyled, rag bag of slightly geeky musicians played above, beyond, out of themselves, giving us way more than everything they had, whilst still checking we were ok, they weren’t losing us, it was going ok?…
My gig of the year by far – subtle, electric, buoyant, and yes (that awful muso journo short-hand) anthemic. The new stuff from the upcoming album An End Has A Start sounds just as good as The Back Room – maybe even better, but it was hard to tell on one listen… Time will of course tell.
And thankfully all this – a neat hour and twenty of short, sharp rocks - without the swagger of the Kaiser Chief’s pitiful attempt at a second album (everything is average nowadays – you bet).
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