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London ICA – 11th November 2004

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Setlist

Laid / Careful What You Say / Eh Mamma / Into Darkness / Bone / Five-O / Dance Of The Bad Angel / Love Hard / Sometimes / Down To The Sea / Wave Hello / Butterfly’s Dream / Monkey God / Ring The Bells / Fall In Love

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The Lovegods

Review

So to London and the final date of the UK tour. The ICA venue is a small black room out of character with its other galleries and cinemas. You’ll have to forgive the rather fuzzled recollections of events due to my friends Mark and Alan and the people of Ceske Budejovice.

The Lovegods open the set, introduced by Tim, who is a close friend of the band. Sadly restricted to half an hour, the Lovegods show that they are going to be a force to be reckoned with in 2005. Focusing primarily on tracks from their EP Between Dogs and Wolves, they proceed to rock the crowd and convert quite a few people in the process. You need to go and see this band very soon. Opening track Mississippi and the closer Heroin are the two stand-outs.

Tim comes on and opens with Laid, which again gets the crowd’s attention early. Careful What You Say keeps the mellow tone to the opening numbers, with Lisa adding flute to the instrumentation.

Eh Mamma is introduced by Tim as a song about waking up and finding out you’ve been going out with your Mum. He tells the story of his Mum being there in Leeds on Monday and gets heckled by some drunk at the back. Darkness is preceded by a female heckler who says something when Tim starts explaining the background to the song, Tim then wanders off into a story about a little green man who lives in a tin can. Despite the rather muffled sound (the ICA has notoriously awful sound), the faster numbers gain the power from having a standing audience and people dancing. Darkness is superb, Tim half speaking the words across a sprawling guitar sound from Lee.

Bone opens with Rob’s gorgeous sax playing and is again possibly the highlight of the set. Five-O has the crowd stunned, building up to a cresecendo of vocals and guitar at the end. After a false start to Dance Of The Bad Angels when someone starts singing loudly in the wrong place, Tim puts down a heckler with a line “if you’re going to heckle, at least be witty” and then “it’s not an invitation” when the heckler replies that Tim should know his own lines. The song itself is gorgeous, Lisa’s vocals again holding the audience’s attention.

Love Hard is rocked up even further tonight and feels like a loose jam behind Tim’s vocals and Lisa’s section. The crowd start to dance a little more, I suddenly find myself down the front for the first time on the tour.

Sometimes gets recognised from the opening keyboards and the chorus turns into a singalong, but the audience respect the calm peaceful mood of the verse and Robin’s sax part which is extremely haunting and shuts the crowd up.

Hecklers return with a woman calling Tim vain, which Tim says he’s happy to take. Tim dedicates Down To The Sea to John Peel on the day of his funeral. Tim remembers quite rightly that John was one of the few people to play James on the radio in the early years. In fact, my own personal first time hearing James was a 1985 radio session on his show.

Wave Hello, Butterfly’s Dream and Monkey God bring the main set to a storming conclusion, guitars flying around the core of the songs, held together brilliantly by Milo’s drumming. Tim lets rip full-on with his dancing, Lisa joins in on Butterfly’s Dream, Geoff Buckley performs his magic with the lights and there’s an improvised lyric section over the closing madness of Monkey God. The crowd go wild when the set finishes.

Ring The Bells opens the encore, the only “new” song from the July church shows, but I don’t think anyone cares about that. Mad dancing ensues in the crowd. The gorgeous “ooohhh” section after the first chorus just adds so much to the song.

Fall In Love with me concludes the set and is listened to attentively by the audience as per Tim’s request.

And then that’s it, the UK tour is over. Four superb nights in quite contrasting venues. A real progression in terms of performance from the July tour that bodes extremely well for the second album that Lee and Tim have started to put down initial sketches for. Getting the whole band involved in the songwriting process in a live environment is a mouthwatering prospect.

Manchester Royal Northern College Of Music – 9th November 2004

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Setlist

Laid / Careful What You Say / Eh Mamma / Into Darkness, / Bone / Five-O / Dance Of The Bad Angel / Love Hard / Sometimes / Down To The Sea / Wave Hello / Butterfly’s Dream / Monkey God / Ring The Bells / Fall In Love

Support

Trap 2

Review

Manchester’s show was at the Royal Northern College Of Music, a venue specifically designed for performing more classical music, so the stage was huge and the acoustics were perfect wherever in the venue you were seated (I was in Row N, suddenly a pass doesn’t seem that attractive when it doesn’t actually guarantee you a seat).

Trap 2 got their best reaction of the tour. As a five-piece all male guitar driven band it’s easy to fall into following cliches of what they should look and sound like, but they have a personality and humour and humility about them that saves them from that fate. And they’ve got some cracking tunes to boot. Hopefully this tour and the Kasabian tour beforehand will lead them to bigger things. They’ve certainly got a fighting chance.

Opening with Laid, the first thing that’s clear tonight, is how stunning the sound is in the venue and what a fantastic job Stuart and Chris have done on the desk. The Manchester crowd generally wasn’t as attentive as Leeds however. Quite why people feel the need to shout “Cmon Tim” during quiet songs is beyond me, it certainly doesn’t help the band perform any better.

What would have done was the instant recognition by a significant section of the crowd of Discover which made its first and only appearance of the UK tour as the second song of the evening. As my personal favourite track off Bone, it was great to hear it again and the setting made the lyrics even more piercing and personal than before.

The faster songs get pockets of the audience up to dance in their seats and Tim invited one of the more extreme dancers on to stage for Into Darkness. The poor guy however couldn’t keep up with Tim’s dancing for most of the song. What was becoming increasingly noticeable was the amount of improvisation in certain songs, particularly from Lee and Robin. Bone, Darkness and Butterfly’s Dream in particular benefitting from this.

As in Leeds, the last two or three songs brought the crowd to their feet and down the front to dance. Sat near the back, Butterfly’s Dream and Monkey God looked and sounded enormous, extremely powerful and direct. Manchester erupted at the end and when the encore opened with Ring The Bells. The audience did however return to their seats or sat on the floor for the final Fall In Love, the crystal clear acoustics making it the ideal environment to play the song. Another victory in front of a sold-out crowd.

Leeds City Varieties – 8th November 2004

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Setlist

Laid / Eh Mamma / Into Darkness / Bone / Five-O / Dance Of The Bad Angel / Love Hard / Sometimes / Down To The Sea / Wave Hello / Butterfly’s Dream / Monkey God / Ring The Bells / Fall In Love

Support

Trap 2

Review

Moving onto Leeds the following night, the venue itself, City Varieties must be one of the most unusual Tim has ever played in. All-seated with boxes upstairs at the sides, it used to hold Victorian and Elizabethan musical evenings which Tim told us he attended as a child with his Mum who was in the audience. At one point during the show, he climbed onto the speaker stack to the box where she was sat and held her hand whilst singing one of the songs.

The seated environment meant that the show and the audience was much more subdued than in Glasgow but this worked wonderfully. The stripped-back Laid was performed without the audience singing along making it almost eerie. Watching the faster songs played to a seated audience was an extraordinary experience, but really focused the crowd’s attention on the quality of the musicians on show. Tim always referred to the abilities of the rest of the band when in James and I really doubt he would have ventured back into music without at least similar calibre people around him. Lisa holds the crowd’s attention with every vocal input, particularly Dance of the Bad Angel, Down To The Sea and Love Hard, where she almost steals the show from Tim and her dancing during Butterfly’s Dream. Lee’s guitar playing is adding even more to the faster songs as they are played live more. Wave Hello merits particular mention as this was the highlight of the set for me. Robin’s excellence on bass, guitar and sax brings new life and colour to the recorded versions of Bone tracks from which he was absent. Milo’s energy and power in the faster songs has been noted before, but there’s a new subtlety to the slower moments that almost goes unnoticed.

The crowd reaction to the set was ecstatic. Naturally the James tracks get the most recognition and applause but the Bone tracks either convinced those who already knew them or converted those that didn’t. A glorious Butterfly’s Dream and a frenetic impassioned Monkey God brought the crowd to their feet towards the end. The final Fall In Love was performed to almost silence from the crowd, just how Tim wanted it.

Leeds was a great night in an unfamiliar venue with the probably the best and most attentive audience of the tour.

Porto Hard Club – 3rd November 2004

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Setlist

Laid / Eh Mamma / Into Darkness / Bone / Five-O / Dance Of The Bad Angel / Love Hard / Sometimes / Down To The Sea / Wave Hello / Butterfly’s Dream / Monkey God / Ring The Bells / Fall In Love / Careful What You Say

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Review

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