Tuesday 11 October 2016

LIVE: Four gigs in four days... 7th-10th October 2016

It feels odd to be sitting in for the evening procrastinating over dissertation work, following a run of four shows. The first was Friday evening's stunning Sofar Sounds Oxford living room show which I've already written up a little post about. On Saturday night, I ran the door for a Tigmus show, with Wille and the Bandits, who are in the middle of a UK tour, headlining. With a lot of sales in advance the show sold out on the door and although it was pretty crazy trying to keep on top of everything, it was a really rewarding experience and the guys were really lovely! 


On Sunday was a show I've been waiting months for, rock legends Biffy Clyro playing an acoustic show in Kingston. It was my first time seeing the band, and when tickets went on sale they were available in Banquet Records and an extra show was added (and sold online) due to demand... tickets sold out in under a minute, apparently, so I feel pretty lucky to have got a couple! The two shows had different setlists and while there's a couple of tracks they played in the later show that I wish I could've heard, mainly Howl from the latest record, I was really chuffed to hear one of my favourite tracks from Only Revolutions, God & Satan. It probably sounded closest to its recorded version compared to some of the other tracks, all stripped back to acoustic guitar, cajon, various shakers and bass.. and sounding beautiful! Don't just take my word for how special an evening it was... NME posted an article labelling the shows as 'unlike anything we've seen from them before'


Travelling back from London on Sunday evening, after a morning of a little work and a supermarket stock up, I hopped back on the coach to London yesterday afternoon to catch a free Bear's Den set I'd won tickets for through Amazon when their latest album was released a few months ago. The show was due to be in September and had been rescheduled, but it was absolutely worth the wait. Playing totally unplugged and without microphones, lead singer Andrew Davie described it as terrifying, but they had no reason to be worried, the audience, an intimate crowd of around fifty, and all those watching on the live stream, loved it. Hearing them in such a raw setting, from a metre or two in front of me, was beautiful. It was also lovely meeting up with a few friends (and making new friends) at the show, and chatting with the band after. The set was a lovely mixture of old and new tracks, including a cover of Bryan Adams' Heaven which they performed on a recent radio show and you can listen to below (it's seriously incredible!) If you'd like to watch the whole set (although they don't seem to have recorded a couple of songs at the start and one at the end of the set) you can watch back the livestream on their Facebook page.


Essentially I am having a blast with some truly amazing gigs at the minute... and after tomorrow night, I've got another stretch of four shows with two Tigmus shows, The Eskies on Thursday and Little Brother Eli on Friday, Oxjam Festival on Saturday and (if I'm not terribly behind on work by this point) All Tvvins on Sunday evening. 

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