A sing-along frenzy hits Getintothis’ Dan Byrne as Young Knives and Fly With Vampires convert at least one more fan.
Have you got Music Week Fever yet? You must have; the symptoms are not doing any work, singing along to youtube clips of the whatever band is on Later and seeing the daytime as a sort of inconvenient pause before the music kicks off again.
It has swept through the Spiel office like some epidemic. We all caught it early too probably due to excitement about the massive closing party LMW are throwing round the back of the office at the CUC and spent inordinate amounts of time debating the virtues of the various bands playing.
But Music Week Fever is no benign affliction; a severe case can get into your head and play havoc with your gig-going-sensibilities.
I agreed to go to a Young Knives gig with a non-Young Knives fan. Going to gigs with someone who isn’t a fan is a rudimentary error – right up there with taking girls to football matches? – and denies all of the best pre-gig routines.
Debates about favourite songs (for Young Knives probably Loughborough Suicide) or expected set-lists fail to take off.
The non-Young Knives fan in question was my co-editor from Spiel, usually a dependable gig-going companion, but whose unsuitability for the task at hand was emphasised on our half-drunken saunter from The Fly to Mojo as the pre-gig sing-a-long to the hits ended up with just me singing on my own like, well, some sort of numpty drunkenly singing She’s Attracted To on his own on Seel Street.
Inside the gig though any doubts about the course the night was taking were banished by the standard of the support local lads Fly with Vampires.
They demonstrated all the flair and panache that has endeared them to writers on this blog before and showed off the wide array of punchy pop songs they have in their arsenal.
There was a real sparkle to Fly With Vampires‘ performance and they were a classy addition to the bill.
With the audience suitably primed, Young Knives took to the stage. Angular guitars and witty lyrics are par for the course at a Young Knives gig and their set went a long way to demonstrating the strength of their three albums.
I am not sure that any other band could pump as many hits into 40-odd minutes at Mojo. The atmosphere was fantastic and was spurred on by the band’s punchy and frenetic journey through their set.
On stage the band don’t seem to take themselves too seriously – in fact nobody in the sort of waistcoat Henry Dartnall was wearing could be accused of taking themselves seriously – which was reflected in their sporadic but at times genuinely funny interaction with the crowd.
This adds to the infectious charm of the band and by the end of the evening my mate
was, if perhaps not a convert at least toe-tapping away in time with the back line.
