God bless that mining boom. It’s been the summer of bands that five years ago no-one had a reasonable expectation of ever again seeing live, and now John Squire and Ian Brown have stopped using the music press to call each other twats for long enough to reap our high exchange rate to top up their nest eggs.
Conspicuously absent is any of Brown’s sandwich-board preacher style rants about, inter alia, the Taliban being the greatest political force of human history. Evidently, the band’s peace treaty signed prior to reformation had a “don’t say anything that will get us burned in effigy” clause directed specifically at him.
Also conspicuously absent was Squire’s septum, and even from my vantage point near the mixing desk, every time he cocked his head up was an occasion to dwell on whether having half as many nostrils as before was worth it for the awesome coke-riffs on Second Coming. The band evidently didn’t think so, refraining from raking over their often-scorned career bookend beyond a token rendition of Love Spreads, with Brown devoting most of the song to waving his phallic black maracas like the hi-vis wearing fellas guiding the planes on the airport tarmac.
After opening with I Wanna Be Adored – the only thing less surprising about that choice was the crowd’s vocal strains being more in tune than Brown – Squire launched into the opening strains of Mersey Paradise, the twee and upbeat B-side thrown in for the diehards choking back tears while they thought back to Britpop night at Ding Dong’s circa 2000, a highlight in a set otherwise devoted to bashing out all the staples from their debut.
In lieu of any new work, it’s a relief to be able to say that the band’s a lot more interesting on stage than during their turn-of-the-‘90s, acid-bleached incarnation. However, if one might suspect the tensions still linger under the surface, they were ebullient onstage in a way they never used to be, while still paying due deference to the things that made them adopt all those cloying references to how they were living gods. Reni even wore his dumb hat.
BY SEAN SANDY DEVOTIONAL
LOVED: The dude in the bucket hat trying to flog off counterfeit band shirts with the poorest imitation of a Mancunian accent this side of Life on Mars. Innit.
HATED: Bucket hats. Everywhere, bucket hats. This is the fookin’ Rocky ‘orror Pickcha Show of Festival ‘all gigs, innit?
DRANK: Parisian lemons, innit?
