city invasion 2008: agnostic front / mdc / us bombs / peter and the test-tube babies / the restarts / the bones / deadline / static thought / random hand / creepshow / bitchfits / darkbuster / radio dead ones / shark soup / grown at home / burn subvert destroy / love & a.45 / moral dilemma / geofry oi! cult / altonomaids
bolton soundhouse
12/04/08
housed in the ground floor of one of several large ex-industrial factory buildings in the centre of bolton, the soundhouse is probably the best laid out venue ive been to outside of manchester and can boast a main stage capable of packing in four to five hundred people. unfortunately, the second performance area is close to the front door and on a cold windy day like saturday is absolutely freezing. having decided on past experience to forego taking a jacket to avoid the late night sweat once the headliners were on, i made the critically short-sighted decision to stay in the warmth of the main room and managed to miss some cracking bands; including ‘mdc’ who i had actually bought the ticket to see in the first place! on the subject of tickets, priced at nearly thirty quid once booking fees had been paid, this was a grossly overpriced gig and shared none of the economical ethos punk has. all day parking was however remarkably cheap at just under two quid, although as this was provided by the local council and not the venue it’s a strange situation where the tendrils of the state turn out to be more reasonable than the money grabbing of a supposed socially-minded gig promoter.
i was also informed as i went to leave that night in the carpark that i could get a blowjob for a cut-price fee owing to the fact it was raining – but obviously being a model citizen of impeccable moral standards i declined this invitation from the lady of the night…only having five quid left in my wallet, there was no alternative. the bar charged central manchester prices for booze, and although some kinda stew was on sale somewhere its location wasn’t advertised so i spent nine hours without food and had to wolf down a reheated meal when i got home. this lack of information connects back to missing certain bands too; because there was no program or even a list on the advertisement posters stating which acts were on which stage, i had no idea what i was missing and would have braved the chill if i had known mdc were playing next door barely twenty feet from where i was standing. that said, what i did get to see was probably of equal quality band for band [see below]
venue score:
prostitute score:
[it was dark]
moral dilemma: a decent opening to the hour-delayed start of events, displaying all the gusto a fresh group to the scene should have, and a cute bass player ensuring my attention didn’t leave the stage even if my ears weren’t completely focused on the music all the time. the frontman might have to work on his audience banter though as he merely repeated all the ‘so nice to be here’ and ‘punk should be all inclusive’ rhetoric everyone else uses. being a continuing general trend of benign pleasantries, maybe i shouldn’t be overly mean in singling this trio out, but sadly it is the only memory that has lingered from what was an average rather than good set of songs.
darkbuster: arriving from boston with a mission to increase the already overflowing reserves of odes to drinking and slacking off, the band were minus one guitarist to the normal line up after he injured himself while on tour in france. a sign that the music was not overly appealing could be discerned from the knowledge it became just as interesting to dream up funny explanations as to how the absent band member had come to grief as it was to listen to the rest of the group in action. lauding the easy life of the slacker might be what will ultimately sees darkbuster drift into obscurity, as there doesn’t seem to have been any effort made to distinguish themselves from a hundred and one other forgettable pop-rock non-entities
random hand: unleashed from the badlands of bradford with a livewire trombone playing singer who led the frantically dancing masses like the pied-piper of madness, this was easily the most joyous half an hour of the day. it has to be the first time the ska-punk crossover has worked properly for me, having been subject in the past to a long list of bands who use a barrage of bland saxophone noodling to lull the crowd into a coma. in fact maybe the source of random hand’s success is that its guitar-based punk with a mile-a-minute delivery from a bouncing frontman, who drives the music into a higher gear with his trombone only when the singing has stopped. whatever the cause, this was awesome
deadline: there should be a law against this degree of musical blandness. there was noise of some kind if memory serves correct, could have been drums and guitar, could have been the distant rumble of heavy goods vehicles, and a ginger haired woman warbling like a songbird that can’t remember the tune. it was such a come down after the celebration of random hand that i wouldn’t have flinched if someone had started to rub medical alcohol into my eyes.
1s
the restarts: returning to the isolated reaches of the north-west of england from the far away promised land of london for the second time since last year’s anarchistic undertone’s christmas gig, the restarts would probably be a lot more popular if they realised the country to the north of birmingham is not a leper colony. although being veterans of the genre for over ten years, the touring schedule rarely brings the spiky haired trio to this uncivilized backwater, which probably has a lot to do with the uncertain reception from the crowd who didn’t know many songs. presumably the reluctance to journey beyond the capital has also resulted in a great band being put lower down the bill than should really be allowed and it disappointingly affected the overall impression of the set.
peter and the test-tube babies: being a devoted fan of the distillers [rip] i was preprogrammed to dislike the aforementioned peter after he acted like a prick in front of the undisputed queen of loveliness brody dale [ah, be still my pounding heart]. however, believing it was only fair to judge this bastard, er, band, on the merits of its performance alone, i can say without fear of contradiction that they were shit. undoubtedly a great deal of people do enjoy the pub hunour of songs about picking up transvestites and fighting in the street, but i am not so impressed with the unfunny toilet jokes and frankly amateurish guitar playing; constant squeals of high-pitched feedback marred the performance or playing stopped altogether when he couldn’t remember the riffs. in the right setting of a working man’s pub on a friday night after way too many drinks it probably does work, but not today and certainly not good enough to be on
after the restarts.
1s [and that’s being generous]
us bombs: at this stage of the night i had realized the folly of not migrating between the two stages, because although this punk-lite seemed to hit the mark with younger members of the audience who were more familiar with the offspring than with the clash, many of us simply looked on and finished our drinks waiting for the proper headliners to appear. that’s not to say the us bombs didn’t give it their all and really dominated the room, its just most of us aren’t from california and don’t give a shit about the internal preoccupations of the sunshine state. the first two songs of the set were called something like ‘sons of america’ and ‘american youth’; maybe someone should of explained this is bolton where the sun hasn’t shown its face since 1861 and the kids have bigger problems than worrying if their parents are going to raise their allowances by giving them another american express card to play with. ill chosen songs considering the surroundings is probably the best way of describing the overall experience.
agnostic front: surviving this explosion of new york’s finest hitting the stage would be somewhere along the same lines of dealing with fireworks; light the fuse and retreat to a safe distance. the leading portion of the crowd became a seething mass of flailing limbs and airborne pint cups as a relentless barrage of high-octane songs laid waste to the main stage. it was, as agnostic’s frontman said himself, a real shame that fellow hardcore legends mdc were playing at the same time in the other room, so it seemed the band were compensating for the lack of planning by the gig organizers by delivering a performance that was little short of a declaration of war against pretty much the entire universe. if the world had ended when agnostic front were on stage, no one would have noticed or even cared.
I will let the others fill in the names of the support acts and a more educated opinion of the gig.
)
