Too Little Too Late

It's over. I have decided that I will no longer attend any concerts by the waste of space that is Mark E Smith,  last Wednesday's gig put paid to that.

I used to look forward to going to see The Fall, every now and again there would be a poor performance but more often than not it would be worth the wait. On the run up to last week's gig all I could think of was, it can't be as bad as the last two fiascoes. Stiff was the same.

And no it wasn't as bad as the last two but it wasn't good either. Smith was front of stage for maybe fifteen minutes of the forty five/fifty minutes the band were on stage, the rest of the time we got incoherent ramblings from a fud sitting behind an amp at the rear of the stage.

The final fifteen minutes were brilliant, a great version of Container Drivers and one of the best renditions of Blindness that I have ever heard but the rest of it although not awful it certainly was not great. During Blindness I thought to myself, well Smith you pulled it out of the bag there.  But on reflection, walking back to the car (not a great distance) both Stiff and myself agreed that it really wasn't good enough and certainly not worth the ticket price. This may be due to the fact that last month we saw The Wedding Present and although Sea Monsters isn't my favourite album and I really don't like this,  playing an album all the way through at a gig thing, the band were nothing short of brilliant,  100% effort  through the whole ninety minutes.

There are people that will say, if Smith wants to sit behind an amp all night, he can, he is MES. Yes he can and I'm sure he will continue to do so but I won't be paying his fucking wages to do so. I work hard for my money, I have the work ethic that Smith talks about but obviously doesn't know the meaning of. He will still produce the goods on this tour at other venues but frankly,  now I don't really care. I  believe that his best work is certainly behind him, you only have to listen to the few lyrics there are to the songs on the last couple of albums, which is quite sad as the band he has at the moment are very good with the possible exception of the keyboard player.

Anyway,  here is a great track played by JD Twitch who was djing on Wednesday night and played an absolutely blinding set of dub and rockabilly. I think that this was the reason that I wasn't more angry going home.

Just don't ask me about the support act, there is something really quite disturbing about a middle aged Mancunian acting the hard man and a young lady in a leotard singing dreadful lyrics over mediocre backing tapes.