A Twofer From Our Nottingham Correspondent

Mister Prime returns with reviews from shows last week on back-to-back nights. Those were the days...

A Week of Indie Royalty Old and New
(in the dank East Midlands of Old England)

On Wednesday night this week I went to an in-store at Rough Trade to see Pete Astor promoting his fine new album, 'One For The Ghost', with a signing and a short live set. He was ably accompanied on second guitar by Neil Scott (who was apparently one of the "ever-changing succession" of guitarists for the mighty Felt after Maurice Deebank left -- cheers, Wikipedia) who rounded out the sound nicely, what with the addition of a bit of stamped-foot percussion. And they bought their stools down off the small stage, got the audience to sit on the floor and played without mics to ensure an intimate and convivial atmosphere for the set -- half a dozen songs from '...Ghost' and his last album, 'Spilt Milk', and an encore of a rather marvellous version of the Weather Prophets song 'Like Frankie Lymon'. Excellent stuff.

Mr. Astor is an engaging host ("You'll see that I'm quite old..." were his first words to the frankly mostly less than youthful gathering of the faithful), and there was a certain amount of gentle chiding from Scott about the lack of rehearsal time and the number of pre-gig setlist changes that had been made and some suitably mordant between-song chat. Apparently the title of the song 'Tango Uniform', for example (for me, one of the highlights of the latest album), is a phonetic alphabet acronym for "Tits Up". ("As in, you know, dead..." explains the man himself, helpfully.)

As always, thanks, Mister Prime. I nicked a couple of wonderful YouTube clips of this very show from a Mr. Jim Bethell. Well done to you too, sir. One of the songs is brand-spankin' new and the other will take you back to aforementioned days in the Weather Prophets.





And up next from Mister Prime's impressive back-to-back nights...

And then on Thursday it was off to Leicester for the altogether more lively prospect of Canada's finest young purveyors of indie pop, Alvvays. Molly asked the crowd at one point what Leicester was like and the answer -- possibly misheard, misunderstood or both -- was "basic." "That's like a big insult in the UK, right...?" she asked, cheerfully. Not such a basic crowd though in that it was both significantly more youthful and significantly larger than the previous night's entertainment. Indeed, the O2 Academy at the University was a boisterous and sweaty sellout -- even if we were, in fact, in "Academy 2", round the back, not as it happens my favourite venue (despite the fact that it reminds me of the Riley Smith Hall at Leeds Uni, and thus of Fall gigs in the late '80s and the Afghan Whigs in particularly ferocious form) since it's rather like a school hall, unusually chill and characterless and redolent of suet farts and desultory crowds for midweek Wedding Present gigs, however much blue light and dry ice they try to disguise it with. "Nice room!" said Molly, cheerfully.

And so Alvvays continue their seemingly inevitable rise to greatness, and it's in a setting like this you realise that for all their impeccable jangle-pop pedigree pretty much everyone of this band's songs has a pretty unstoppable groove and killer, sing-along chorus. Alvvays were great, then, as ever -- and my regular afternoon trawl of the Internet for stage times (potential boon for the middle-aged gig goer that it is...) had revealed the added bonus that Spinning Coin were supporting! I made the effort to get there early for a change and was treated to a short but sprightly set-- the two front men swapping vocals and lead lines to great effect and making pretty determined inroads into warming up an initially skeptical crowd.

-- Mister Prime

No such luck finding clips from this particular show. We will have to make due with this video of my favorite song from the latest album. Thanks again, Mister Prime.