Although it seems like I just posted the review of the Wolfmother gig not 5 mins ago, it really was last weeks effort with a bit of work needed just now to finish it!
Anyway, last night I happened to go to a Badly Drawn Boy concert at the Queens Hall in Edinburgh. As you may know, or may not know, the Queens Hall is a fairly small venue, almost church like in its interior due to the seats, which are basically pews…
A friend of mine went to see the Cribs here a while back and said how strange it was moshing amongst pews. But whatever floats your boat!
Back to the gig though, the warmup act was someone called Malcolm Middleton, who was this singer on acoustic guitar with a drummer who played on about half of the songs. If you just listened to the music, you could quite easily mistake it for Badly Drawn Boy, as it is fairly “Badly Drawn Boyish” so to speak! But the lyrics were quite possibly depressing, one of the songs was called “We’re all going to die” and an another optimistic one went on about how his songs were shite. After this happy introduction, Badly Drawn Boy came on. The one word that could really be used to describe him was MOODY! For the first few songs, he was really good, playing a few from the first album by himself. But as soon as the band came on he kept getting all irratable/lazy/moody. I mean that he introduced songs by saying that ‘this song would probably sound shit’ or ‘it would be a fooking miracle if this song came out okay’. He then had incidents where he would stop and start various songs on the keyboard because his wrist was hurting from playing it, only after one song! There were also incidents were he was positive that the effect on the guitar was wrong when it clearly sounded fine, this happened mainly on “Fewer Words”. He did even have to take in the break in the middle for a cigarette, but I suppose we should be thankful for this because when he came back he was so much more happier and positive. He even apoligised for his earlier behaviour, but some of the crowd had already left! The second half of the set was much better, as he basically was just not so darn pessimistic and did not make as many mistakes or complain. Most of the songs that were played were from the newest album, Born In The UK, but there a few from One Plus One Is One and Bewilderbeast.
Overall, I thought that it was really good and despite his moodiness and shortcomings, he played well on the majority of songs. The one thing that amazed me was the pessimism of artists in that genre, but if thats your kind of thing, then fair enough!