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Saturday, May 24, 2008

Old rockers never die; they just reform for comeback gigs

Back to the Carling Academy in Bristol - this time to see Bradford's finest, Terrorvision. Four or five years after they'd called it a day they were back for a short tour and it seems they've lost none of their edge. In short, they were excellent. And they played all mine and Cath's favourite songs, including quite a few of the older ones like New Policy One, Middleman, Some People Say and Alice, What's the Matter?

The audience has aged though. It was quite interesting to see how many people had obviously come straight from work, or had dug out the vintage t-shirt from a tour back in the 90s, or simply had gone bald. We saw our first gig back in 95, so that was 13 years ago. And we were 19 then. So, if someone started following them earlier, and was a little bit older, they'd be pushing 40 now. But there was enough pogoing along to belie the advanced age of the audience.

The band had lost none of their energy, even if Mark was going a bit grey round the temples. Tony had grown his hair long again and jumped around so much he split his trousers with a high kick. Leigh had a shaved head and was trying to look like The Edge in a wraparound pair of shades. And Shutty was Shutty - with his name on his bass drum in case you didn't believe it was him.

The encore was six songs long - four of them acoustic, including Tequila. Tony said 'we could play this so it sounds like the kind of crap you hear ont' radio, but instead we're going to play it the way we think it should be played' which was much better. (There's a live version of Tequila free to download on their myspace page, but be warned it's one of the ugliest myspace pages you ever did see.)

Support was a band called The Sound Ex, who were refreshingly metal in their outlook, complete with guitar solos and hi-jinks on stage. They were giving out free CDs - always a winner in my book. And to be fair they weren't bad. We also bought the two albums by Tony's new band, Laika Dog, which on preliminary listens seem to be pretty good. Time will no doubt tell though; they may end up in the 'heap' of CDs we don't listen to any more.

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