Go The Bees!
Aug.11, 2006, filed under Miscellany
Frood and I went to see The Bees last night at The Reading Rooms in Dundee. The last gig we went to was Electric 6 at The Lemon Grove in Exeter so I was very excited.
Well, Frood has been to see Mika Bomb since then but I was a bit poorly that evening.
THE BEES AM FAB!
It was a very small venue — it felt about half the size of the Lemon Grove. The crowd was unreasonably staid, in the main, with many of the audience looking like they were hardly enjoying themselves at all, although that might just be the natural demeanour of Dundonians. At one point I came very close to telling the two blokes in front of me to shift out of my way and go to the back if they didn’t want to dance. I only didn’t because L from work had already given them a row for dropping a beer can on the floor, and had shoved it down the back of bloke on the right’s pants when he refused to pick it up. We don’t think he noticed.
The set was great. Every single track it seemed that the entire band changed positions. Get to the end, all change. I wonder if they ever argue over who gets to play the maracas. Everyone got a shot of everything except the Hammond Organ player and the guitarist, presumably either because they can’t play anything else or no one else can play their instruments the way they do.
They opened with Wash In The Rain, and I was delighted to find that they are even better live than I hoped, and their distinctive style is even more apparent on stage. Gordon admitted he had serious cowboy hat envy before that track had finished. They let us hear some of the new material, which was just a tease as their new album, Octopus, isn’t released until January. As people were busy whooping and hollering, and L was chattering in my ear between tracks I didn’t get to hear what any of the new ones are called, but the slide guitar sound on one of the new tracks was the sort you can feel vibrating through your sternum. Unfortunately most of the audience seemed to be there to hear Chicken Payback, screaming for it after each track, to the point where L said she’d have just played the damn thing at the start and told everyone to fuck off if they weren’t interested in hearing the rest of their music. We all knew they’d keep it until last, or even the encore. Which is what they did.
The surprise moment was the live version of the instrumental track The Russian, from Free The Bees. Absolutely stonking. Well worth the price of entry alone, even with the extorionate ‘convenience charge’ levied by Ticketmaster.
The Bees are currently on their Highlands and Islands tour and will be playing some more venues across Scotland — see the website for details. Catch them if you can.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
