Woke up this morning, well it's a start

Ah there you go, your expectations are high based on albums you know and love and a previous sighting of their live show. So you sign up for the new tour full of excitement and then what happens? The venue lets you down. Alabama 3 was hotly awaited – you know them, most famous for the Sopranos theme song, creators of some of the finest wordplay in songs and a range of musical styles – acid, country, house music is only the start. Normally fantastic – but no small part of it is that you need to hear what they’re saying/ singing. Sadly at the Cheese & Grain the booming acoustics turned the vocals to sludge. Larry Love’s suggestion that D Wayne Love’s mic should be switched off between songs to avoid offence (none taken) wasn’t necessary because the hall swallowed up all his words and rearranged them into soup. Still, I had heard Larry’s comments so it can’t have been all bad. This acoustic thing can get quite exciting – if you look at the Bellowhead tour blog you’ll see some scandalised comments about the St Albans (I think) show. At the time I just thought it couldn’t make that much difference, everyone can get the mix right and balance it to the hall’s natural acoustics. (For more information look up the Bear’s website [Google Owsley Stanley] which has lots of information on how he used to set up the sound for the Grateful Dead – and they were invariably completely off their faces and still had it sounding good. But I digress.)


Photo by Looby Loo
Anyway, musically the Alabama 3 put on a fine show and gradually cranked up the volume too – it’s been a while since I’ve stood in front of a speaker stack feeling a strong blast of air. Just like those old Maxell adverts they used to have in hi fi mags. Fantastic. All the band did their stuff and, if you knew the lyrics then you knew what was going on. Classics like Hypo Full of Love, U don’t dans 2 tekno, My name’s Johnny Cash (how great is that? Very great). Old stuff and new stuff but good stuff. The light show was clearly designed to flush out any latent epileptics in the crowd but they’re a hardy bunch in Frome so no obvious delirium occurred – or none that required the help of St John’s Ambulance. Thinking of which, why has no live music fan ever signed up for them and so get into every concert free – they never seem to have much to do. Instead it’s always people who are several centuries older than the crowd – although that’s getting harder the longer the old folk go on (ever noticed the fans at some of these things – Van Morrison's are archaic, Pink Floyd's were particularly wretched - and that was over 12 years ago).
And at this point it’s support act time. For this gig in Frome the support act was the Olive Tree just up the road and round the corner. Fine old pub, clean, serves a very nice pint of Courage and also has a good line in thai food. Some slightly wayward interaction with the staff could be put down to country ways – we don’t get down from the hills too often. All of which meant that the support act we were supposed to be seeing we didn’t. I wonder if the acoustics were any better for them.