Martin McAloon (Prefab Sprout) - Login Lounge, Camberley- 19th November 2025

For many years Prefab Sprout have been on my 'want to see sometime' list, but they never tour and I found out fairly recently that front-man and song writer, Paddy McAloon suffers from Ménière's disease, a condition affecting the inner ear that causes vertigo, tinnitus, and hearing loss, which means he can't play with other musicians, so it seems it will never happen, but then Martin McAloon's "Two Wheels Good" tour appeared on my Facebook feed.

Martin is Paddy's younger brother and bass player with the band, so this seemed as close as I was likely to get and, better still, he was playing a small venue I'd never visited before less than 10 miles away. I bought a ticket.

One Facebooker bemoaned the fact that it was 'just him with a guitar', so I knew I wasn't getting a full band experience, but I was still interested to hear how the songs would sound live, especially in such a stripped back form.

It was below freezing as I made my way into the Login Lounge, but I was greeted by a friendly woman and wandered upstairs to the performance area.

By day, the Login Lounge is a remote workspace with meeting rooms people can rent by the hour to work from and it looks a pretty pleasant environment to do that in.

Upstairs there was a large bar area at one end and a lot of tables leading to a fair sized (for the size of the venue) stage. Lighting was good, not too bright, but equally not coal hole dark. Apparently, they hold lots of music and comedy events here in the evenings and at weekends.

I sat with a friendly couple from Wokingham and we chatted about musical tastes before a figure with straggly white hair and beard appeared and greeted us with a cheery "Hello!" - Martin looks very much like his brother does in recent photographs.

The McAloons and their friend, Mick, the drummer hail from 'a village between villages' in Durham and always ploughed their own furrow, musically, but are a band I hold in fond memory, partly, at least, for the time I played their greatest hits album over and over on a drive home from a glorious day's skiing in St Anton. "Cars and Girls", especially takes me back to that day.

The tour was to celebrate 40 years of their most famous album, "Steve McQueen" (released as "Two Wheels Good" in the USA, hence the tour name) and the first set consisted of the tracks from the album in order.

Martin was alone on the stage with an array of guitars which he explained were all tuned to different keys for different songs.

He started with "Faron Young" and, if I'm honest, it didn't work that well to my ears - I started to wonder if the Facebook naysayer had a point...

Next was "Bonny", a song I didn't know, but sounded far better than "Faron Young".

This was followed by a song I know well, "Appetite", which did sound good - It's not a 'big production' song and sounded pretty good, Martin's voice not sounding dissimaler (allowing for the passing of time) to his brother's and he can certainly play a guitar well, although a few times during the set, the lack of other instruments did make a key change seem a bit abrupt.

The next two familiar songs, "When Love Breaks Down" and "Johnny, Johnny" (titled "Goodbye Lucille #1" on the album) were equally good and I was starting to enjoy the set, Martin chatting amiably between the songs, recounting anecdotes from the bands time, notably around the writing or recording of the songs.

The rest of the album tracks were less familiar to me, but enjoyable, it seemed Martin had hit his stride.

The first set rounded out with a song that I didn't catch the title of, but he said they'd wanted on the album, but producer Thomas Dolby didn't like!. It would have been fine as an album track, but apparently, failed to make the next two albums as well, so became a bit of a 'lost' track - He actually asked us not to record it, to keep it that way!

Around a 15 minute break then ensued as Martin took a break and the audience nipped to the loo and/or bought a drink for the second set.

Martin's promotion for the tour promised 'all the hits' and he certainly seemed to cover the ones I recalled.

He started with a song Jimmy Nail covered, "Cowboy Dreams" and then "Hey Manhattan", a song that has a 'big' sound, but he managed to pull it off pretty well with just a guitar! As a contrast, the very stripped down, even in original form, "Cruel" followed and then a few songs I knew less well "Nancy Let Down Your Hair" (seemingly about a crush on a female boss!), "Spinning Belinda" (this was requested from the crowd and he'd forgotten the words, so played a bit of the tune), "Horsin' Around", "Cue Fanfare", "Machine Gun Ibiza" and "Atlantis".

In between, he played "We Let The Stars Go" as a request and it was warmly received.

The last few songs were a mix of hits and requests from the audience, "Dublin" and "Golden Calf" being slotted in between "Carnival 2000", "Life Of Surprises", "Cars and Girls" and, unsurprisingly, "King Of Rock n Roll" as the finale.

There was no pretence of an encore, just a "Thanks for coming along and I'll be at the merch stand over there any moment now!"

Would I have liked to have heard these songs played with a full band to give the bigger production sound some of them deserve? I can't deny I would, but that's very unlikely to ever happen, so it was great to hear these songs played by someone who played them originally and with a bit of a twist due to the limited instrumentation avaiable.

I did wonder if he may have backing tracks to fill out the sound (My first time seeing Echobelly did this, to good effect), but that didn't seem to be the case, everything came from whichever guitar he used and an effects box for it.

On reflection, I'd have liked to have heard "If You Don't Love Me" and "The Sound of Crying" rather than some of the less familiar songs, but I've only come to that opinion the next day, so it wasn't a big problem.

Overall, though, I did enjoy the gig. Martin's a personable fellow, his voice close to his brother's and his music the way (on the whole) the band would have wanted it, within the constraints.

I suspect his performance would seem a little empty in a bigger venue, but in the excellent Login Lounge it worked very well and I came away very happy to have enjoyed an evening of Prefab Sprout music at last!

Setlist:
Steve McQueen album - first set
Faron Young
Bonny
Appetite
When Love Breaks Down
Johnny Johnny/Goodbye Lucille #1 (Name of track on Album)
Hallelujah
Moving the River
Horsin' Around
Desire As
Blueberry Pies
When the Angels
Bonus track

Other Songs - second set
Cowboy Dreams
Hey Manhattan
Cruel
Nancy let down you hair
Spinning belinda (a bit of the tune, he'd forgotten the lyrics)
We let the stars go
Cue fanfare
Machine gun ibiza
Atlantis
Carnival 2000
Dublin
Life of surprises
Golden Calf
Cars and Girls
King of Rock n Roll

The Devout - The Boiler Room, Guildford - 14/11/2025

Some tribute bands are really good and The Devout have a reputation as one of the best Depeche Mode tribute bands (from how many, though , I don't know) and the Boiler Room was packed when I arrived at around 7:30

I was a fan of DM in their early, Vince Clark and a little later days, but lost interest as they veered into the leather and studs period.

Sadly, the first hour of The Devout's set was mostly dirgey leather period songs that, especially with the singer's habit of shouting "Guildford!" and letting the crowd do far more than their fair share of the singing, merged into a mostly dull wall of morose music.

There were 3 people on the stage, two at the back behind synthesizers and a singer in a vest.

Musically, they sounded OK, although mostly the sound was coming from synthesizers, so one wonders how much they were actually doing live, but the 'singer' really wasn't that great. Even to my untrained ear, I could hear him clearly missing notes plenty of times, which might explain why he was so keen to shout at the audience and hold his mike out to them.

When I got home, I put on "A Broken Frame" and the difference in vocal quality between The Devout's front man and DM's was night and day. A stark contrast, for example, to the Cure tribute I'd seen a couple of months earlier.

For a couple of songs, one of the synthesizer players took the vocal lead and he had a far more tuneful voice to my ear.

I'll be honest, an hour in and I was seriously considering cutting my losses and heading home for an early night and a Horlicks.

The performance wasn't great, the venue packed and oppressively hot for a November evening (There was a brief pause at one point as a young man had to be helped out after passing out, although it still didn't compare to the Summer night I'd seen Dave Wakeling's version of The Beat).

However, the last ten songs almost redeemed the evening for me.

Starting with DM's first single, "New Life", they rattled through a number of the livelier early songs, along with later hits such as "Everything Counts" and "Personal Jesus", which clearly enlivened the audience, rounding out with the iconic, but not universally loved by DM fans, "Just Can't Get Enough" (which went down a storm) and then the downbeat "Never Let Me Down Again" to finish off at which point I made my way to the welcome coolness of the evening.

It was apparent from walking in that The Devout have a strong following, but I didn't feel they lived up to the hype.

The main thing that I took from the evening, though, was that I have a narrow window of favourite DM songs and the later material, on the whole, is just not for me. If it is, you may well enjoy The Devout more than I did, plenty of people seemed to.

No photos or videos, it was far too crowded to get a decent line of sight - The one at the top is taken from The Devout's website

Setlist:
Black Celebration
Policy of Truth
World in My Eyes
A Question of Time
Sacred
Stripped
Blasphemous Rumours
Leave in Silence
Photographic
Something to Do
Somebody
A Question of Lust
In Your Room
Told You So
Walking in My Shoes
New Life
See You
People Are People
Shake the Disease
Home
Personal Jesus
But Not Tonight
Everything Counts
Enjoy the Silence
Just Can't Get Enough
Never Let Me Down Again

ABBA Voyage - ABBA Arena, London - 9th November 2025

I had heard so many people say how good the ABBA Voyage show was that I was intrigued. As my wife, unusually, expressed an interest as well, I bought us two tickets for an afternoon session

We made the trek to the Olympic Park from Waterloo station relatively easily and grabbed a burger and a beer before going in to the Arena.

Inside there were further food and drink and merchandise outlets, as well as toilets and complimentary cloakrooms.

Our particular event had been hijacked by Radio 2 and turned into a Children In Need benefit and Scott Mills was holding a DJ session in the pre-Arena area, which made it pretty crowded, but passed a few minutes before we dropped off our coats and headed into the Dance Floor area.

The venue has a fairly small floor level area and 3 seated areas behind. It's not a massive venue, but it's a good sized one.

As we went in an animation of a snowy forest was playing on mesh screens dropped down in front of us and this continued for around 45 minutes until an announcement that the event was about to begin.

Flashing vertical white lights heralded things and then the 4 virtual members of ABBA appeared (seemingly) from the floor of the stage.

The first two song, "The Visitors" and "Hole In Your Sole" were relatively obscure ones, I guess they work you in gently as you're still trying to work out what is happening on the 'stage' and how they are doing it.

Things definitely hit their stride with "SOS" and "Knowing Me, Knowing You" ("Ah ha!" as Alan Partridge would say), followed by the gentler, more melodic, but still familiar "Chiquitita" and "Fernando".

The performance makes clever use of lighting, huge, almost wrap around, screens, a live band and, of course, the "ABBAtars".

They are mostly the size you would expect to see people on a stage and, as such the detail isn't too clear. Once or twice I recall thinking the movements looked a little stiff (like computer game characters), but more often I marvelled at the natural little actions that I would have felt extremely difficult to replicate, a flick of the hair, a half turn, it was remarkable at times and a credit to the people who put this all together.

Photography and Videoing is forbidden on pain of expulsion, so here's an approved video about ABBA Voyage to give a taste of it

Throughout, too, the ABBAtars were projected in large scale onto screens either side of the stage and, now and then looked a little CGI'd, but at times the detail was so good that I feel convinced that some of the content must have been based upon high quality film footage from the 70s and 80s.

However it was done, it was very impressive and it was hard at times not to feel you were watching people perform live in front of you.

The band were good, getting a turn to perform when they performed most of Does Your Mother Know without the ABBAtars.

They were absent too, for a couple of songs, when an animation of an Aztec-looking person took on a fantasy journey to a castle where the images of the band members were hewn in rock. It was different and a reminder that you weren't at a live concert, but an audio-visual show.

The lighting played a big part in this.

At one point lines of dotted lights showed on the 'stage' over and behind the ABBAtars, while rods of lights descended over the audience, echoing the lights on stage and giving the impression of an extension of one place. One another song, beams of red lights over the dance floor area did likewise.

The song that started it all, "Waterloo" was shown in the form of archive film footage, projected on the mesh screens ahead of the stage again.

That said, it was genuinely quite hard not to react, in the most part, as if you were seeing and hearing live performers on the stage.

All 4 ABBAtars had a little chat with the audience and they even appeared as they do now briefly at the end to thank us for coming.

The main 'set' ended with "Dancing Queen" and then they were quickly 'back' for an encore featuring "The Winner Takes It All" (probably my favourite ABBA song, they do melancholy very well I think).

We left, both very happy we'd come along.

However, on the way home we agreed there seemed little point going again. It's not a live gig, the next time will be the same.

It is, though, a great technical feat and an enjoyable experience - Go and see it, even if you're not an ABBA fan, there is plenty to enjoy!

PS: Some have decried this as a threat to live music. Obviously, for ABBA it's not, they will never tour again, but I can see it proving popular as a concept for many performers past their best (I imagine a similar Beatles concert, for example, would be hugely popular) or as a way for people to see performers in huge demand; someone like Taylor Swift springs immediately to mind, even if not for me, to be reachable by even bigger audiences.

Setlist:
The Visitors
Hole in Your Soul
SOS
Knowing Me, Knowing You
Chiquitita
Fernando
Mamma Mia
Does Your Mother Know
Take a Chance on Me
Eagle
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
Voulez-vous
Don’t Shut Me Down
I Still Have Faith in You
Waterloo
Thank You for the Music
Money, Money, Money
Dancing Queen
Encore:
The Winner Takes It All

Dub Pistols - West End Centre, Aldershot - 24th October 2025

Sometimes I take a bit of a speculative punt on an act; this was one such occasion.

I knew the name "Dub Pistols", but next to nothing about them, but having no acts to see in October and them appearing at the West End Centre, very close to my home, I decided to take a gamble after listening to a few of their tracks online.

Even from those, though, I realised I was either going to really enjoy the evening or, possibly, hate it.

There was no support, not a bad thing often, and the band (6 mostly middle aged men) ambled onto the stage about on time.

I can't find a setlist anywhere, so I can't really tell you what they performed, although I do recall "West End Story", "Real Gangster", "Running From The Thoughts", "Mucky Weekend", possibly "Rub A Dub" and "Pistoleros" and a few covers "I Predict A Riot", "Peaches" and "Gangsters", which (for me) were the highlights.

On the positive side, they're a very energetic act and there were plenty of people having a great time there, clearly familiar with the songs and the band.

To me, though, the tracks soon began to sound very alike, but I was happy to move along with the groove and the dubbing by the MC, which was pretty good, I have to say.

Barry, the lead man, suggested we all go to the bar for a drink after about an hour and most people did (Some seemingly didn't come back!), which seemed to surprise the band who I think expected a cry for an encore "That's never happened to us before! It's an encore, not an interval", the MC told us, somewhat bemused!

I moved back a bit for the second part and the sound was actually better there, but I was starting to get a headache (I'm pretty sure there were some substances being smoked around me, too, which didn't help), so, although I did enjoy the rendition of "Gangsters", I was out of the door when the set finished.

All told, I certainly didn't hate "Dub Pistols", they put on a lively show, but they're not really 'my thing' and I don't imagine I'd go and see them again.

Setlist:
If I find one, I'll add it.

Nerina Pallot - Fiery Bird, Woking - 28th September 2025

I'd seen Nerina Pallot before at The Boiler Room and been impressed with her variety of songs, her voice and her easy going manner.

That had been with a small band, but when I saw she was playing at a venue in Woking that I'd never heard of, I decided I'd go and see her again.

The venue turned out to be part of a disused office building (Someone said it was once KFC's regional HQ) and felt a lot like the venue I'd been to in Bracknell to see the Police 3.0 a few months earlier - A big room with a very low stage and a bar area.

I spoke to a friendly man at the 'merch' stand and bought a copy of her covers CD, made up of songs from artists from towns on this tour (disappointingly, she decided against my suggestion of covering A Town Called Malice, but did cover a Paul Weller song).

Disappointingly, for me, I discovered the venue was all seated. I like to move around a bit at gigs (My wife would definitely discourage me from calling it dancing) and being stuck in a hard plastic chair isn't my idea of a good gig, but it was what it was and I found a seat near the front, so I'd have a good view.

The tickets said 7:00PM start (on a Sunday evening), so I assumed Nerina probably wouldn't be on stage until 8:00, so I don't think I was alone in being a little surprised when she appeared at 7:15! Good job I got there early!

Nerina was alone on the stage, with an electronic piano and a couple of guitars and started with a couple of song on an electric guitar, before moving to the keyboard.

Singing unaccompanied by a band, I was even more struck by how good Nerina's voice is.

She has a clarity and a great range.

Another thing I've always liked about her is the variety of her songs, she's not just a ballard singer or a 'rock chick', she even had a 'Randy Newman'esque song (written in a hurry for an advert, she tells us, because "Randy Newman was too expensive!") in You and Me (The Dog Song), laughing that people have said they had this played at their wedding, which made her wonder what they were trying to say...

As in Guildford (where she chatted so much, she was told to hurry up to finish the set), she chatted amiably with the audience, even eliciting some 'news' from the audience (One woman was there alone on her husband's birthday because he 'hates live music' and someone announced the arrival of a nephew).

Before she played "Everybody's Gone To War" she quipped, "I'll play my one hit now and then normal service will be resumed".

At one point, she called the friendly man from the Merch stand up on stage.

He turning out to be her husband who, she told us, has more stage fright than her (despite being an accomplished keyboard player, it transpired) and he accompanied her on Wild Wood, her 'local act' cover for the evening.

There was a brief interlude mid set, while the audience got drinks and Nerina had a costume change, I see this more and more, maybe the audiences at gigs I go to need a pee break mid way!

She ended the set and then returned mere moments later to give us her cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart - Usually I hate covers of that song (Paul Young's emotionless dirge being the worst offender), but Nerina's arrangement is very different, while retaining all the emotion and despair of the original.

If I'm honest, I prefered her gig at the Boiler Room, with the bigger sound of a band and being able to stand up for the performance gave the gig a more energetic, less passive feel, but perhaps that's just a personal preference. I'd have liked to have heard "Alice At The Beach", too, the song that introduced her to me, but as you can see, she covered a lot of her back catalogue and I suspect a lot of those there found her through her earlier material.

If nothing else I discovered two albums from her I'd not heard, "Into The Light of a Dark Black Night" (the covers album) and "A Psalm For Emily Salvi" (released in 2024 and somehow I'd not realised there was a whole album).

Overall, though, another very enjoyable performance by Nerina - She's performing at the Royal Albert Hall next May and I'm still toying with the idea of going, much as I dislike the hassle of going to central London for gigs these days.

Setlist:
These are songs I recall from the gig, the order is definitely wrong, except the encore
Everybody's Gone to War
Put Your Hands Up
I Don’t Know What I’m Doing
Sophia
Idaho
The Right Side (Not 100% sure about this one.)
You and Me (The Dog Song)
Geek Love
Learning to Breathe
Wild Wood (Paul Weller cover)
It Starts
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Real Late Starter
There's a River
Damascus
Bring Him Fire
Daphne and Apollo
Encore:
Love Will Tear Us Apart

Siouxsie & The Budgiees and The Cureheads - Boiler Room, Guildford - 1st August 2025

I used to be snooty about tribute bands, but I've come to recognise that they can be a lot of fun and, even where the original acts from 40 years ago are still touring, sometimes better than the real thing!

So, it was that I bought a (modestly priced, another advantage!) ticket to see two tribute bands (which turned out to be a little less than two, more in a bit) at the Boiler Room in Guildford.

The bands were "Siouxsie and the Budgiees" and "The Cureheads" (tributes to the Banshees and Cure, respectively.

When I arrived at the Boiler Room, I was a little surprised to see a notice saying the event was sold out, but there seemed to be a lot of students in town and it was a Friday evening. Inside, though there were few people at 7:40, so I wandered into the garden and waited for a while.

I came back in a little before 8 and bought myself a pint of Guiness (at an eye-watering £8 - I know it helps support the venue, but bloody hell, that's expensive!) and found myself at the front of the crowd in the still quite empty venue.

Around 8, the band appeared. A couple of middle aged blokes (Phil and Nigel) on guitar and bass, a young drummer (whose name I didn't catch) and a woman, Ceri (probably of similar age to the guitarists, but it was hard to be sure in all the makeup and the wig - She went for an early Siouxsie look!).

They started with Israel, a hit, of course, and mostly played well know Banshee's songs, the musical sound was spot on, sounding exactly as they were played in period, but for me, Ceri's voice just missed sounding right. She can certainly sing, but she didn't sound like Siouxsie to me.

That said, it's hard to replicate a distinctive vocal sound and the songs were great to listen to (the sound was excellent, ever word was audible in the mix, which is rarely the case even for supposedly top flight acts) and everyone was undoubtedly having a good time, despite the heat, me included.

I can't recall the full setlist (and am yet to find one even for another recent gig), but they played Happy House, Christine, Arabian Knights, Wheels On Fire, Hong Kong Garden and other hits, all of which received loud applause and rightly so.

There wasn't an encore (I noticed "Dear Prudence" at the bottom of the setlist on the stage floor, so I guess they ran out of time - There was a bit of a delay with a drum kit malfunction), but after a break, about 9:15, the guitarist, drummer and bassist from the Budgiees appeared! Clearly, there was a degree (!) of overlap in these two bands.

For a while, I wondered if (in all the Robert Smith makeup), we might have Ceri back, but it was a different singer, Rabbit Schmidt (according to Wikipedia!).

I'd been impressed with the band's accuracy of Banshees sound, so it was great to hear that they sounded just as accurate playing The Cure tracks.

Of course, for talented musicians, the difficult bit of being a tribute band is getting the vocal sound to sound like the original and they definitely did this better than Ceri had managed, at least to my ears.

I have to be honest and say that I'm not a hardcore Cure fan and there were a lot of songs I didn't recognise at all, but they were (mostly) enjoyable and all performed excellently. The singer did quip a few times that if you'd come with a 'mad Cure fan', you'd recognise the next song.

The ones I was more familiar with included Lullaby, In Between Days, Just Like Heaven, Let's Go to Bed and the twon in the encore, Friday I'm In Love and Boys Don't Cry.

The familiar songs were great and sounded very much like the originals to me, allowing for them being played live.

Overall, it had been a great night. Both bands (or versions of the band) were excellent musicians and they performed the tracks with skill and energy, rewarded by a packed house of enthusiastic gig-goers of very mixed ages (some were around when these bands were the new kids on the block, but some, like 3 probably teenage girls in goth getup in front of me, were definitely not even a twinkle in their parent's eyes in the early 1980s).

It was very hot (not quite as bad as when I'd seen The Beat a couple of years before, but I don't think I'd sweated as much since then!), but I'd only ventured away from the front of the packed crowd after the Cureheads main set finished and went home very happy with my night out.

A great night out for anyone who likes Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Cure.

Setlist:
Siouxsie and the Budgiees
TBC

The Cureheads - From another gig, but close
Plainsong
Pictures of You
Play For Today
A Strange Day
Torture
A Night Like This
Push
Lullaby
The Walk
Let's Go to Bed
Last Dance
Kyoto Song
In Between Days
Just Like Heaven
A Forest
Encore:
Friday I'm in Love
Boys Don't Cry

St Vincent - O2 Academy, Bournemouth - 30th June 2025

St Vincent (or more accurately Annie Clark) is not a woman who you can easily categorise - You never know what she will do next.

With every album there's a new style/image and sometimes the shift is quite dramatic.

I'd seen her before, on the Daddy's Home tour, where the style was quite 70s and mellow.

They had been at Glastonbury the day before this gig, so I had an idea that this was going to be a hard-rock St Vincent and so it proved to be.

I arrived just before 8 to see one of two support acts just finishing, but I saw so little of their performance I can't really comment on it.

About 8:30, the expected support act, Cult oF Venus, arrived. This is just one woman with a flowing grey gown (a bit like a wraith!), long blonde hair and a box of electrics (which reminded me of the support act for Nouvelle Vague) although she also had an electric guitar.

Her sound was predominantly electronic and she was quite enjoyable, albeit rather etherial and the vocals were a bit lost in the mix (a near universal flaw with support acts!).

Some of the songs were quite melodic and she seemed to have a great voice, but then she'd tweak something on the box and there would be a discordant jar in the music - Odd, but interesting.

She got a good reception and deserved the loud applause when she finished.

We then had a prolonged wait for St Vincent, to the point at which people started slow clapping and whistling no doubt prompted by the fact that it was getting very hot in the venue, despite effective air con, but when the band did appear, at 9:30, that was quickly forgotten.

The tour was in support of the most recent album, All Born Screaming, so obviously we got a number of tracks from that, including the opener, Reckless.

This set the tone, Annie, wearing a grey jacket and shorts, over tights, with shoulder length black hair (rather than the odd blonde wig(?) of the previous tour) and her guitarist played with lots of thrashing and distortion, not heavy metal, but certainly on the loud end of rock.

"Fear the Future" (From her 'Masseduction' album) followed and then, possibly her best known song, "Los Ageless" (a great song and undoubtedly my favourite of hers) from the same album.

The stage looked bigger than I recall it from previous (many) visits to 'The Academy' (it was a nightclub of that name in my late teens/early twenties, so I've known it for many years), with a drummer to the rear right and a keyboardist to the left, and the guitarist and bass guitarist flanking Annie.

We then got another track from the latest album, "Broken Man" and then "Dilettante" during which she forgot to the lyrics and sang/spoke them for a verse, before the band joined in again for the rest of the song.

Another old favourite, "Birth in Reverse" and then "Pay Your Way in Pain", followed by "Flea" and "Big Time Nothing" from the latest album, sandwiching "Cheerleader".

At some point, I forget exactly when, Annie attempted to crowdsurf over the audience, but it seemed those in the front misunderstood her intention and they let her crash to the floor! She seemed ok, although jokingly pretended to have injured her back later on ("At least you have the NHS here").

She seemed pretty relaxed and convivial between tracks, probably talking more than most would have liked (perhaps we could have had another song or two), but it did make her seem a likeable performer, although in one manic moment, she hurled a cymbal stand from the drumkit into the crowd (this was more deftly handled than her, though, being caught by a couple of people before it could make substantial contact), so perhaps she was still a bit miffed about them dropping her!

"Marrow" from an earlier album, "Actor" followed and then "Violent Times" from the new album, which was a bit of a variation in tempo from the rest of the gig and excellent.

Another popular track, "New York" followed and then we had "Sugarboy" and a dramatic finale rendition of "All Born Screaming", the title track from the tour album.

By now we were close to the 11 O'clock curfew, but they came back for one more song, a stripped back "Candy Darling", demonstrating Annie's excellent singing voice after the loud and brash performance of most of the gig, although it had been apparent on some tracks.

Overall, the gig was, I expected, totally different to the last time I saw them. Noisy, thrashy, distorted guitars, even on the older tracks, but it was exciting and energy packed.

As on my first visit to see her, I'd worried that I may not like the performance after the Glastonbury coverage, but again, live, in a small venue, they were great and I'd happily go and see her a third time, if only to see the direction she takes next.

Definitely an imaginative, talented, artistic performer, but one who can put on a show that leaves you energised, entertained and excited.

Brilliant stuff from her and the band.

#stvincent

Setlist:
Reckless
Fear the Future
Los Ageless
Broken Man
Dilettante(Forgot lyrics of second verse)
Birth in Reverse
Pay Your Way in Pain
Flea
Cheerleader
Big Time Nothing
Marrow
Violent Times
New York
Sugarboy
All Born Screaming
Encore:
Candy Darling