Latest 7 magazine

Warm up

Last year’s Great Escape was at times, erm, great, so this year has a lot to live up to. It takes a band of some magnitude to set the tone for the annual weekend event featuring more than 200 bands playing 30 venues, and We Are Scientists step in for the event’s official warm-up show perfectly. The largely industry and so-hip-we-buy tickets-for-gigs-before-anyone-else-even-knows-they’re-happening crowd fills the XFM stage at The Barfly to bursting point. You might expect this posturing audience to feign indifference whilst carefully adjusting their angular side-partings or pulling their skinny jeans up, but in the company of the indie-pop Brooklyn act, all pretension is thrown to the wind as seemingly everyone gets sucked into dancing. A brilliant set paying attention to both full length albums, though perhaps more to the crowd-pleasing In Love and Squalor, is rapturously received as the band demonstrate why they should have been as big as sound-alikes, The Killers. Lead singer Keith Murray and guitarist Chris Cain are the comedy double act of the weekend, providing silly, surreal banter and affectionate mockery between indie anthems a-plenty. Tonight’s proper party atmosphere sets the scene for what should be another ‘great’ weekend. Read the rest of this article »

Can someone please explain why Girls Aloud are treated by the serious music press as the manufactured group it’s ok to like? From tonight’s display, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Though admittedly some of their tunes are decent enough pop (recent single ‘Call The Shots’ most notably), too much is just dull, low-rent dross. The girls can’t really sing and they can’t really dance. They’re paid to pout a bit and sell underwear, which they do kind of well. There’s little fun for anyone who genuinely likes music here. As one Latest 7 reader recently wrote, it’s like burlesque for kids, though they forgot to add ‘minus any talent’.
**
Nick Aldwinckle

Brighton Centre, Tuesday 13 May

Once the awkward poster-boy for avant-pop, with android complexion and a shock of white hair, 80s electro maverick Gary Numan has, in recent years, resembled more of a middle-aged goth. Recreating seminal album Replicas in its entirety (even outtakes ‘We Have A Technical’ and ‘The Crazies’), fans old and new couldn’t ask for more.

A stunning blend of the original songs filtered through Numan’s modern-day industrial rock persona; live, guitars replace electronic thrums and a crashing drum kit replaces cold machine rhythm with brutal bombast. The high points are inevitably the moody, paranoid, nevermore – theatrical ‘Down In The Park’ and crowd-pleaser ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’, but also, surprisingly, the relatively low-key ‘We Are So Fragile’ and ‘You Are In My Vision’ are given new life through their metal makeover. Unfortunately the record’s occasional weaker tracks slow tonight’s momentum, though with a sold-out Dome thoroughly seduced (particularly when non-Replicas track ‘Cars’ is thrown in), no one cares.

Brighton Dome, 12 March 2008
Nick Aldwinckle