No Surface, Still Reeling

So if you want to be a petty, pedantic bitch, yes, the Manics concert was six days ago. I actually decided to wait this long, and here's why.

When I was in sixth grade, by some freak crossing of ectoplasmic streams, we cable-less lot picked up MTV2, then a new station. It played music videos. All the time. They used to have this program called Control Freak wherein viewers could vote via a webpage for what music video would come up next. Lucky for me that A Life Less Ordinary by Ash off of the little-appreciated soundtrack for the film of the same name, got picked once. And thus began my Anglophilia. I suddenly had to hear every Ash song ever made, again lucky for me that their most recent album (Free All Angels) had just been released, so there was a good deal of it.
Then one day, perusing their website, I joined their messageboard. I met people--almost exclusively English--who liked Ash as much as I did, and had all these other bands in their hearts I had never heard of. Enter Suede, Pulp, Blur, and the likes of the Manic Street Preachers. Their music had been everywhere--loud and angry and political, quiet and sentimental--they had even had the requisite member disappearance, the true hallmark of any decent band. They became the soundtrack of my awkward middle school years, a damn good thing given most kids my age were listening to crap like Nickelback. I had a band quoting Sartre and Chuck D in the same song.
When I discovered that they didn't tour the US much, in that in their then-eighteen year career they had toured twice, I broke a little. I'd probably never see them live, unless I happened to study abroad at the right time. Or something.

Flash forward to this summer. Depressed that I'm going to end up at BU, a crappy film program with no future, I had decided I was going to fill my fall with concerts--a small consolation prize for my life being over, at least in my mind. And then I saw tickets were on sale for the Manic Street Preachers first American tour in a decade. Attending BU or no, I was going. I'd live on the street if I had to.

So here it is, my review for a band I thought I'd never see live, much less at a venue of like 500.

1.The Place:
The Paradise is nothing new. 'Nuff said. However, James Dean Bradfield did do an instore gig at Newbury Comics earlier in the day, and he marveled repeatedly at the fact that a place like it still existed, which made me pretty happy. Sometimes I forget not every city has a Newbury Comics.
2. The People:
I'll say me and the three other under 21s were pretty much the youngest people there by a decade. I met a couple of super awesome people, one of whom is in college across town, but by and large, the Manics fans were over 30, quite a few were British expats, and one woman, Jo (we talked) had flown from England to see them, because she said she would've paid the cost of the flight and the ticket just to see them that close up in Britain. Nutso. Great crowd though, lots of energy, lots of love for a band that has sometimes been a little short on reciprocation.
3. The performers
Bear Hands opened for the Manics. Saw them open for We Are Scientists in July, and while their sort of cranky whiny dance rock made sense there, here it was one of those "what the fuck" moments. But honestly, I think any opener would have gotten the same response. You're opening for a band that has toured the United States like three times yet still somehow gathered a rabid following.
The Manics were flawless. Poor James had come down with a cold that morning, but you couldn't tell. He's still the loudest singer in music, and he and Nick were bounding around stage for the entire gig. They were funny, there was a ton of banter between the two of them, they did sort of a greatest hits gig (every other song was from Journal for Plague Lovers) and the audience was singing along so loudly you could hear them over the speakers.

Bloody brilliant.
Until next time,
WF
Don't judge yrself


(Thursday night was the Dodos, so that'll be next, but tonight is Langhorne Slim and Sunday night is the Avett brothers. Oh boy.)