Doing a Damien Rice

A couple of weeks ago I booked tickets to see a band about which I knew very little, beyond the fact that they were big down under, so to speak. This may have proved to be a mistake: I think Sal summed it up best when she described the John Butler Trio, who we saw last night at our local venue, Islington’s Islington Academy, as being “good musicians…”

That much is certainly true–Mr Butler plays a mean slide guitar–but there’s only so much that even I can take of 20 minute acoustic guitar solos. A few songs into the set we were beginning to flag (although perhaps having been out for Pete’s birthday celebrations the previous night might have had something to do with this), and so we retreated to the back of the venue, and a bit later we even moved upstairs to the mezzanine level where we sat down and watched the rest of the gig on a widescreen telly.

I don’t think that we were the only people tiring–as the band reached the end of yet another extended instrumental break that had taken about three years, the guitarist, who had hardly spoken for most of the gig, suddenly launched into a Damien Rice-esque rant against “the loud c*nts at the back”, inconsiderately talking through his music, asking if they would “shut the f*ck up”. I’m not sure it had much effect though–I could still hear people talking during the 8 minute drum solo with which they chose to end the main part of the set. All very 1975: just like punk never happened.

After that, Sally inadvertently chose to go to the toilet and thus missed the most exciting thing to happen all night, when a woman out of the audience chose to invade the stage, although somewhat inexplicably she chose to do this during the gap between the main set and the encore, and therefore couldn’t do much more than hug the roadie (in mid-guitar tune) before being dragged down by a bouncer (although she did then make it back up onto the stage, only to wiggle her arse at the crowd before being pulled back down again).

And then, my Northern tightness being the only thing that had stopped me from leaving before the end, it was over, and we wandered off to Sainsbury’s to do our shopping.