Frank Turner and The Sleeping Souls, Rock City, Nottingham

Supported by Will Varley & Skinny Lister

Will Varley is probably one part folk singer three parts comedian. All his songs come with a very large dose of dry humour which makes it well worthwhile turning up early to catch his entertaining support slot.

Some of his songs have a political edge but others just send up the likes of supermarket self-checkouts (‘The Self-Checkout Shuffle’) and those get rich quick emails we all get from foreign princes (‘I Got This Email’). Brilliant stuff. 

Skinny Lister are next up and they bring their own demijohn to join the party. What a party it is. This is not just folk but raucous good time folk of the like possibly not seen since The Pogues were in their prime. Oh, how I bet they're sick of that particular comparison but someone's got to restore the good name of folk after it's been diluted down to nothing by the likes of Mumford and Sons. This band could do it on their own.

Tonight the six piece are crammed in down the front of the stage but this doesn’t temper their boundless energy at all. They are an extremely confident outfit and get the crowd involved from the off. Singer Lorna Thomas will grab a lot of the attention but it’s not just her singing as most of the band contribute vocals at some point. I imagine they go down an absolute storm at festivals. It’s also the first time I’ve seen a band member go crowd surfing with a double bass. By rights security should have thrown him out... a dangerous precedent set there, perhaps.

Now can I use the ‘as seen at Glasto’ brag again? Perhaps not. Here's Frank...

Frank Turner is back home. After turning his back on his true love and having a brief affair with the Nottingham Arena, he is now back where he belongs. I hope he feels guilty about his infidelity. He's certainly making up for it big time with two nights at Rock City and an intimate show at Rough Trade.

He opens with ‘Get Better’, an ode to getting his half marathon time down despite the rapidly advancing years... ‘We could get better because we're not dead yet’, well that’s how I read it when it got me through the Leicester Half recently. Anyway... I digress, he and the Sleeping Souls machine gun out the first four tracks without pausing for breath. Four songs in and no monologue yet, what’s going on Frank? Just trying to fit an impressive 29 tracks into two hours I guess.

He finally takes a breath, rather appropriately, before introducing 'Out of Breath' one of many tonight from his new excellent album 'Positive Songs For Negative People'.

Before long he’s almost begging forgiveness for straying, once more proclaiming Rock City as his favourite venue in the whole of the UK and dedicating 'Polaroid Picture' to the venue. He keeps saying this year after year, so it must be true! We again get the story about his former band the Million Dead being told to f*** off and not come back, as well as being bowled over when he headlined here for the first time and it sold out in weeks. I wonder how his recent Möngöl Hörde hardcore side project would have gone down tonight...

I actually remember him being bowled over a good six months earlier than his first headlining at Rock City when he supported The Gaslight Anthem here and half the crowd seemed to have turned up purely for him. Even back then everyone knew every single word to every single song. It's the same tonight. It doesn't matter how old or how new the tracks are, same effect. A full singalong. Don't come to a Frank Turner gig unless you've rehearsed first!

On this tour he’s not been chopping and changing his sets much between gigs except for his acoustic request slot in the middle, when The Sleeping Souls put their feet up and whatever has been requested of him recently is played. It's produced a fair few rarities on this tour but tonight we probably get the best selection. Not total obscurities but set staples of yesteryear that there just isn't enough room in the set for these days.

The no longer retired 'The Ballad of Me and My Friends', an amazing 'Father's Day' and an equally good blast from the past with ‘Love Ire and Song' make an already brilliant set even better. In between he takes a moment to reflect on the happenings in Paris and dedicates 'Journey of the Magi' to Nick Alexander, a good friend of his, who died whilst working for the Eagles of Death Metal in the Bataclan. 

Then over ninety minutes in and we expected to perform star jumps to 'Recovery' accompanied by 'Lee' upon stage who shows us how, just like an instructor at an aerobics class.

It doesn’t feel like song number 25 but it is, the last song of the set and he finishes with a new song albeit the current single ‘The Next Storm’. Not many artists would risk doing that but then not many have new songs this good or fans who will know every word even if it was only released yesterday.

He’s back for an encore of course, playing four more songs before finally winding things up and sending the audience home to practice their star jumps for next time.

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Tom Robinson, Rescue Rooms, Nottingham

Supported by Kitten Pyramid

On a night when we all expect to be home early for our cocoas support act Kitten Pyramid turns up already in his pyjamas. After a slow melodic acoustic start where he does the dedicating a song to his wife sort of thing, he suddenly changes tact. He ties a naked Action Man to his music stand, invites his son upon stage to play drums then picks up a bass guitar himself and turns into the White Stripes. An intriguing transformation indeed but then he is from Burton on Trent.

Follow that Tom Robinson or should I say the ‘as seen at Glasto’ Tom Robinson. Tom is the latest ‘oldie’ to reform, if you can reform yourself that is and he’s now released his first album in 20 years entitled ‘Only the Now’. It’s an album funded by pledgers on Pledge Music and not surprisingly this album makes up around half of tonight’s set or should we say sets as Tom, now age 65, opts to take a siesta half way through.

The majority of the rest of the set comes from an album 37 years old, 1978’s ‘Power In The Darkness’ and he opens with a couple of old favourites from that record ‘Winter of ’79’ and ‘Too Good to Be True’. These go down very well, as is to be expected, with a mainly but not exclusively older crowd tonight. Then he follows those with a track off the new record, the very appropriate ‘Never Get Old’.

Robinson is, as always, totally engaging on stage. Every song has a back story or a joke behind it. ‘Martin’ has, of course, the whole crowd behind it with everyone yelling the key parts back at him or in the case of Mr Irritating next to me singing every single s***ing word back and he is not in TR’s league vocally.

The first set ends with a blatant plug for the merchandising stand and Tom’s big hit 80s ‘War Baby’ one of two tracks tonight from 1984’s ‘Hope And Glory’ album. His other top 40 hit ‘Atmospherics: Listen to the Radio’ follows later.

The second set starts with ‘Home In The Morning’ off the new album and then a solo track performed by Lee Forsyth Griffiths ‘Meet Me Halfway’.

‘Glad to be Gay’ comes dedicated to George Michael and with yet another lyrical makeover. In fact it appears Robinson was brought a lyric sheet before the song. The memory probably isn’t what it used to be.

One thing that hasn’t changed is his determination to tackle issues that he is passionate about. His new material tonight took on the banks (‘Risky Business’), suicide (‘Don’t Jump Don’t Fall’), legal aid (‘The Mighty Sword Of Justice’ and the Iraq war (‘Merciful God’).

Another thing that hasn’t changed is his ability to belt out the powerful oldies as a double-barrelled finale of ‘Up Against the Wall’ and ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ arrives.

There’s time for one more and he returns to play an encore of the title track off his new album. Before the song he harks back to his decades that have passed but was keen to point out that is exactly what they have done. Their time has now passed and now he appreciates more than ever the need to live ‘Only the Now’. Good advice.

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Ride, Rock City, Nottingham

Flashback to February 20th 1990 in the short lived venue that was Bobby Browns Café in Nottingham and its utter bedlam. Security guards who should be guarding the stage are busy holding up the speaker stacks and preventing the fake palm trees (yes really) from toppling over, consequently stage diving is rife. I would say its standing room only but there was no standing room, healthy and safety had yet to be invented. Not bad for a band who had only released their début EP a month beforehand.

The band on stage were Ride, ably shredding the ears of their audience with their monstrous guitar sound. I’d gone through almost exactly the same experience two weeks earlier at Derby’s famous Dial, now sadly demolished, and had come back for more.

Now Ride have returned nineteen years after an acrimonious split with a comeback tour that we never thought we’d see and it has took an age to reach the provinces. A terribly disloyal but probably profitable US jaunt has delayed their arrival. As if to apologise the band are now playing two sets on this tour with no support.

One of these sets is to be celebrating the 25th anniversary of their début album ‘Nowhere’, which is to be played in its entirety and in order. Not that this would have taken particularly long as the original album only had eight tracks, so they’re playing the CD version with its bonus tracks culled from the ‘Fall EP’.

Personally I’d like to have seen a set dedicated to what I would call their defining era, those three EPs all released during 1990 entitled ‘Ride’, ‘Play’ and ‘Fall’.

Actually I'm not a fan of bands doing the whole album thing; it just removes all the unpredictability from set. The 1990 version of themselves wouldn’t have stood for that, Bobby Browns was a sea of unpredictability. Anything could have happened there and probably did but of course time has moved on.

For a start, tonight has a 10pm curfew then presumably its home for cocoa and security are clearing away everyone’s rucksacks (yes really) from the front of the stage rather than holding up the speaker stacks.

‘Nowhere’ is to be the second set, which immediately make the first set more interesting.

They come on to the sound of a This Mortal Coil track that precedes even their own existence and start work on the overblown ‘Leave Them All Behind’, the opening track of their second album ‘Going Blank Again’ but it’s the brash indie-rock of ‘Like A Daydream’ from the ‘Play EP’ that really kicks things off. It doesn't quite erupt into a sea of arms and legs in front of the stage like it used to but some folk in there are having a go.

It is perhaps not surprising that ‘Going Blank Again’ contributes a large chunk of this first set. Whisper it quietly, arguably a better more complete album than ‘Nowhere’. Tonight the likes of 'Twisterella', 'Chrome Waves', 'Time of Her Time' and 'Mouse Trap' all jingle nicely, sounding as sharp and alive as ever.

The only other EP track to appear is ‘Unfamiliar’ from ‘Today Forever’ and there’s a run out for ‘Black Nite Crash’ from the reclusive ‘Tarantula’ album.

The band seem to have all aged well apart from perhaps Andy Bell who at times looks like he's done 15 years hard labour. Oh he has hasn’t he, 15 years with Oasis and Beady Eye. Mark Gardener meanwhile reels around the stage, thrashing his guitar, and wearing a trilby under which he may have folded up his former trademark floppy fringe but one suspects the hair doesn’t groweth as well as it once did.

After eight songs the band take a break before returning twenty minutes later to the squall of ‘Seagull’ as they kick off ‘Nowhere’. The decision to tackle the album in full highlights to me what the album appeared to be at the time, a ragtag selection of all the unreleased material they had to hand rather than a record conceived in its own right. Fair play though that they didn’t just plunder the earlier EPs as many artists would have done.

Some of the album plods a touch but tonight ‘In a Different Place’ sparkles nicely and ‘Polar Bear’ is, as always was the case, immense. Then of course there’s ‘Vapour Trail’, one of the finest closing tracks to an album ever, complete with accompaniment from the crowd.

Next up the ‘Fall’ EP and the wonderful ‘Taste’ which gets a bit of a mosh going but the momentum is lost with the slightly monotonous harmonica driven ‘Here and Now’ but ‘Nowhere’ itself is an appropriate set closer.

A quick exit and then they’re were back for the encore of ‘Ride EP’ tracks ‘Drive Blind’ with its sludgy wall of noise and then finally the awesome ‘Chelsea Girl’. If there’s going to be a mosh going to this, I’m in there. There is and I am.

It’s good to have them back and with what was such an assured performance that belied the decades. Yet I can’t help feeling that one shorter punchy set would have hit the spot a bit better. 

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Splendour 2015

Today is Splendour number eight and again it has pulled a large 20,000 crowd to Wollaton Park despite, what I would describe as, a weak line-up. We have long stopped worrying about the line-up and now automatically go to our local festival every year.

The Specials headline above James and Bananarama who headline the second stage, which is usually where the better acts are to be found. The fact that a clearly main stage artist such as Bananarama are on there hints at a lack of better options but we’ll see how they do later. Let’s start at the beginning.

Well not quite the beginning because we don’t arrive until about 2.45pm and it’s a decent start with Lenton’s Amber Run up on the Main Stage. We thread our way through the multitude of deck chairs, blankets and cool boxes to the front where a small enthusiastic crowd are the only ones paying attention but they are heavily into it. We join them. 

As they finish another Nottingham artist Keto or Leah as she is known to her friends is starting up on the Second Stage. As perhaps you can already tell the focus of the festival is promoting Nottingham and both are repeat visitors. As well as Nottingham bands, the majority of the food and drink on offer is local. So although we touch base briefly with Leah, we feel the real ale tent is a bigger pull particularly as beer stocks rarely make it past tea time. Castle Rock seem to have almost exclusive rights this year with a couple of beers from new Shipstones the only other option. We buy six vouchers which may be a mistake as it assumes a fair longevity for supplies.

London rapper Roots Manuva is next on the Main Stage, although running fifteen minutes late due to technical issues. He plays a rather tired sounding set, although he is definitely not my thing.

We go for a wander to check out the other stages. Aside from the main two stages there are three smaller stages. There is a ‘Fringe’ stage somewhere in the main field but we don’t even stumble across that. The other two, an acoustic stage and a comedy stage, are both located in the courtyard area.

We take a seat on the rather uncomfortable gravel strewn courtyard floor (some matting would be nice guys) to watch Essex girl comedienne Ellie Taylor. Taylor, a former model for Greek yoghurt (apparently) seems obsessed by two things. Firstly her weight (aren’t all women!), she is delighted at her sister’s pregnancy because she is pleased to see any rival female gain weight. Secondly with genitalia (are all women?), pointing out that men have few inhibitions about using theirs for comedic affect and urges the women in the audience to use theirs for ventriloquism. Something to try later perhaps, oh to be a fly on the wall. It was quite an amusing half hour.

We head back to the main field to find that the final barrel of real ale has been drunk dry at 5.05pm, which may be a record but perhaps only just. We move on to some ‘craft’ version, which is at least better than nothing, as we sit in the outside ‘bar’ area and listen to Lawson up on Main.

Next stop, The Twang. These Brummies were once going to be really big but somehow it never happened. Tonight though, their, dare I say baggy/Madchester, sound goes down a storm. They are also the first band today who look they are having a really good time and that means the audience have a good time too. They may now be totally unfashionable but their lively music and sneering vocals help make this possibly the set of the day.

By contrast James are incredibly business like even though, with an irritating time clash between stages, we only stay for four songs. Two of which are new material and one of which is the popular 90s hit ‘Sit Down’. Although I love the way that this is tossed aside so early on and would really like to have stayed to see what Tim Booth and co played later on but we must move on. There’s karaoke up on the other stage.

Which is perhaps a little unkind but Keren and Sara are basically two fifty-something young girls dancing round their handbags and singing into their hair brushes. Perhaps that’s always been the case but you know what, the large crowd love it. Cruel Summer, Robert De Niro's Waiting, Nathan Jones, Venus... they’re all here. Well not all as they’ve had 28 hit singles in all and like the Twang they grin and smile infectiously all the way through it.

The only thing that would have made it better was if Terry Hall had popped up on stage to join them for the songs they did with the Fun Boy Three. The girls hint at this themselves but I don’t think Terry is listening.

Hall is up next on Main with tonight’s headliners The Specials. As is tradition we ignore the headliners and head off for a curry. Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye.