Nu Yorican Soul
It’s interesting to see how fame and success can affect the number of roadies a band has and what they have to do do get set up and then pack up at the end. A band would score points for things like this and we’d get a league of some kind. Playing by these rules, the Warm Jets would get about two points and currently be somewhere in the Beazer Homes league. The only reason for that is that they seem to not have any roadies apart from themselves and the only way to tell that they are a band is when they start playing the instruments instead of just tuning them.
This doesn’t affect their seven-song set, fortunately, which is kicked off with the almost-punk ‘Maestro’ and then careers along with a similar energetic stance throughout. Their only break from this is a song described by the singer as a ‘swing ballad’, but that comes off equally well. They are a lively and multi-talented band (the guitarist and bassist both take turns at playing keyboards at various points) and seem to enjoy performing, evident in their appreciation of the crowd’s raucous applause at the end of each song.
After the onslaught of the Warm Jets we endure the punk pop of Gold Blade and enjoy the Scot Pop of The Supernaturals but soon it is time for the band everyone is waiting for.
The appearance of the Boo Radleys has two effects on the crowd. Anyone who isn’t already on the dancefloor decide that they want to be, thereby causing everyone nearest the stage to become immediately asphyxiated and everyone else just starts screaming or making as much noise as possible. They pick up their instruments and launch into the title track off their latest album, ‘C’mon Kids’. If you were even slightly doubting this song on record, watch it live and be prepared to revise your opinion. After a second track from that album, they hop along to their total-pop number ‘Wake up boo’, which seems to have the effect of making everyone in the crowd pogo at exactly the same rate, even if they don’t want to. The singer, Sice, is excellent live and he gets help from the guitarist and songwriter Martin Carr on a few tracks, like the enchanting, ‘From the bench at Belvedere’. They are a good natured lot too and don’t act too serious on stage, something that becomes evident whilst playing a particularly energetic version of ‘Lazy Days’ in which Martin breaks a string. This causes him to almost double up in laughter whilst playing the rest of the song and prompts Sice to comment, "If you keep breaking them you’ll not get any more!". They carry on brilliantly through tracks like, ‘Find the Answer Within’ and ‘What’s in the box’, but it is their piece-de-resistance from the ‘Giant Steps’ album that gets the biggest response from the audience. ‘Lazarus’, with its trumpet-soaked hooklines and almost psychedelic vocals, has the entire audience almost too mesmerised to move, but some seem to do so anyway.
When the band come back onto stage to do their encore, they seem to know that they could play the audience a tune made up of burps of different types and still get appreciation in enormous quantities. They are aware, also, that that’s exactly what they are not going to do. When he walks off for a second time, Martin Carr smiles to himself and waves to his audience with thanks. "The boys did good tonight", he must have been thinking.
Alok
