venta

Well, recently I've been having a bit of a wallow in mid-90s nostalgia.

Looking round, the crowd were all of an age to have been My Life Story fans the first time round. Not that there really is a second time round - MLS aren't staging a comeback, they're just doing the odd gig now and then. The only people in the audience who weren't late twenties and upwards were clearly the children of original fans.

The Empire obligingly played to the crowd, sending Lush and Elastica out over the speakers as we waited for MLS to hit the stage. The support had been a slightly limp acoustic set from Jake Shillingford, who pottered through some of his current album and made salacious remarks about MLS' singer.

When they came on they were good, but not great. The reunion gig 18 months ago was fantastic; this time it was merely a reasonable band on stage singing songs I liked. The audience knew all the words, and joined in enthusiastically with, er, everything.

There's always an odd moment of realisation at MLS gigs. Lots of bands will have a song which features swooping choruses of strings. Most, however, are using a backing track of some kind. With MLS you get the genuine swooping article (two violins, a viola and a 'cello). I'm still a sucker for real instruments on stage and happily counted all 12 of the musicians backing the outrageously spangly singer. Who, incidentally, announced that at 40 he felt ridiculous and would henceforth no longer be spangly at gigs.

A few months back, ChrisC discovered that **e* **v** were playing at the Carling Academy, Oxford (né Zodiac) and demanded I bought tickets so we could go. I wasn't that keen, but am an obliging sort[*].

Again, the audience was entirely constructed of people who liked ***d ****n in the 90s, turned out to relive their misspent youth. The Zodiac obviously has a more hardline approach to nostalgic wallowing, and alternated songs over the speakers in a vane attempt to drag everyone into the current century: Cast, Arcade Fire, The Charlatans, CSS...

We'd missed the support owing to eating Thai food instead, and then there were five blokes on stage and the audience nearly took the roof off singing along to It's Getting Better.

*h** *e*** are, in my hummble opinion, a lads band. Like Oasis, their songs are ones you can (and even might) cheerfully render on the way home from your seven pints of lager. Most of the audience sounded like lads who'd had seven pints of lager. So did the singer, actually, though his speaking voice sounds more like he's been gargling gravel and woodsmoke every morning for the last ten years.

There is, however, something quite appealing about being in the middle of a crowd which is cheerfully singing along, even if what they're singing is Chasing Rainbows. The band were out to please, the crowd were very willing to be pleased, and a hits-packed set rattled along to a great reception. Except for an isolated area of grumpiness around me: Pintwatch is persistenly disgruntled in Carling venues, and the band persistently refused to sing the song I was most keen to hear.

Still, I quite enjoyed the evening. But don't tell anyone, will you ?

[*] In the spirit of fair reporting, I should really point out that ChrisC would tell you that I grabbed tickets as soon as I saw the advert, and dragged him along kicking and screaming. I leave it to you, the public, to decide where the truth of the matter lies.

This post is brought to you by the nice people with the Belkin router who are letting me use their wireless. By which, of course, I really mean "failing to stop me".