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This evening, I went along to the Mark Gardiner show at the Empress. I never was a Ride fan back in the day (I picked up Going Blank Again and another one some years ago, but they didn't really grab me; then again, Slowdive were the only shoegazer band that I really got into, unless you count Lush and the Cocteau Twins and such as "shoegazer", but I digress), though what I saw was quite passable, as far as guys playing acoustic 12-string guitars and singing went; he has decent chord progressions and a fairly good voice. The venue was packed with coolsie types and aging indiekids from way back; I saw one chap in an old Chapterhouse T-shirt, which was rather cool. To Mark Gardiner's credit, he recognised that his fans came to hear Ride songs and played a good number of them, often rousing wild applause with the opening chords. Now, had Neil Halstead done something like that when he toured here in 2002, rather than disowning the corpus of works most people there were undoubtedly hoping against hope to hear, that would have been excellent. An acoustic version of Alison or Catch The Breeze wouldn't have gone at all amiss. But I digress. Anyway, he strummed a 12-string guitar, and a second guitarist played notes on another acoustic guitar; in that way, it was not unlike an I Want A Hovercraft gig, only with fewer pedals. The main concession to shoegazer was a delay pedal which came in in some songs. |
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