At Home with John and Debbie

Leaving Debbie working, I went with Gav and Tash to see New York’s The Bravery at The Academy in Birmingham.

The support act was Hard-Fi (not to be confused with Hi-Five), who were a competent shouty guitar band with occasional wibbly synth and pedal effects. Some niggling between the singer and guitarist seemed like an affectation to me, but afterwards they rocked just a little bit harder, so maybe it worked.

For a band that sounds like Duran Duran, The Bravery certainly know how to put on a rock’n'roll show. We got:

• A guitarist with mouth agape with enthusiasm throughout
• A singer in a leather jacket, mounting the monitors to tower over the crowd
• Sweating: nice to see a band working for their living
• Midway through the set, singer’s jacket comes off, bassist strips to the waist
• Persistent crowd contact - culminating in the bassist crowd-surfing
• Beer sprayed into the crowd (it missed us) from bottle then later from mouth
• “We’re gonna do one more song for ya. You wanna know why? Because this is where Ozzy Osbourne comes from!”

In the cold light of day, that all sounds a bit silly, but in a small room — an audience of around 500 were crammed into the bar next to the Academy’s entrance — and stood right next to the speaker stack, it was enthralling.

Also, as a crowd, we were awesome. He told us so.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2005 at 09:57 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.