At Home with John and Debbie

With Debbie otherwise engaged — returning from an examiner’s meeting in Manchester — Ian, Gav and I took the bus to Coventry to see the Super Furry Animals.

The Colosseum in Coventry turns out to be a pretty good live music venue. It’s mightily convenient for the bus station. It’s a good size (i.e. not too big). The sound is better than the Birmingham Academy. The beer’s a bit expensive…

We were a little nonplussed at support act Brave Captain’s invisible singer — he turned out to be hiding behind a speaker stack (from our perspective) fiddling with a laptop. He did come out to play guitar later on.

Brave Captain did little to impress, although their drummer was very good indeed; best thing about it.

While we waited for SFA, the projection screen above the stage displayed video from a camera in the DJ booth. Someone stirred up the excitement by writing messages on paper plates with a marker pen, and holding them up to the camera. Messages like:

“SFA FOR THE FIRST TIME IN COVENTRY!”
“FUCK YEAH!”
“THE EARTH WILL MOVE!”
“COVENTRY CATHEDRAL WILL FLOAT INTO SPACE”
“ALL IN A NIGHT’S WORK FOR SFA”
“IN JUST A FEW MUNITES”
… later corrected to …
“IN JUST A FEW MIUNITES”

I was suitably keyed up when the lights dimmed, the screen switched to what I’m told they call “visuals” nowadays, and the sampled intro to “Slow Life” kicked in. As it played, the band trooped on, the sample petered out and Gruff struck up on his harmonica. During an instrumental section, he disappeared, reappeared with a big alien mask on, and finished the song through that. “Slow Life” is a cracking song (and you can legally download it here!) — how on earth were they going to follow that?

Since the tour is a low key preparation for the release of the new album, we were treated to a lot of new songs. Often crowds want what they already know, but this audience was enthusiastic enough to lap up the new stuff.

Of all the new stuff, a song called “Cloud Berries” got the most applause, by virtue of ending three times…

We also got “Hello Sunshine”, “Run! Christian, Run!”, “Ice Hockey Hair”, “Do or Die”, and other favourites.

“Something for the Weekend” got an ecstatic reception from the crowd. It made me feel a bit old — the album Fuzzy Logic was made in 1996.

They finished off with a rousing — even moving — rendition of “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck”, which segued into a long prerecorded thumping techno breakdown as the band sneaked off: no encore.

As is played out, the screen showed us a Hi-de-hi style “You have been watching…” reel, with the band doing cheeky poses, followed by the crew and other assorted contributors to our great night’s entertainment. This must have been at least partly created on the night, since it included a shot of the Colosseum bar staff, credited as “Alcohol technicians”.

A substandard kebab and an hour long bus ride later, we were home in our beds. Maybe some of the Furries got to stay with their Mums last night? They play in Wrexham tonight.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 at 10:27 and is filed under Social. 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.