Given that the doors opened very early, I didn't make it to the venue in time for the first band, Mumm-Ra, to start their set. The Horrors were due to be on next, so I also decided to delay my entrance until about 7:45, in the hope that they would also have played by that point, and I would be spared the annoyance of seeing them. Mumm-Ra were due on (and off) before 7pm, so that was a plausible thing to do.
So, getting into the venue at 7:45, I was gutted to catch the last song of Mumm-Ra's set, which was the excellent Out Of The Question. So, not only did I now have to watch the Horrors, but my delaying tactics had meant that I had missed Mumm-Ra too, all because everything was happening much later than advertised. Message to NME - if you say that a band are coming on at 6:40, stick them on at 6:40! Mumm-Ra, from what I managed to hear, sounded absolutely excellent - very annoying.
The Horrors were up next - if you look at a photo of them, it conjures up a mental picture that they are likely to be pretty atrocious. In fact, they are even worse than that, and I cannot believe that people pay to go and watch such utter crap - half an hour of unintelligible, tuneless drivel. However, there seemed to be lots of 14-year-olds going mad for it, and even complaining at the end, that the band had left "songs" out of their set. Live bands often exceed your expectations, and they were no exception - they were far worse than anticipated. Run a mile if you see them playing on a bill near you.
The View came on next, who were predictably great. There were some technical problems early on in their set, which made for huge gaps between songs, and also meant that they seemed to play all of their songs at twice the normal speed. This made the late start all the more annoying, because they could have been given more stage time, and in fact had to leave out many of their live staples.Many of the crowd were fairly unfamiliar with their songs, to the extent that live favourite Screamin' And Shoutin' was played second up, to a good number of bemused faces around me. They also seemed to be playing to the crowd (from what you could understand through the thick Scottish accents). Building up to Wasted Little DJs by giving the crowd advance warning that they were going to play it, was just a good opportunity to get everybody excited, by giving their favourite hits top billing. So, a fairly inexperienced View crowd, but the band did a great job of winning them over, and by the end, Superstar Tradesman saw by far the most mental crowd action of the night.
I had thought that, as headliners, The Automatic would risk being out of their depth here - but they pleasantly surprised me. Their set was very entertaining indeed, and despite a similar sound and songwriting style for most of the set, it stayed engaging for the whole time. Playing Monster reasonably early on helped, but the set still flew along even after that. The keyboard player is clearly a fool, but the set rocked along very nicely - running many of the songs together helped greatly with this, as it prevented too many boring lulls in the action.I don't think they should necessarily have been headlining, given The View's recent album success, but let's not hold that against them, because they were very good. For the encore, all of the other bands invaded the stage, with the notable exception of The View, who could and should have been headlining in front of bigger crowds than this. They are in a bigger league now. A great night out all round though, roll on the next NME tour!
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