The Maccabees, Jack Penate - Astoria, London - Thursday 17th May 2007

One year ago today, Arsenal were 15 minutes away from winning the Champions League. Depressing, but I could think of a much worse way to forget about the first anniversary, than going to this gig. The Maccabees released their acclaimed (and excellent) debut album this week, and this was the last date of a very successful UK tour. As if that wasn't enough, Jack Penate, after being thoroughly excellent at the recent Camden Crawl, was supporting. And, the whole thing at the Astoria too, my favourite "medium-sized" venue.

On entering the venue, it quickly became very apparent that there was a VERY young audience for this show. The gig was open to anybody over 14, and it seemed that the majority were between 14 and 18. Which of course meant nice short queues for the bar. The fact that both the Maccabees and Jack Penate take care to play "all ages" gigs regularly, has definitely helped to make both of them massive on MySpace, and made sure that they are extremely popular amongst "the kids". I felt very old, until I saw Steve Lamacq at the bar, which made me think that I wasn't all that old after all.

Jack Penate's set was, again, amazing - with the guitar riffs and poppy songs that really manage to get people fired up. Of course, the audience here needed no firing up, to the extent that the floor was actually bouncing up and down because so many people were jumping. Quite scary. There was moshing, crowd surfing, falling over, and by the end of the set, the floor was a sweat-soaked mass of people. A short but quite brilliant set, which never dipped from being extremely high-tempo throughout.

I got the impression that many of the audience were there to see Jack Penate as much, if not more than The Maccabees - so the whole thing was as mental as you are ever likely to see a support set get. Obviously the crowd here was very different to the Camden Crawl, more hardcore Jack Penate fans - and the atmosphere was much better for it. The set closed with first single Second, Minute Or Hour, and new single Torn On The Platform. Jack threw his baseball cap into the crowd, there was screaming and cheering, and all in all it was an awesome set.

The Maccabees came on stage to the massive sound of The Clash's Clampdown, which started their set off fantastically, and that was the way it continued. Their album is full of brilliant songs that mix indie and pop, with a little bit of punk thrown in too. They played for just over an hour, and it was a set that I never wanted to end. There were at least half a dozen huge highlight songs, including About Your Dress, Latchmere, Precious Time, Lego and X-Ray, and the rest weren't at all bad either.

For a group of people with such posh names, they really do know how to rock, and to put on a very mental show. Orlando, Felix, Hugo, Rupert and Robert do not sound like rock and roll names, but lead guitarist Felix in particular was going completely mad on the left hand side of the stage. The mosh pit was covering the majority of the floor for most of the songs, and tunes like About Your Dress went off even more than that.

All in all this was one of the best gigs I have been to for quite a while, and everything a good gig should be. It was at the Astoria, with 2 great bands, playing poppy guitar songs. The crowd were incredibly up for it, went mad, and completely adored both bands. The venue was outrageously hot, and the music was loud and good. Almost the perfect gig - I want to see both bands again VERY soon.