Good Shoes - Astoria, London - Wednesday 21st November 2007

After the amusement of England's failure to qualify for Euro 2008, and on a stinking evening weather wise (cold and pissing down), it was off to the Astoria to see Good Shoes. Having seen them a couple of times before so far this year, and having some of their album on heavy rotation on my iPod, I had had this in the diary for a while. The gig wasn't sold out, and there were still plenty of tickets left on the door, but this was still easily the biggest gig on the biggest headline tour of the band's career. The audience was very young, even for a 14+ gig, so the front of the ground floor was still packed as usual.

The band came on stage at around 10pm, just after the final whistle of the England game, which also saw a big influx of (wet) people into the venue. Despite this, the balcony was almost empty, with nobody higher up than the first couple of rows - meaning that the venue was a good few hundred short of capacity. The stage was pretty bare, with just a banner at the back, and not much else to give you any clue that you were watching a headline act. Obviously not a huge headline act, but I had expected some more in the way of stage set.

Overall, I was pretty underwhelmed by the set that Good Shoes played. Their album is pretty hit and miss, with 7 or 8 really good songs, but then another few that are very nondescript indeed. This carried through into their set - the songs were either really rather good, or not far short of terrible I thought. They just don't seem to write average songs, they are either very good or very bad - and with too many dodgy ones. It didn't help that the sound was quite poor for most of the set, so even some of the good songs struggled to sound their best.

Previous times where I have seen Good Shoes, they have played a relatively short set of around half an hour. This is time enough to play all of their good songs, but not enough time to allow too many of the crap songs to lower the overall quality of the set. This was a 50-minute set, which I though that the band just didn't have enough quality material to fill. When your songs are either 8 out of 10 or 3 out of 10, playing for too long really isn't a good idea if it exposes people to the lowlights of your song catalogue. Their good songs are real highlights, but sadly I just didn't think there were enough of them to make this a great show.