After a bit of a ropey gig last night, there is nothing better than a Pigeon Detectives show to see some blinding live music again. Having seen them a few times already this year, you know you are going to get decent songs delivered as part of a riotous live show, with a fantastic frontman too. This was one of the last dates on a month-long UK tour. I have written a few times that you need to see this band live to really appreciate them - it looks like many people caught the bug at the summer festivals, and are coming back for more.When I got into the venue, a band called One Night Only were playing. They seem to have appeared from nowhere in a very short space of time - one minute, nobody had heard of them, now they seem to be popping up supporting every band on tour at the moment. Clearly a large record company has signed them, and is shoving them out on tour to "showcase" them to us all. Anyway, they sounded pretty good, and seemed to have drawn a decent sized crowd. I recognised a song called Just For Tonight from their MySpace, and in fact thought that they generally sounded much better live than on their recorded songs - always a decent sign.
The Pigeons arrived at about 10pm, with some dramatic music, and went straight into it - the crowd on the floor was going mental from the first guitar riff of I Found Out. The singer started off wearing a big black leather jacket, which quickly came off as the venue turned into the hottest place on earth. The mental songs kept coming, to the point where I was forgetting which one was which. That is one thing about the Pigeon Detectives, many of their songs sound very similar - but at least that means that they all sound good, and are all good at whipping up a live audience. For much of the set, the singer even "exchanged fluids" with the crowd - there were loads of pints being thrown up on stage, and in return, the singer threw plenty of water back into the audience.
A few songs in, they played Romantic Type, and the singer failed to get into the crowd as he always used to - scandalous! As the gig went on, I began to think that there were no more songs left for the band to play, as there had been so many familiar ones - but more and more kept coming. This shows that the band have a very respectable number of quality songs - most of the album in fact is very good, and the standard never dips below that of a great shouty indie rock song, with a mental singalong chorus.
As well as playing all of the album, there was also time for some b-sides, including the excellent I Need You, which appears on the current single, and also some new songs. The singer was crazy throughout, but somewhat more restrained than in their early gigs, where climbing speaker stacks and singing almost whole songs from in the crowd were commonplace. There was none of that tonight (he stayed on stage throughout), but sadly I guess that comes with the fact that the band are rightly a bigger live draw now - 3 sold out shows at the Forum, supporting the Kaiser Chiefs next month, and 2 big sold out gigs in Leeds next May. Maybe they are getting more sensible....
All in all a very good show, a bit less mental from the singer than before, but certainly the crowd loved it, and the Pigeons seem to be getting to where their live show means that they belong - as one of the big live indie bands in the country. I'm not sure I'd want to see them in too much of a bigger venue than this (also because a fair few laddy idiots have latched onto them now - there were quite a few punches thrown in the venue tonight) - but the band undoubtedly deserve to be (and will be) playing bigger venues now. At the end of the set, the singer picked up all every loose item on stage - setlists, plectrums, towels, water bottles - and gave them to people in the crowd. So, some people got some great souvenirs from a brilliant gig - more bands should do that.
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