The Charlatans - Le Trabendo, Paris, France - Tuesday 12th February 2008

Going to Paris for a work trip, I noticed that The Charlatans were due to play there. So, a quick trip to a friendly ticket agency (especially friendly given that they don't seem to charge booking fees on top of the ticket price), and I was going to the gig. The venue was a small club called Le Trabendo, a place that probably held 500 people at most - but which was half full (or half empty, depending on your outlook) for this gig - there can't have been more than 200 people there.

When I arrived, a band called Lipstick Traces were playing, 3 young French kids, who seemed to have a fixation with British indie music. The singer played a Union Jack guitar, some of the lyrics were in English, and they generally looked and sounded - 100% deliberately of course - like a French version of the Libertines. It looked and sounded a bit contrived, and definitely not very original, but they actually sounded OK - the riffs were all present and correct, and they scored top marks for effort in their impersonation of an English indie band.

I hadn't seen The Charlatans for years and years, although I used to see them regularly during the 90s. So, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. When they came on stage, and I saw the length and floppyness of Tim Burgess's fringe, I wasn't thinking that things were boding well! Obviously with a new album to promote, they played a few of their newer songs in this set, but generally, they concentrated on a greatest hits set. Which was good, as some of the new songs were a bit hit and miss - many, like set closer This Is The End, were very good, but others sounded distinctly ropey.

The gig reminded me of seeing Ash last year - a band that just has loads of classic songs, and seeing them again for the first time in a while was a real revelation. Hearing The Only One I Know, Telling Stories, Weirdo, and especially Here Comes A Soul Saver (an amazing song, that I hadn't heard for years), was fantastic, and the band played them like it was 1996 all over again. They were clearly doing well with a small but very devoted crowd, on their first gig in Paris for a decade. The hits kept coming, sounding great, and when the encore wrapped up with How High, and an incredible version of Sproston Green (always brilliant live in any case), my fuzzy memory of how good The Charlatans were was fully restored. A very good gig, from a classic but sadly forgotten band.