Skip to main content

Biffy Clyro, Idlewild, Honeyblood - Concert in The Gardens 2015

Edinburgh's Hogmanay
Four stars

Atmosphere may have been to the fore in the build up to Biffy Clyro's first live show in over a year, but when astronaut Tim Peake beamed down a pre-bells message from space, it all but stole everybody's thunder. By that time Idlewild's impeccably mannered frontman Roddy Woomble had predicted that it was too cold for even Biffy's vocalist and guitarist Simon Neil to take his top off, only for Neil to prove him wrong. With be-jerkined bass player James Johnston being the only band member to be sporting anything above the waist, what there was of Neil's billowing outfit gave him the appearance of a genie who had just burst free of his bottle.

Prior to this, Honeyblood's duo of singer and guitarist Stina Tweedale and drummer Cat Myers offset any potential for boys club machismo with a set of raw, drawled-out pop-rock bounce, while Idlewild's surprisingly funky brand of literate Celtic-tinged rock was the sound of a band in their grown-up prime.

With some very loud-looking speakers stacked up onstage, Biffy Clyro entered after a pre-show spin of Motorhead's Ace of Spades set the tone of things to come. Sure enough, while some of the band's stadium-size epics are leavened with a down-home sentimental warmth, new material from the forthcoming follow-up to 2013's Opposites album suggests that Biffy's fleshed-out line-up are keen to get back to their sludgier, less anthemic roots. With all three bands having honed their craft in the sort of small venues that property developers and city planners would rather bulldoze away, this in itself was testament to their worth in what might well be a very loud 2016.

The Herald, January 4th 2015
 
ends



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more