Day 10/100 and I’m aware I didn’t post yesterday. It just wasn’t possible – I went straight from work to the train station and off to Bath to see John Grant perform at the beautiful art-deco Bath Forum. This also meant I returned home very late, and went straight to bed – not even a pre-bed cup of tea!
So whilst the Forum is a nice venue, it’s not one I’ll be rushing back for. We booked months ago and requested to pick the tickets from the box office, when we got there our tickets hadn’t even been printed, we had to wait whilst the box office chap looked up our seats on a plan, and then handwrote the ticket details out. Then there were the queues for the bar – because of a no-glass in the auditorium policy all bottles have to be poured into plastic cups – this slows down the service immensely. The venue would benefit with either working with the local brewery that they use to have plastic bottles or allowing pre-ordering of drinks that are then pre-poured. Or getting more staff on the bar. Or having a bigger serving area.. during the interval I needed some water to take some medication and after waiting for over 20 minutes in a queue, with John Grant due on stage in a matter of minutes, I ended up grabbing a cup and chancing the water from the taps in the toilets marked ‘not drinking water’.
Anyway back to the gig – due to trains we sadly had to leae shortly before 10pm, meaning we saw little over an hour. But what an hour – I wasn’t quite expecting such a frenetic and colourful show. John was on stage looking very relaxed with a trucker cap on, and then he belts out that deep and rich voice that could melt butter. Several tracks from the new album were played, with the current 6music favourite and title track Love Is Magic interspersed with older tracks and accompanied by some interesting graphics – in particular what appeared to be coyotes eating the flesh or something.
Being sat up in gods it was hard to see how the crowd was reacting, but from where we were it took Pale Green Ghosts to really get the crowd to show some movement. However it wasn’t long after this I had to leave to grab my train after such a short but sweet set.
Culturenator 