Gigs - live music events past, present or future

For me it was Echo and the Bunnymen at the O2 Academy in Liverpool. It's a soulless big old barn of a space and you have to really go for it to make it work. So I went to see Echo and the Bunnymen there with a bunch of mates and they did not make it work. At all. In fact they managed to drain any jot of entertainment from the evening. It was their regular pre-Christmas homecoming gigs and they usually do something a bit special for it. The special thing was playing the songs off one album in its entirety, with no others thrown in. All fine and dandy but it was a later album after their peak and hardly anyone there knew any of the songs. To cap it off Ian McCulloch spent a good 5 minutes between each song having a chat with his mates on the front row, which killed any modest momentum. I suppose a few hardcore fans and friends of the band har a great time but everyone I spoke to, from fans to those who knew their big hits (I'm largely in the latter category), all expressed their disappointment with the over-indulgent performance we witnessed.