Gig Review: Brakes, Manchester Club Academy, October 6, 2007
File under brakes,Gig Reviews,Reviews.
It’s been a while since I witnessed such clearly idiotic behavior at a gig that it deserved to get the “Gig-Goer of the Week” headline. Last night we went to see Brakes. When they came on stage they announced that they wanted to do something special so they had decided to play through both albums back-to-back. I’d have thought they were joking except Eamon clearly had a copy of their first album, Give Blood, on stage and he kept referring to it to see what was next. Despite this, some young groupie-wannabe in an unfathomably short skirt for a gig* pushed to the front and leaned across the monitors, motioning Eamon to her. He leaned in and she whispered something. His response was, “We’re going to play ‘All Night Disco Party’ when we get to it in 2 songs.” Despite this, she continued to scream for it until it rolled around in the set. The she started screaming for something else. Now, while her enthusiasm was nice to see, why she felt the need to request songs that they were blatantly going to play is beyond me, especially when she should have known exactly where they would be in the set, seeing as how they were playing through both albums, start to finish (without ‘Mobile Communication’, sadly. Why they left that out I will never understand).
Now, hopefully you’re laughing already at this somewhat ridiculous and blatant attempt by a rather silly young thing to get the band to notice her. She wasn’t nearly the most mentally challenged person in the room.
As some of you may know, Brakes have a song called ‘Hi How Are You’ which is directed at irritating hipsters who stand next to you at gigs and talk shit during the quiet songs. The chorus actually goes “Won’t you shuck the fuck up, I’m a-just tryin’ to watch the band!” They played it twice. After this double-rendition, on which the crowd joined in twice, I ended up stood in front of two women who chose to talk loudly through, you guessed it, the next quiet song. To make matters worse, and in a brilliant twist of irony, they were stood behind a young guy wearing a t-shirt which said on the back “Won’t you shuck the fuck up, I’m a-just tryin’ to watch the band!” to which, at the tail end of their noisy and unappreciated conversation, one of them pointed and went “Oh isn’t that T-shirt funny! I love that song!” or something along those lines. If I were bigger and it had actually been a farce, I would have turned around and knocked both their heads together.
*Tip: Girls, don’t wear short skirts if you’re going down the front. When people start to dance in such close quarters, your skirt will ride up and you’ll end up wearing it as a belt, backside and knickers exposed to the world.