LoathedVermin72 wrote:C'mon, he didn't actually say "I'm a serious artist," did he? I mean, for real? Come on. You have to be exaggerating or paraphrasing or something. That can't be real.
He most certainly did. I can't tell you how amazing that moment was. His Mancunian swagger took a blow that night. What a wanker.
Wow.
Here's a review that explains some of the sound issues.
It may well be that this review of Damon (Badly Drawn Boy) Gough's performance at the Enmore Theatre will read more like a traffic sergeant's summary of one of those accidents that starts with a bingle and ends in an inexplicable multi-car pile-up.
Just about everything that could go wrong, did. From the first song, faulty on-stage sound meant he couldn't hear himself clearly through the monitors. At first many in the audience were annoyed he was stopping and complaining but it soon became clear, even to the cloth-eared lump who booed, that if you can't hear yourself, it's hard to sing.
We were getting a taste of it with pretty fuzzy sound on his vocals front of house and some feedback as the stage levels were turned up to help him. But the doomed nature of the night became clear when Gough moved to an electric piano for the lovely Silent Sigh, from the movie About a Boy. After a long, attractive piano introduction, he leant into the microphone but instead of his voice we got a wet, electronic farting noise. With an amplifier dying and then a song interrupted by the white noise you get when you hold a mobile phone too close to electronic equipment - made by, it turned out, a mobile phone left on by someone side-stage - it seemed inevitable that unless Gough was a saint (and coming from Manchester, that seems unlikely) an explosion would occur.
And so it did when an hour into the show, frustrated and narky, he smashed the microphone off its stand with his acoustic guitar midsong. "I didn't come halfway 'round the world, leave my two kids behind, to listen to myself through crappy speakers," he said. Then having put that guitar out of tune, he picked up another to continue the song, only to discover that it, too, was out of tune.
But here is the most bizarre aspect of the night. Despite everything conspiring against it, Gough's quality shone through. For a start he played nearly an hour longer than scheduled, declaring that we hadn't had our money's worth so far. Then a rocking 40 Days, 40 Fights happily recalled Manchester predecessors the Smiths (whose bass player Andy Rourke was playing with Gough); the little known B-side Golden Days with a circular piano figure and a wistful tune was touching; Born Again had a heavy psychedelic groove; and a cracked version of Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road charmed.
The result was that while we won't forget the disasters, we will remember that Gough's voice is warm, his humour clever and after three albums and a handful of EPs, he's got a large number of winning songs that can survive anything.
lennytheweedwhacker wrote:stp were my favorite band back in the day, before i really started to get into pearl jam
who else were you into back in the day, lenny?
most of the radio rock bands from that era...i have so many cd's from then that i'll never touch again
True story: I just sold my early 90's cd collection I had boxed up and in storage.
how much did u get? my cases are in awful shape
Yeah it was approximately 200 CDs. I listed most of them in an ad and said I wanted to sell them all together. Some guy who is "starting a vintage music store" came by, took about 30 minutes to inspect their condition, and bought them from me for $1 each. I was happy with that, considering I had converted them all to digital and they were just in storage.
