There’s a lot of recession bashing going on at the bar. Staff grumbling about people drinking less. Punters complaining about the price of going out and a general lamenting of good music venues closing down. This show’s been rescheduled from a Friday night in the now closed Auntie Annie’s to a Thursday evening slot in the Errigle Inn, another venue synonymous with good music but maybe a little less known amongst the younger audiences in the city.
And so, with all this in mind, there’s an awkward atmosphere as Amidships take to the stage early on, leaving more people up there than down here. A few more stragglers slide into seats as the set progresses, JP McCorley’s laconic wit ushers us forward a little more and eventually we all open up and realise this is less of a gig and more of a night down the pub amongst friends and surrounded by sublime music.
Amidships have been gigging relentlessly of late and it shows. The performance is slick, JP and Fiona duel it out on vocals while Steve and Mike plough a steady bass line, keeping us firmly rooted in what the band describe themselves as ‘atmospheric folk rock’. Having been around for a couple of years now, tracks like ‘The One’ and ‘A Friend’ have fast become favourites on the Folk & Tumble stereo, conjuring up aural memories of Reindeer Section, Iain Archer and, dare we say, Songs for Polarbears era Snow Patrol? Latest single ‘Lost’ is a grower and the kind of tune which sees Amidships overcome that wave of social awkwardness and just enjoy the music.
This Is The Kit hail from England, are based in Paris and tonight they’re treating a fairly sparsely populated Belfast; amazing and entrancing with a fairly spectacular performance. As a band, they deserve bigger and better and should that happen, this will be one of those shows which no doubt everyone will profess to having witnessed.
A few of us will be in on the “folk rock tank top” jokes or actually have pinched ourselves in disbelief as Jesse Vernon played a massive fuzzed out guitar solo with his teeth… Yeah, his teeth; Hendrix style. That’s the kind of night it is. There’s something endearingly sixties about the performance, from Kate Staples’ barefoot on stage to the over distorted Woodstock-esque solos, to the tank tops and floral patterns and old finger plucked banjo.
It’s not a flawless performance by any means and a few of the newer tracks on offer are still a little sloppy in places, Jesse shies away from the microphone a little too much and knowing looks between the three on stage let us all in on the secret that there’s a little more work to be done here. In just over an hour we’ve been taken by the hand, taken back to simpler times and guided through a back catalogue of many year’s worth of beautiful songwriting.
The serious music fan might remember that moment in time when Fleetwood Mac transcended from mellow folk hippies to the pop-rock behemoths of ‘Rumours’. I imagine their studio jams in that interim sounded just like this.