Legends of the Sun Pig

I think that Del Amitri’s 1989 album Waking Hours was the first CD I bought after moving to Scotland after secondary school. (It’s a long time ago.) It’s definitely an album I listened to a lot. I definitely remember listening to a tape of it on a portable cassette player on a long overnight bus ride between St. Andrews and London.

I never saw the band live until recently. My parents moved to North Berwick a few years ago, and North Berwick hosts a little offshoot of the Edinburgh Fringe festival every year: Fringe By The Sea. They’ve hosted some big (Scottish) names in the Big Top venue: Texas, Travis, and in 2024 Del Amitri. I had hoped that my parents could come along to see them as well, but the disabled access is limited and there were no suitable tickets left. My dad got me a ticket, and I went along on my own.

It was a pleasant evening in early August. I got to the Lodge Grounds way early. I was pretty much first in line when the stewards gathered people for the queue, and I got a great spot right in front of the stage. When my mental health is in a good state (i.e. not 2023/24), I like getting to a gig early and spending the time to enjoy the opening act(s), because they’re a great way to find new music I’m likely to enjoy. I’m thinking Bleu (opening for Toad the Wet Sprocket in Boston in 2003), Zoë Keating (opening for Imogen Heap in 2006), Thumpers (opening for Chvrches in 2013), etc. I can add Mandrake Handshake to that list. I don’t think they’re destined to be huge, but I loved them. They played a lush, groovy, modern psychedelic set that had me swaying along to their rich orchestration and easy rhythms. Honestly, the evening could have ended after them and I would have walked away happy.

Del Amitri came on later, and played a long, wide-ranging set full of favourites and crowd-pleasers. Lead singer Justin Currie has Parkinson’s, and from close up to the stage I could see a tremble in his hands when they weren’t actually playing his bass or holding the microphone. His voice is not as strong as it once was, but when you’ve got 2500 people in the crowd singing along to the familiar choruses, you can afford to hold back a little and roll with the room.

Set list:

1. Musicians and Beer
2. All Hail Blind Love
3. Always the Last to Know
4. Opposite View
5. Kiss this Thing Goodbye
6. Not Where It’s At
7. Mockingbird, Copy Me Now
8. Driving with the Brakes On
9. Move Away Jimmy Blue
10. You Can’t Go Back
11. Roll to Me
12. Here and Now
13. Tell Her This
14. Lonely
15. The Ones that You Love Lead You Nowhere
16. Spit in the Rain

Big encore:

17. Missing Person
18. Be My Downfall
19. Nothing Ever Happens
20. Gone in a Second
21. Stone Cold Sober

Being close to the stage I got some nice photos of the bands. (I had rented a Fujifilm X-H2 for this week I was over in Scotland, because I was taking a boat trip out to the Isle of May to see the puffins and other sea birds. I didn’t have a press pass, so I didn’t bring that to the gig with me.) My favourite photo of the evening, however, turned out to be a sideways shot of a steward, lit by the setting sun falling through the open flaps of the big top tent.

As a frequent concert-goer (mostly for bands that don’t sell out huge arenas) and as a notorious over-thinker (of everything), I often stand in the crowd at a gig and wonder how the finances work out for a band on tour. A couple of years ago Adam Neely made a video breaking down the costs of touring for his band Sungazer. Last month, Los Campesinos! shared a post giving details of the cost of playing a gig in Dublin.

Like Adam Neely, they clearly get people encouraging them to cut costs by forcing themselves to work under worse conditions:

Often when this conversation is had in the public domain, people will make statements like, “you can save money by sleeping in the van, or crashing on someone’s sofa” attempting to turn things into the dril candles meme. To those people, I say “grow up”.

I love music, and I love seeing artists play live. I kinda hate that the economics of this work out so poorly for them. The best I can do for them most of the time is to buy their music on a platform like Bandcamp (instead of, or as well as streaming it, because streaming is pretty convenient), showing up for them when they’re on tour, and buying their merch at the gig. (I’m very good at buying the merch.) But I wish that the music business was healthier, and could provide a more stable living for more people.

Related: the new album “Bicker” by Orchards is very good.

In his latest newsletter “On Having a Maximum Wealth” Hamilton Nolan discusses the idea of a “level cap” for real life:

The single most ridiculous aspect of human history is how much of it has been driven by the goal of allowing a tiny portion of a large population to live in luxury. This is a theme found, to varying degrees, in society after society across the world: A lot of people with a low standard of living working in service of the goal of raising the standard of living for some sort of ruler or supreme leader and his family and allies. I understand that this is not some sort of revelation. “You’ve discovered class,” you are now saying in a mocking tone. Beyond the social and political and economic dynamics underlying this process, though—things that make up magisterial fields of inquiry—I think that every once in a while it is well worth taking a moment to gape at the basic ludicrousness of this fact. As societal goals go, an honest reading tells us that we are often not aiming for “better technology” or “philosophical progress.” No, the reality is that, thousands of years and around the globe, the primary purpose of all the work that everyone is doing is “allowing a few jerks and their unbearable kids to live lavishly.” Countless millions through millennia have suffered, dragging stones to build pyramids and losing fingers in dirty factories and getting black lung so that Some Guy Somewhere can sit on a soft pillow and enjoy delicacies. 

What an absurd, idiotic goal to organize human society around. Wow!

I’m here for it.

I think I first came across Bilderbuch in 2015 or 2016; I remember sharing their track “OM” in a “New Music Monday” collaborative playlist at work. Their rich, genre-bending pop sound invited obvious comparisons with Falco, and I loved it. When I visited Julian in hospital in Austria at the start of 2019, I remember seeing their name on a poster in Innsbruck. It was probabaly for a gig or an album release. I jumped back into their catalogue, and found myself listening to “Checkpoint” on infinite repeat on my train journeys through the snow for the rest of that trip.

Since then I was waiting for them to play a show somewhere closer than Cologne, and last year they finally touched down in Amsterdam in March. I was still in deep burnout at work, and despite loving the band, and having bought a ticket as soon as I found out about the gig months before, I wasn’t excited on the day. I had to force myself to go into town. I skipped the support act (Kässy). As a latecomer, I had to squeeze myself into a corner of the Oude Zaal at Melkweg to get a barely decent view.

The gig was good, though. They kicked off with the powerful riffs and playful solos of “Softpower”, and carried on with the groovy “Dino”. Singer Maurice Ernst started off in a shirt and tie. He teased and flirted with the crowd and lost the shirt part-way through, but then gained a tight black crop-top. There were a ton of German fans in the audience, and a lot of singing along. Their live version of “Aber Airbags” is an extended, slow and trippy guitar solo tour that turns lively and up-tempo half-way through a 15-minute run, bursting with exuberance and a driving, bouncy beat. And of course they played “Spliff” as well. Amsterdam, innit.

Set list:

1. Softpower
2. Dino
3. Gigolo
4. Drugs
5. Bungalow
6. Willkommen im Dschungel
7. Aber Airbags
8. Maschin
9. Ab und Auf
10. Checkpoint

Encore:

11. Digitales Wunder
12. Spliff
13. Bluezone

I came to De Staat late in life, but after seeing them live in 2022 I resolved that I would definitely try to catch them again. In 2023 they announced that they were going to try something ambitious and experimental to support their Red, Yellow, and Blue project. In a small number of festivals and venues in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, they would play a three-day concert series, with a different set list each evening to match one of the three colours. Red covers their heavier material, Yellow has some of their less classifiable tracks, and Blue is more moody and downbeat.

Paradiso was one of the venues. Although you could get tickets for specific shows, I immediately bought a passepartout ticket for all three nights. I wasn’t disappointed!

Although there were some tickets still available on the night for a couple of the shows, Paradiso was packed. Each show had different set dressing, different lighting (of course), and a different opening act. Many of the fans in the audience were wearing matching colours. On Red Monday I found a place up on the second balcony, facing the stage. Iron Jinn played a suitably dark and sludgy set. For De Staat there was a large speaker at the back of the stage for Torre Florim to perch on, and a tall pulpit that rose up from behind the curtains late in the set. As always at their gigs, there was a huge circular rotating mosh for the song “Witch Doctor”. (One of the reasons I’d positioned myself up on high…)

On Yellow Tuesday, Smudged played a wild and punky opening set, with all band members decked out in green face paint. I was on the first balcony to the right of the stage this evening. This time, De Staat had a set of stairs at the centre of the stage, leading up to a huge lighting rig. The song “Pikachu” is one of the centrepieces of their show, and as well as doing their dance on stage, Rocco and Torre took it down into the audience as well.

Dutch singer Pitou opened the show on Blue Wednesday, and she joined the band on stage for a haunting and entrancing rendition of “I’ll Take You”. The band had a second drummer on stage, and you know you’re in for a good time with two drummers. I was on the second balcony again, but this time off to the left of the stage. (Probably the worst view of the three shows, but it did give some interesting photo perspectives.)

Because I came to De Staat late, I had spent more time listening to their more recent material than their full back catalogue. They played 48 songs over the three shows, and to fill all three evenings evenings they brought out a lot of songs I hadn’t paid much attention to before. Hearing them live really brought them to life, and I think I might now rate their 2013 album I_CON as my favourite. The raucous guitar hooks on “Make Way for the Passenger”, the incredible rumble of drums on “The Inevitable End”, the Beastie Boys echoes on “Input Source Select”, and the memories of Pitou’s voice gracing “I’ll Take You” all combine to give me chills whenever I hear the recorded versions now.

This concert series was an amazing experience. It absolutely cemented De Staat as a “must see” band for me whenever they tour again.

Set Lists:

Monday 29 January – Red

1. Look at Me
2. Ah, I See
3. Life is a Game (Ladadi Ladadada)
4. Me Time
5. Old Macdonald Don’t Have No Farm No More
6. Refugee
7. Paying Attention
8. Some Body
9. Make Way for the Passenger
10. Murder Death
11. Help Yourself
12. Burning the Flag
13. Meet the Devil
14. Head on the Block
15. Witch Doctor

Encore:

16. Rooster-Man
17. Kitty

Tuesday 30 January – Yellow

1. Danger
2. Peptalk
3. Blues is Dead
4. Numbers Up
5. Psycho Disco
6. Input Source Select
7. Habibi
8. Fake It Till You Make It
9. Mona Lisa
10. Pikachu
11. Make the Call, Leave It All
12. Sweatshop
13. Get on Screen

Encore

14. Bombti
15. Who’s Gonna Be the GOAT?

Wednesday 31 January – Blue

1. Take Root
2. Devil’s Blood
3. I’m a Rat
4. Someone to Be
5. Keep Me Home
6. One Day
7. Firestarter
8. I’ll Never Marry You
9. Luther
10. She’s With Me (Torre Florim solo)
11. I’ll Take You (with Pitou)
12. Running Backwards Into The Future
13. Time Will Get Us Too
14. The Inevitable End

Encore

15. What Goes, Let Go
16. Phoenix

Why yes, I am posting this gig almost a year late, thank you for noticing.

This was my last gig of 2023. It was the end of December, dark, it had been a very long and turbulent year, I was neck deep in stress about writing my research project proposal, and I don’t think I was super excited about trekking all the way up to Zwolle. But The Cool Quest always put on a great show, and this was a home town gig for them, with a few new songs they’d released earlier in the year. I took the train, because I dislike driving in the dark.

It was also the first non-arena gig with my still new-ish iPhone 15 Pro, and its camera system that was streets ahead of my old iPhone X. (The first gig I went to with the 15 Pro was Melanie Martinez at the Glasgow Hydro.) Close up to the stage, the 15 Pro produces very noticeably better images, which is nice.

Support act was Dutch singer-songwriter MICHA, performing solo with a guitar. Not really my kind of thing, but the songs were melodious, his voice was strong, and the emotion he expressed while playing in front of a large crowd was heartfelt.

This was the third time I’d seen The Cool Quest, and they were amazing again. Their lineup had changed a bit: Vincent Bergsma (vocals), Sander Moorlag (keys), and Ilse de Vries (bass) formed the core, but Vadim Neef on guitar has been replaced by Cedric Siegers, and Mira Burgers took her place on drums. Mira was a powerhouse, and Cedric was technically excellent, but I missed the playful and intricate back-and-forth that Vadim and Sander used to have during their solos. Vincent was in fine voice, was excited to be back on stage in Zwolle, and he pumped up the audience to a frenzy. As a rare treat, they brought out two players on trumpet and saxophone to round out some of their songs from their first album Funkin’ Badass that featured horns extensively.

They’re such a great party band. Even if you’re not familiar with their music, I’m sure the energy would be infectious and you’d have a great time.

Set list:

1. Party on the Bloc
2. My Little Peace of Mind
3. Screw Up 2.0
4. Daily Grind 2.0
5. Last Dance
6. Dancing with the Devil
7. Funkin’ Badass
8. Shine
9. VIVID medley: Deadlines, Runnin’, Coastline
10. Punisher (acoustic)
11. Rain
12. You Got What I Need
13. Temporary
14. Gypsy Woman (Crystal Waters cover)
15. Dark Matter
16. Celebrate the Struggle
17. Storm

Encore:

18. Hesitate
19. Loose Cannon