Mono Café, 14 February 2025
Being a music fan in 2025 is a different experience to that when I first started going to gigs in the 1970s.
Delving into the memory bank, I can’t recall sharing the gig with too many people in their late 40s, 50s, 60s and even older when attending The Apollo to see bands of the calibre of Black Sabbath, Roxy Music, Deep Purple, Wings and more.
Over the past few years, bands of a certain vintage have reformed in full or in part to rekindle the heady days when they were the darlings of the NME, Sounds or even Melody Maker. With re-mastered albums, 40th and 50th anniversary releases with rare additional tracks, picture discs, etc. All great marketing with an audience more than happy to add to their collection of memorabilia.
And of course, many have reformed to tour around the country, in some cases the world, to play tracks from their back catalogue.
And the questions that might need answering is:
Has the act decided to go back out on the road because they ‘hope’ there’s an audience still out there for them?
or
Is the audience, in buying their back catalogue of albums with a new found disposable cash stream, given the acts and the promotors the financial incentive to make hay while they can?
On Friday night at the Mono Café in Glasgow, it was the turn of The Boo Radleys to once again strut their stuff, playing tracks from two of their favoured albums Wake Up released in 1995 and the follow up C’Mon Kids released in 1996. And the audience, in the main, were of a vintage to remember them first time around.
Made up of the three, original members, Sice, Brown and Cieka, the sounds that emanated from the stage harked back to hose heady days when Wake Up was the number one album and the band were rarely off the airwaves.
While C’Mon Kids didn’t achieve the same levels of popular opinion, the band still believe it to be their best work.
Listening back to the set list you can hear that the earlier album had tracks oozing pop sensibility, while the latter showed a maturity in writing which highlighted how the band explored the musical possibilities that their songwriting offered.
What is also evident from similar gigs, is the depth of storytelling that is just as entertaining for the audience. How songs were contrived. Sharing gigs with illustrious stars, the good, the bad and sometimes the ugly.
Between songs, Sice was equally happy to share some pearls of wisdom. In setting the context for some of the songs that followed, it gave an extra dimension to where the tracks were coming from at the time of writing.
Musically, the set was very tight with the drums and trumpet adding to the depth of the evening.
Shutting your eyes, it was as if the band had transported us all back thirty years. To a time when we were all that bit younger. When most music from the Creation stable deserved attention.
Friday night was a beautiful sonic experience that captured the best of times.
Support Acts
Keeley is a trio of musicians, neither short of talent nor ambition.
In a relatively short set, Keeley (Moss) is the leading light of the trio with a smart eye on what indie rock music is all about, capturing both the spirit and the dynamism of the genre.
She has a social conscious too with much of her creativity dedicated to the murder of teenage German backpacker Inga Maria Hauser.
Like most support acts, there isn’t the time to delve too deep into what they are all about or what they may become. With the backing of The Boo Radleys and others though, collectively they are ones to file away in the cabinet marked Worth Seeing Again.
Marshall Arts had even less time to show what they were about and the ‘normal trio’ was effectively a solo production with a backing track as accompaniment throughout the four songs.
Leaning more towards indie pop than indie rock the songs were engaging, if seemingly time constrained and feeling slightly rushed. Another Time, Another Place maybe.
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