Journey down to London went fine. Once there, traveled straight to the venue area to check it out. Bumped into Jim & waited for doors to open. Strangely, even at 6pm there was only less than 10 of us there. Met with another mate, who didn’t recognize me to start off due to the fact last time he saw me i had hair !
Once inside, we got a great viewpoint on raised area on right hand side. Quickly said hi to my mate Adrian Hextall & settled in for the night.
Later Rob & Kristina arrived & we’re good to go. Hey Hello kicked off things in fine style, with “Swimwear”, followed by “Burn The Rule Book” & ” This Aint Love “. The new vocalist , Cat, fits in very well. Whilst the majority of the audience isn’t exactly bouncing along to everything, there’s a couple down there who are obviously loving every moment.
Don’t tell anyone, but, i think i enjoyed Hey ! Hello! more than the others today 😉 By the time they got to ” Lock For Rock “, the audience was in fine voice. Bloody loved it. A great 10 (?) song set that just flew by.
Next it was “Ryan Hamilton & The Traitors”. I think anything after “Hey! Hello!” would have felt a bit lackluster & that was my feeling during their set. Decent enough music, but, there seemed to be no edge to it. Don’t get me wrong,it was quality,but after HH anything would seem downbeat. Interestingly, Ryan told us all about how in these days of support bands having to “buy onto” tours, Ginger personally invited them to join. Once again, it shows Gingers heart is in the right place. We even got an impromptu jam of ” Take It On The Run” ( REO Speedwagon) where Ginger guested. Most enjoyable 🙂
Finally it was time for the main act. With Ginger having such a big back catalog (from his various incarnations) ,gawd knows what the setlist will be tonight. Straight out of the blocks we’re hit with 3 SG5 songs. Nice start ! The first Wildhearts song of the evening was ” Mazel Tov Cocktail”. This was about 10 songs into the set, so we had a varied bunch of songs before this & it rightly showed they don’t have to rely on the Wildhearts songs to keep everyone entertained. Later when they played ” If You Find Yourself In London Town”, there was the surprise guest appearance of Micko Larkin ( He who used to play in Courtney Loves band). The stage did get a bit busy by now 😉
The show was finished with three classic Wildhearts songs ; ” Geordie In Wonderland ” , ” Suckerpunch ” (preceeded with Ginger saying ” Let’s play Kill The Drummer ” ) & then a totally OTT version of ” 29 x The Pain “.
All in all a very good night out. I’d never been to this venue before & was pretty impressed with the place. Will certainly go there again in the future 🙂
Someone uploaded the full set :