Right, just got back in from The Cat Empire gig in Angel with Lord Science and Mr Bird. I swear, at this rate I'm NEVER gonna get around to writing about my trip to Wales !

As far as gigs go, I was WELL impressed. The support act was Will Hoge, and their appearance sorta turned me off initially. Paul's comment was “Hey, it's the Identikit rock band !”. It was quite interesting – every one of their songs sounded like a different band (we definitely had Aerosmith, Shania Twain and AC/DC sounds in there, with a bit of a twist of Stevie Wonder and James Brown to boot), however we warmed up to them, and by the time they'd finished we were well into it.

The Cat Empire eventually came on, and if the gig was relying on crowd support alone then they already had it in the bag – I'm guessing a lot of this was due to their sellout gig at Shepherd's Bush Empire on Thursday. Talk about home crowd advantage… once again, Islington Academy was shoulder-to-shoulder with Aussies. As soon as the band fired up, the crowd exploded. And from that point it was high energy tunes all the way to closure. Incredible – what a way to work a crowd !

At this point I'm able to easily say that the material was a mixture of stuff from their first and second albums, cos I've heard their first, and they've only got one other ! They cranked straight into Days Like These for song #2, and Hello Hello came out surprisingly early… It didn't really matter what they played to be honest – that room was going berserk in any case. The cover of Paul Kelly's “Dumb Things” was pretty rockin, and the new album stuff's got me intrigued enough to consider buying it once my much-spoken-of paycheque arrives on Tuesday.

All in all, a totally top gig, and yet more evidence that we've got some kickarse musical talent back home.

2005-08-01 : Hhhhhhhcello, hhhhhcello
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