Brighton’s favourite indie band The Electric Soft Parade played The Haunt last night for the tenth anniversary of their classic Holes in the Wall album, released on Feb 4th 2002.
Support came from two local bands – Another Costume Party, who play good energetic indie rock; and Whiskey Whores, who are a bluegrass-country band, and a lovely one at that.
The White brothers seemed to have mixed emotions about their tenth anniversary gig. Happy to celebrate ten years of their much-lauded first album that still sounds brilliant today, they also seemed keen to see the back of it and consign it to history.
The songs are still strong, and the band itself – Tom and Alex White augmented by Damo Waters on drums, Matthew Twaites on bass and Andrew Mitchell (of the Hazey Janes) on second guitar – sounded amazing. Tom and Alex swapped keys/guitar from song-to-song, and the ‘hit’ single Silent to the Dark, played out in its full length noise-filled long version which seemed to go on for a mesmerising 15 minutes was worth the entrance money alone. Tom even managed to get the audience to sing the opening lines, before the band launched into its sonic assault. Empty at the End, Somethng’s Got to Give, Biting the soles of my feet were also highlights.
But things were obviously not quite right with the band, with Alex in particular having a fit and throwing his toys out of the pram. By the end of the gig he was bemoaning the fact that his keyboards had died, perhaps not helped by his trying to play it with his heels earlier in proceedings, and saying this would be the last time he ever played live. That would be a shame because on the evidence of tonight, it’s hard to see how these boys could eve play a bad gig.
