How best to review the best In The City for years? You’ll find acres of praise written (a lot of it here on ANBAD), so adding much more seems superfluous, save for another dollop of much-deserved praise.
Thus, here’s a tremendously glib faux-award ceremony, featuring the best bits, exclusive interviews and a video of a man dancing, playing a keyboard with his forehead, and then falling over.
Widest Variety Of Bass Noises: Youthless. I interviewed the brilliant and lovely Youthless after their excellent last gig at Umbro Studios.
And in case you were thinking of skipping it, remember – an interview that spawns the quotations, “I started writing music because I like to climb on things…” and “…my trademark is bass feedback that sounds like a whale…” is always worth a listen.
Interview with Youthless – In The City, Manchester – 15/10/2010
Please ignore my witless guffawing – I was very heavily medicated on ‘flu medicine.
The Bands I Swore I Wouldn’t Miss Under Any Circumstances, But Did: Yuck, White Ring, Dutch Uncles, Young British Artists, Egyptian Hip Hop, Eagulls, Brown Brogues…
The Band That Isn’t Cool Enough For In The City, But Have The Tunes To Make It Anywhere: The effortlessly strange Lissie Dancefloor Disaster, who have the kind of thrilling earworm-songs that, in a fair world, would see them topping the charts for weeks. Success can’t be to far away now, surely.
Listen to a surprisingly sane interview with LDD here!
The Band That Actually Exceeded The Hype: D/R/U/G/S, a band whose name is increasingly painful to type. I can’t remember the last time a band’s very first song gave me the feeling of sudden realisation that I was watching something particularly brilliant, only to then trash that revelation and replace it with feelings of even higher praise during the next song.
Yes, they sound a bit like Orbital, but since when has that been a bad thing? So good I saw them twice, and would have seen them three times, if they hadn’t clashed with Youthless.
Tinnitus Providers Of The Week: No Age
Sweat-Inducers Of The Week: No Age
The Band Whose Template All Other Guitar Bands Should Copy: Yep, No Age. They were so blisteringly alive, almost all other guitar bands witnessed seemed flaccid and insipid in comparison.
The Most Wholly Wonderful Dancing Of The Week:
Congratulations to Lissie Dancefloor Disaster, for coming to the hometown of Happy Mondays’ Bez and out Freaky Dancin’ the master himself.
Most Phlegm Produced In One Three-Day Burst: Me. Sniff.
So That’s It. In The City is over. There’s a hole in my life that Manchester’s normal gig scene just won’t be able to fill. How sad.
More Coverage:
Daytime Liveblogs: Wednesday / Thursday / Friday
Weekend – Metallic, Howling Clouds. And Fußball. | A New Band A Day!