There was a real buzz in the queue and in the venue before the band came on. Clearly a group of competition winners seeing their favourite new band in a small venue is more than enough to blow away any London-crowd Monday-night apathy.
The band came on to a stage flooded with dry ice and a barrage of strobes. For the first few songs, we couldn't see the band and they couldn't see us, a slightly odd situation which they commented on. But it did make the band and audience feel very much as one with the songs coming from disembodied misty figures. If the dry ice had cleared faster, it might have the same effect as the Manics entry for the Holy Bible Astoria shows. As it was it was still a great entrance.
They then piled through their classic tunes songbook. All the EP tracks that are on the album, some album tracks they'd not played before, and great versions of Sappho, When My Day Comes and We Were Children.
The crowd were really behind the band the whole way, belting out choruses, throwing pints and even crowd-surfing - no mean feat in an audience of 150.
It's a rare treat to see a band play their debut album in its entirety and create such energy amongst the audience that they got the floor shaking.
Album tracks that we hadn't heard before seem slower than those we knew already. They were driven by fairly heavy guitars and some seemingly heart-felt lyrics that touched a chord with the audience.
By the end of the packed set, our ears were ringing and the room was buzzing with excitement.
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