Last week, I was lucky enough to win tickets to see one of my favourite bands Athlete play a little gig at the Amersham Arms in New Cross, London, (their local, allegedly). The tickets were from a prize draw on Amazon and I was a little bit thrilled to win as I hadn’t seen Athlete live before.
A free Athlete gig in a relatively intimate environment was too good to miss, so I grappled resignedly with the decidedly ailing London transport system in an attempt to get there somewhere near the support band’s start time of 8pm. Things proved tricky.
But it was Athlete, so on I battled and eventually found myself at the Amersham Arms queuing in a downpour to have my name checked off the guest list and my hand stamped – definite winner in the biggest, dirtiest and smudgiest hand stamp ever stakes.
It was decidedly after 8pm by now, but I still managed to be in time for the start of the support band’s set, though how that could’ve happened I don’t know. Was time travelling involved again, and did it work this time? The band seemed quite good, a bit loud in places for me, but definitely worth checking out, so I struggled to hear through the distortion when their singer announced they were Tapetheradio. Yes, all-one-word.
After a break to set up instruments, on came Athlete. The place was full by now, with about 250-300 people crammed into the small venue. Amazingly, all the tallest people in the world had converged at the Amersham Arms and I didn’t think I was that small but was obviously wrong. With the help of some strategic peering-through-the-gaps I managed to see the entire band and determined that they were in fact definitely Athlete and the free tickets hadn’t been some oh-so-funny wind up.
As I hadn’t seen Athlete live before, I didn’t know what to expect or if they’d be any good or not. I needn’t have worried about being disappointed though as they turned out to be one of the best live bands I’ve seen. Not as if I’ve seen hundreds like! But they were extremely good and one of those rare bands whose music sounded better to me live than their recorded stuff, aided by the fact that their singer can most definitely sing in actual real life.
They played a surprisingly long set for a free gig but it went by quickly as nearly everything about it was so good. They seem like very down to earth and funny guys and it was kind of nice for once to not have to suffer a barrage of insults and expletives, (and I hadn’t even paid for this one!).
Now, you might know how hopeless I can be at song titles, so I’ll just mention a few of the fifteen or so played over the next hour and a quarter, otherwise I’ll be doing my usual thing of talking about a song I can’t name! The set list embraced songs from all their four albums, so a nice mix of old and new with a couple played acoustically.
Athlete – Black Swan
The band opened with their current single Superhuman Touch from their album Black Swan, which sounded very good live. I liked the wobbly synthy bits on this that stuck in my head.
Next was an early song whose name escapes me (there you go, I’m at it already!) but its lyrical offering of ‘Ohh, it’s getting hot in here’ could have been written for the venue which was rapidly developing a sauna-like atmosphere as everyone’s rain-soaked clothing steamed in the intense heat from the lights and bodies. I suppose it actually could’ve been, it being Athlete’s local an all!
After a very good rendition of Half Life we got a bit of guitar tuning from Joel, (their lead singer), nicely covered with some jokey chat. This finally developed into Shake Those Windows with a bit of a false start as their singer decided he was playing his guitar in too low a key, luckily, as he pointed out, before the rest of the band came in! He stopped and recovered with an amusing aside and a smile in such an accomplished way I suspected he’d had a bit of practice with this very occurrence!
Next up was Black Swan Song from the new album, a quieter more acoustic number with a very personal lyric and not one I’m that keen on. But overall as a piece of music it’s growing on me a little, it did sound very nice live admittedly, with some interesting sounding overlapping backing vocals, just not a song for me I think. Good reception from the crowd though.
We got a song choice between Tourist and Beautiful to cheer for next, although I strongly suspect the outcome was actually rigged as my choice lost! So we got Beautiful acoustic which was clearly popular with the fans and is quite probably from its response one of those songs every fan longs to hear live but which has passed me by, nice enough but nothing special, with a lot of lyrical repetition.
Another couple of songs later and even the band had noticed the sweltering heat, but they struggled on regardless. The last song in this trio of early ditties (and yeah, I don’t know its title!) had an interesting techno instrumental finish which ended slightly oddly as someone ran on and left a very large drum in the middle of the stage which Joel proceeded to bash a few times from a great height. The drum then ran off again. Seemed a great deal of effort for so very little, but hey it went down well with some. They do have a drummer, but he obviously isn’t allowed to play with that one.
They moved on to Magical Mistakes from their current album, followed by Hurricane and something else from their previous one. We were then treated to another bit of an odd mistakey guitar moment in the acoustically rendered Love Come Rescue Me, with Joel stopping playing mid-song with a “That’s not right is it?” though to be honest if he hadn’t of stopped I wouldn’t have noticed. It was charmingly and adeptly handled, so I was probably right when I guessed earlier that he might have had a bit of practice at dealing with these scenarios!
Last but not least was what I’m calling the O-Uh-O-Uh-Oh-Oh song aka The Getaway, one of the better songs from Black Swan. If you’ve seen them live recently, you’ll know why. The final song was Wires, the one pretty much everyone will recognise even if they fail totally to name Athlete as the songwriters. This happens to be one of my favourite songs of all time, I’ve a fantastic acoustic version of this done for a Virgin Radio session a few years back, just love it. Sounded lovely live, a great song to finish on.
We couldn’t go though as we had to sing for Carey (the bass player) to AudioBoo us for posterity on his twitter page here!
I heard a ghost 