The Beat Surrender

It really is with a degree of sadness that I find myself sat watching Electric Soft Parades last ever tour, I hadn’t realised this at the time of coming to the gig, I thought I was just seeing them on tour for the first time, it turns out though that after the lack of support they have received in the music industry for the bands third album No Need To Be Downhearted, they’ve decided to call it a day and pursue other projects.

This is both a big loss to the music industry in my eyes and a sad indication of the industries failings in this country, the fact that it is basically built around two peoples opinions at the opposite end of the scale (NME and Simon Cowell) is a worrying way for the industry to have gone. If anyone was going to get behind ESP then it would be supposed uber cool music magazine NME, however if you aren’t flavour of the month with them then you don’t get coverage and they have never really thrown their weight behind these Brighton Boys.

So they have decided to bow out by playing their latest album in full from start to finish, more of them later, but before that we have two very different support acts to watch.

First up is Dear Britch, basically a one man (Stuart Flynn) act, which see’s the 6ft, camp(er) Mick Hucknall look alike parading and cavorting on stage with his leather trousers, attempting to croon over backing tracks, it’s utterly terrible stuff and I can’t wait for him to finish.

That performance we have just witnessed couldn’t be further from the brilliance of Paul Steel, he emerges on stage with his band and two backing singers and proceeds to absolutely blow the whole crowd away with a combination of stunning sun kissed harmony, beautifully crafted tracks and then a closing song in Ray Gun that is the absolute highlight of the night for me.

It starts off as a fairly quirky pop song (something he excels at) but turns itself into this warped, thrashed full on energy burning epic that see’s Steel dancing away like a madman behind his big fringe and throwing himself and the music into all sorts of twisted shapes. It’s all timed perfectly and is a fantastic spectacle to close on. For me he steals the show tonight and it’s such a shame that a bigger crowd haven’t turned out to enjoy him. If you get the chance go see him live.

So finally we get onto the Headliners, after a slight sound delay and a member seem,ingly lost backstage somewhere, they come on in their understated way in their matching white shirts and proceed to play the entire album as promised. The highlights for me are No Need To Be Downhearted, Misunderstanding and Life In The Backseat.

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