The Beat Surrender

Okay, to start with, part of me had hoped prior to the gig that the band would be below par, or even just not very good, it was the only way I could imagine myself being able to be objective. I’ve been a fan of The Delays since I first accidentally discovered them tucked away on one of those ‘indie bands of the moment’ type compilation albums. The song on the compilation was Long Time Coming and shortly after listening to it a couple of dozen times I bought their debut album Faded Seaside Glamour which was an instant hit with me.

Follow up album You See Colours released earlier this year was even better and after seeing them for the first time live at the V Festival last month, they were officially installed as my current favourite band (although Doves forthcoming album may knock them back off the top). As I said in my report on the V Festival last month, their sound is kind of a cross between The Cure and The La’s on helium. To cut a long story short, it would be fair to say that I absolutely love this band. With this much biased opinion, it’s hard to maintain a neutral stance, but I assure you that I have, and I also assure you that at the Leadmill on this particular Saturday night, they were absolutely awesome.

Our night started in Henry Boons, a quaint little pub in Wakefield, just outside the main centre on Westgate. Our party was 5 strong, myself, the missus, two mates and one of the mates girlfriend’s. A swift pint was thrown down and we moved on to the train station to catch our chosen from of transport for the night, picking up on the way a few cans of Strongbow to keep us company on the journey. In no time we had arrived and entered the Leadmill to the sound of the first support band of the night finishing the last couple of songs of their set. I still don’t know what they were called but they could bang the drums very hard, and as they were pretty proficient at doing this, that’s pretty much all that they seemed to do. Unimpressed with the initial audio entertainment we ushered ourselves over to the bar and ordered a round in.

As the second support band Apartment took the stage we made our way through to the main room to see if they were any improvement on the previous tubthumpers. They weren’t actually too bad in all fairness to them, in parts they sounded a little like The Editors, particularly in their song 10,000 Times which they announced is their forthcoming single. Despite the support bands valiant attempts, we had come to watch The Delays and our attention was not going to be held for long until they were on, so we set up camp again over at the bar. My friend Danny has recently stopped smoking and he is currently making up for his lack of nicotine by as he puts it ‘power drinking’. It’s for this reason that I blame him for the ill advised session of downing sambuca between every pint that ensued. As the clock turned 10 The Delays took the stage and we took our place at the back of the generous crowd, now fully inebriated.

I’m not sure if I’ve managed to remember every song they did since I was finding it hard to write text message notes when I couldn’t decide which of the 3 buttons I could see on my phone to press, but they definitely opened with Long Time Coming. This was followed up by Sink Like a Stone, Lillian, This Towns Religion, Out of Nowhere, Hey Girl, Wanderlust, Waste Of Space, Hideaway, Girls On Fire, Nearer Than Heaven and they closed with the electro funk sounding Valentine. Every track was greeted with rapturous applause and cheering both for the instantly recognisable intros and the climatic finales.

Lead singer Greg Gilbert’s voice sounds absolutely fantastic live. It would be fair to say that on record you could easily mistake it as being a woman singing their songs as he enjoys the same kind of vocal range that I can only think of the late Jeff Buckley as having. Live though, Gilbert has a rough undertone to his voice, he almost growls out the songs with passionate ferocity and it’s this rawness that makes them sound so good.

After a minute or so of milking the deafening calls for more the band retook the stage and did a blinding cover of John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance that I’m sure would even have had the liverpudlian legend himself giving favourable plaudits. Best was saved for last though as they closed the night with You and Me, a real crowd favourite with its majestic synthesised string section and uplifting chorus.

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