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| Radio 4 Ekko, Utrecht 23.02.2003 We arrived to a not even half filled venue, where most of the people present were over thirty or trendy student types in their twenties wearing the most horrible of fashionable indie-kid clothes. It took ages for the show to start, so we just hung around the place, looking sulky, and waited and waited. Indeed, even when the support band was already standing with their instruments at the ready, the DJ just wouldn’t stop playing, and it took him two songs to understand that they wanted to start playing. They were some terribly clichéd emo-band, and Dutch too, but they were reasonably good. They had brought some fans with them, who were looking too fashionable to seem even slightly interesting, so we didn’t talk to them. Anyway, the music was reasonable, and their show was really refreshingly entertaining. The singer made good use of the crowd’s supposed stage-phobia (they did not dare to come within two metres of the stage for some reason- maybe the band was carrying an exotic disease) by simply jumping off the stage and showing off playing his solos right in front of the crowd anyway. After a good half hour they stopped and Radio 4 came on. Even with them the crowd displayed signs of stage-phobia; only the admirable Renée and Else as well as myself dared to stand right in front of the stage, to the bands delight, and they asked the rest of the crowd to come forward too, which they did, eventually. The gig was nothing short of marvellous. The music rocked, was very danceable and even though I felt like an idiot for being one of five people dancing shamelessly, it was a very good time. There were a few rather stoned people dancing too, and Anthony did some of his trademark moves to impress us; raising his hands and his guitar and dancing with Tommy. ….., who did the percussion, was also dancing, thought looking rather like a drunken bear, but he was entertaining anyway. My favourite was Gerard, the cuddly keyboard player, who was being very intense behind his keyboard, shaking his head like Johnny Greenwood, prompting rumours from Renée and Else that he was autistic, but he is just shy really. He also consistently ignored my taking very frequent pictures of him, to my general annoyance, because he was always looking the other way when my flash lit up. They played quite a long setlist (see below), and when they left, everyone kept cheering and shouting until they gave in and came back to play an encore, to much applause, or rather, to as much applause as you could get from the trendily sulky audience of around fifty people. By Hanna Nierstrasz |