And so all too soon to the following night with Simon Love & the Plastic Yeh Yeh Band. A somewhat avant-garde stage presence combined plenty of 60's sounding keyboard lines which Billy Preston himself would have been proud of with an extremely nattily dressed band member providing live sign language translations of the lyrics... then later conducting the crowd in some extremely entertaining participation. It was ultimately pleasing to see Simon Love return with a great new band and a bunch of fantastic songs.
A short bar stop later and it was suddenly time for the return of Emma Kupa (obviously previously of Standard Fare) with a new band. Mammoth Penguins must be both a continuation and change from what has come before, combining as they do beautiful sounding and beautifully heartfelt songs, clanging guitars and Emma's wonderfully distinctive voice. As always the entire set was delivered with a trademark sense of humour and flew by in an instant!!
An equally brief break gave time for a dash to the merchandise stand and the purchase of arguably my favourite t-shirt of the entire Winter Sprinter and time to briefly contemplate what was coming up next.
Herman Dune had played the 2013 Sprinter and closed their encore with a memorable cover of Pale Blue Eyes, originally by the Velvet Underground, which had got me thinking that given the death of Lou Reed in the intervening year perhaps the song might be reprised.
What transpired was the most poignant and perfectly unexpected tribute to Lou Reed that could possibly have been imagined. A, presumably, recently composed tribute to the man himself came first, followed by an exquisite set made up almost entirely of VU and Lou Reed songs, interspersed with the occasional Herman Dune original, which undoubtedly kept everyone on the edge of their metaphorical (as the Lexington is standing only aside from a couple of token benches to one side of the room) seats.
Unfortunately your writer was too absorbed in proceedings to note down the exact set list which is no doubt available somewhere for those with a keen enough interest to search.
It was quite certainly a fitting end to the second night of four which would and will take something inspired to top!!
No comments:
Post a Comment