Tonight's gig - Japanese rockers Boris playing in a small church in Manchester.
Very unusual gig! Well, unusual compared with most other concerts I guess; I have heard of, and seen, church gigs before, this wasn't unique by a long shot. But it was still very interesting watching a band like Boris playing in such a tiny venue. After all, they play at Festivals for thousands of people at one time, so a small venue of just over 100 people is a bit like a break from the norm.
The show was good, nice enough venue, as far as churches go this one seemed quite liberal. A liberal church! You heard it here first. There's a strange piece of artwork on the wall in there of what appears to be a vampire biting a girl's neck, a big old piece of canvas art with fangs and blood and all that. In a church. Underneath it there's a small quote from the bible, something about wives honouring their husbands, next to it was a £250 price tag to buy the artwork. So, churches are also being used as vampiric art house these days. I wonder if the Vatican knows about all this?
Let's get to the Boris gig and their set. We saw the support band, Day for Airstrikes, we watched for a good while from the back of the room through a crowd at least, they sounded fine to me. After they were finished on the stage, the area was taken over with guys acting as roadies for the Boris performance. Then 2 of the band came down to the stage area (the altar) - it was Takeshi & Wata, who play the guitars. They started the set soon after, just the 2 of them. But no drummer... where was he? Then my gig buddy tapped me on the shoulder and I turned just in time to see Atsuo leap over a pew and past us, marched to his kit and away they went.
After they played Pink Takeshi beckoned everyone to come close to the band, everyone piled forward and stood about 2 metres away from the stage for the rest of the show.
Boring sidenote: I kneeled in 'seiza' (the formal japanese kneeling position) under the pulpit for the whole set from there on in, this was because it was the only space I could find to get a good view of the band because space was so cramped. It was very ironic to be watching a Japanese band while kneeling in seiza. I got some great photos from that point of view.
The set list, all you doom geeks out there, went something like:
1. Farewell
2. Rainbow
3. Pink
4. (song with Japanese title)
5. Ibistu
6. Sun Flower Rain
7. Just Abandoned My-Self
8. over 30 minutes of Flood
The above vid is a clip that I took of the last song - a song which was about half an hour long - this is the intro of the second part of "Flood", you can see from that we were quite close to the stage area, about 2 or 3 meters away from Wata and her Les Paul. I took a few more vids and a pile of photos too (mainly of Wata). What can I say: I'm a Wataphile.
Anyway, great show. I enjoyed it a lot anyway. Kudos to the promoters. You don't get many doom metal gigs in churches, especially in Northwest England, so when they come around you should go to em if you can. I look forward to the next one. The merchandise at Boris shows is always very good too, I got myself a new double vinyl record by them called "Doomriders vs Boris", which will probably be played once and put away on my shelf with the rest of my Boris records, and I got a nice tshirt as well. The white one.
We've got tickets to see Boris again next Monday when they play in London - I dunno right now if I can make it along because of work commitments, I also dunno whether it's going be be such a good idea traveling to London for a 3rd time in 2 weeks! But I do like Boris a lot, and it would looked good on my "Gigs attended in 2007" list, so perhaps I will make it along after all. Who knows! If not, well, I have 4 tickets spare for the London show that will inevitably go to waste.
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