Gig roundup - Travis, Pet Shop Boys

In the past two weeks I've been to two gigs at Hammersmith's reasonably large Apollo. Both were by bands with a dedicated following but their best days (in musical and success terms) some way behind them. One of them was kind of formative in my music taste, the other wasn't at all.

First up, Travis. In the wait before the inevitable encore, I jokingly guessed at what was to come: 'They're going to play three more songs, and not one of them will be "U16 Girls"'. It sort of made my evening that, on the second count, I was wrong. Fran Healy hammed up his implausible dirty old man role brilliantly and all laid into its increasingly incongruent strut with style and, gosh, had fun. It cemented what was clear throughout much of the gig, that ten years after they abandoned the dischordant rock of Good Feeling it's still when they sound most vital. Not just the songs from that album though (we were treated to another two earlier). It's thanks to unlikely guitar god Andy Dunlop is let loose that "Turn" and particularly "Writing To Reach You" reach through overfamiliarity. New songs, aside from the appallingly drippy "My Eyes", are loose enough to benefit similarly and prevent increasingly redundant lyrics from being a liablilty, which just leaves the empty stadium rock of "Sing" and "Side" as evidence of where things all went wrong. Hope that they'll learn too much from their live strengths isn't strong, but for the night, it was enough.

Travis, in a rather pleasing gesture to showmanship, began their show spotlighted, running through the crowd with the theme from Rocky playing. Pet Shop Boys beat this though, with some ingenious sleight of hand whereby Neil and Chris emerged from a neon lit frame, followed by... Neil and Chris. And Neil and Chris. One man in a fluorescent yellow anorak and baseball cap looks much like another from a distance, you see. This set the scene for definitely the best staged show I've ever seen, with fabulous projections and lighting and great work by the dancers throughout. The accusatory synth stabs of "Can You Forgive Her?" synched with angry flashes of white light, the thunder and lightning finale to "It's A Sin", the gold lamé cowboys dancing to a hilarious "Where The Streets Have No Name"... yeah, there were a lot of highlights.
And a very smartly chosen setlist, aside from packing in enough classic songs to make almost anyone jealous, was often tied into the staging. The icy blast of "Numb" giving way suddenly to the warm, red glow of "Se a vida é" was perfectly done, and it's a compliment that segueing M-I-N-I-M-A-L into S-H-O-PP-I-N-G seemed so obvious in retrospect.

Staging aside, the music was given a boost and a twist here and there to sound more bright and immediate than ever, and Neil Tennant was pitch perfect. A little too much if anything - a curiously limp "Rent" didn't really add anything to the record and was about the only moment to not quite come off. Almost all of the rest was fantastically celebratory in a way that only The Flaming Lips can nearly compare to out of any gigs that I have ever been to. During "Always On My Mind" the dancers popped up from behind giant cardboard cutouts of the boys' heads in a succession of silly hats to massive cheers, and it seemed the most logical thing ever, bursting way through irony and turning it into genuine feeling in much the same way as the song.