GIG: Assemblage 23 (London)

Having passed up the chance to see Tom Shear perform at Resistanz 2014 (what a fucking idiot), I finally got to see him play live headlining the second SOS Festival at the legendary Electrowerkz in Islington.

Not being particularly arsed about the other bands, Rose and I decided to take as late a train as possible, to minimise standing around time and wasting our Saturday. We left home at 6:30pm, got the 7:30pm train and got into London at 8:45pm.

When I came out of the toilets at Euston I saw Rose standing waiting for me, talking to a very tall man and woman... it was Pete from Shiv-r! That was a bit of a surprise. We all took the tube to the venue together and once we got to the venue went our separate ways. 

The venue was a bit of a warren, with one very strange room that looked almost like it was 'outside'.

Here we found the merchandise stall, although it wasn't really much of one at all, it was in fact a little stall set up by Analogue Trash Records. The proprietor and I bemoaned the lack of A23 shirts and I bought the Neonsol CD. He was also flogging the Advance redux CD, but I passed on that, in hindsight, perhaps that would have been a better purchase!

Analog Angel weren't annoying, but they weren't exactly anything to get excited about. The most notable thing I could say about them was that the lady in the rubber top was lucky to keep her puppies in her basket, if you know what I mean.

Assemblage 23 were supposed to come on at 10pm, well it said 9:45pm on Facebook, but after much dithering and plugging in and unplugging of the keyboard (surely this could have been sorted out in advance, no?) they finally kicked off at 10:35pm. Which was annoying since we had a leaving deadline of 11:45pm to catch the last train home at 12:15am.

The sound was a little boomy, but A23 were really good. I didn't expect Tom to be an entertainer like Daniel Graves, and of course it was more about the songs than the show, but that was fine because Tom has some quality tunez! Best of the night was undoubtedly 'The Noise Inside my Head', but other notable tracks included 'Damaged', 'Document', 'Spark' and set opener 'Binary'.

Unfortunately we had to leave while A23 were still playing, but I don't think there was much left in the tank as Tom had already announced that they don't do 'encores', so we left the building with 'Let Me Be Your Armor' playing in the background and headed back to the station. Then we had to stand on the platform for about fifteen minutes with a load of annoying brats waiting for the doors to open.

It was a very late night by the time we got home, but worth it to see A23 and finally see what Electrowerkz looks like.