Well, I went to see MGMT last night. Musically, very good, but couldn’t hear a damned word he was singing. Couldn’t even hear a word he was saying on the (very) rare occasions he spoke to the audience. The sound was a bit muddy and the vocals had way too much echo on them.
I was surprised by the performance. The band has almost no stage presence at all. It’s just five people, each doing their own thing in their own little space. The singer looks like a sulky teenager and behaves like that all the way through. The keyboards player at least made an effort: he was wearing large and ridiculously dark sunglasses. The lead guitar looks the part and is quite accomplished, and since much of MGMT’s repertoire involves fairly long guitar riffs this was welcome. I don’t think the bass player looked at the audience all night. You definitely got the impression that they didn’t really want to be there.
The thing we noticed on the way in was the age of the crowd. It was full of students doing what students do best: being annoying. I’ve never seen so many people in one place all trying to take their own photographs.
In the venue there is a flight of stairs which leads up to a first floor. I’m pretty sure there is a bar up there, and I’d be surprised if there are no toilets (but there might not be). Well, we stood quite near these stairs, and also near the two or three steps which lead down to the floor in front of the stage. As the time neared for the main band to appear there was a constant two-way flow of people up and down the stairs and up and down from the main floor. I have never seen it that way before. Even when the band came on, it triggered a further flow of people – away from the stage, it seems.
I suppose that since students are only technically not children, and certainly at this precise moment they were children up until about a month ago, the presence of a flight of stairs to keep walking up an down simply because it is there has to be accepted by those who were genuinely there as adults. (Incidentally, at a Rush gig last year someone had brought their son – he only looked about 9 or 10. He must have walked from his seat at one end of the row, past me to go somewhere, then come back 5 minutes later at least a dozen times. It’s just what kids do, even if it IS extremely irritating.)
Oh, and the other people-watching thing involved the two girls in front of me. After they’d taken a few pictures of themselves on the camera phone, heads together, laughing hysterically, arm outstretched, they then spent the whole gig yak-yak-yakking to each other. I don’t think they looked towards the stage once.
Finally, we went for a curry in a local restaurant which has featured on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. It was absolutely crap – like the chef had forgotten to put any curry powder at all in the dishes when he was making them. There was literally no curry taste of any kind.