Soul Drift

25th October at Nottingham Rock City.
Photographs by Michael.

I discovered Editors exactly two years ago when I came across the track ‘Blood’ on Victor Timofeev’s (an artist) MySpace page. I thought the song was great & I could really relate to it at the time. I had recently bought tickets to see Franz Ferdinand in November 2005 & was pleased to find out that Editors would be supporting them. It was an amazing gig & I was keen on the idea of seeing them as headliners.

Two years on, I wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy seeing them again. I haven’t really been listening to that kind of music lately & I was sceptical about it. The support bands weren’t a big help in giving me hope for the evening either. What is it with terrible support recently? The Rakes had awful support bands back in February as well.

Anyway, the first band, Ra Ra Riot, was just awful in my opinion. I felt a tiny pang of hope because of the two girls playing cello & violin, but their instruments were falling apart as they played & I think I only heard the instruments in the final song. I really wasn’t a fan of them. The second band, The Kissaway Trail, weren’t much better. I’m pretty sure most of their lyrics consisted of “la la la la” & “woohoo”. In fact, I think one of their songs is actually called ‘La La Song’. Er, yeah. There was nothing interesting about the music either, it was all very samey. By 9 o’clock (it was an early gig) I was very bored & had convinced myself it was going to be the worst gig I’d ever been to.

However, Editors completely turned the night around & didn’t bore me for one minute! They put on an amazing show & the songs sounded great. I even think that ‘Blood’ sounded better than when I saw them last! They have definitely got better live & it helps when you have a solid fan base who know all of your songs. They played all of the singles, as well as new single ‘The Racing Rats’, & some other great tracks such as, ‘When Anger Shows’ & ‘Lights’. When they came back for the encore, the band even had a water fight with the crowd which was highly amusing! It’s good to know they have a sense of humour. Some guys behind us were poking fun/shouting at the quiet guitarist, Chris, who I felt a little bad for, but at least he eventually humoured them while they were chanting “Chris, Chris, give us a wave”!

Editors are a great band & I feel a bit bad for recently lumping them in with all the generic indie bands cropping up at the moment. I guess it’s just the swarms of Editors clones that irritate me.

If you’re a fan of the band, you can stream the full set the band recently played for the BBC Electric Proms here.

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