There were no bear suits to be seen on stage for the opening gig of The 2 Bears’ first live tour – a curious state of affairs given that Raf Rundell and Joe Goddard are routinely seen donning furry costumes and sending huge festival tents into blissful pop-house dance-offs.
It says something about the elusivity of Neutral Milk Hotel that their singer, Jeff Mangum, essentially disappeared for three years following their much-eulogised second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, in 1998.
If a one-woman take on a biblical rock opera which usually enlists hundreds of performers might sound somewhat fanciful, perhaps it's best to know that this supposed distillation was in the hands of Peaches Nisker, a stage polymath whose better-known guises as a cultish electro-rock satellite and darling of the Berlin art scene diminish nothing from her theatrical tour de force.
Judging by the claps and cheers filling a full house before he shuffled on stage, David Sedaris would have been preaching to the converted had he solemnly recited random extracts from the phonebook .
On their last visit to Brighton, Rough Trade-signed Howler appeared to be admired exclusively by discerning, vinyl-clinching types of an age several years their senior. Nearly 18 months on, their demographic appears to have altered dramatically – tunnelled close enough to the stage to make crowd-surfing mandatory, the fans who crammed in to hear much of new album World Of Joy resembled the younger siblings of a quartet barely old enough to drink in their native Minnesota.
Strengthened by heartbreak and fuelled by a raw food diet, Boy George’s ascent from the darkest of days has earned the New Romantic inner peace, widespread respect and an enviable physique.
Drenge – Eoin and Rory Loveless – are hardly the types to worry about selling out gigs, with a heads-down, no-nonsense take on stagecraft they would probably be recreating in a cellar had they never escaped their suburban tedium.
Positioning fairground rides, impenetrable beer tents and three stages within hills overlooked by cows and Falmer stadium, Shakedown’s final escapade in Stanmer Park – the festival will move to a new, as-yet-unnamed location next year – took the joy of midday raving to the countryside.
It has been 33 years since Steve Vai started out touring with Frank Zappa’s band, but this sultan of strings has lost little of the risk-taking experimentalism imbued by those early years.
A balmy Friday evening in an elegant theatre space near a well-stocked beer garden might draw the prospect of genuine happiness closer than it usually seems during the working week.
