Friday 6 June 2014

Gig Review - Bold Things Live @ Whelans



Bold Things, 'And I Was A Boy From School', Hot Chip cover, Whelans


Leaving cert. students were having nightmares, the workers were asleep in their beds, but all of the cool cats were in Whelan's instead. 

It was a great pleasure to witness Dundalk band, Bold Things', first ever Irish gig last night Upstairs in Whelans. While the quartet of Ian Patterson on lead guitar, Gavin Murray (vocals, drums & guitar), Jim O'Donoghue (lead singer, guitar) and bassist / video producer (see below) Ronan McGeough have played a number of gigs in their adopted city of London, this was the first of three nights which sees them hit Toales in their hometown tonight (beside Gerry Adams' constituency office as pointed out by Jim), and Dolans in Limerick on Saturday. The band have spent a considerable amount of time lately recording in anticipation of their debut E.P. which they hope to have completed and subsequently released in the very near future.



It's almost 6 months since the band put together their first video for 'Love The Bomb', and with each track they put down, they appear to be going from strength to strength with regard to their song-writing and diversity. As such, it was great to hear two of my personal favourites last night, 'Hearts Ajar' and the sublime and haunting 'Swallows End' live. It was very apparent before taking the stage that the band were excited for their first gig on Irish soil and this translated into the performance, it's never disappointing to see an act that genuinely enjoy performing, not just for themselves, but for their audience also. Indeed, at one point when the band thanked everyone for coming to the show one punter saw fit to shout out, 'I've never heard of you, but I really like your songs', while this individual was bang on the money, I would imagine he is also curled up in a ball on a couch somewhere as I type this, and I only say so because he looked like Shaun Ryder.


My only complaint for the entire evening was that I attracted the token weirdo (I thought those days were well behind me), an inebriated individual who appeared from nowhere, and not only told me once that he loved the 'Thump, thump, thump' of one of the songs, but 6 times. In summary, a great night, great performance and while it's completely irrelevant from a musical perspective, in my opinion, it's always nice when the members of any band are very decent sods, which the guys from Bold Things are. Two things I'm looking forward to now are their next performance in Dublin and a debut album, success beckons for Bold Things and it will be well deserved.

Side note: Apologies for the poor sound quality in the first video, I recorded it on a Nikon SLR and I would have been better off using my iPhone in terms of the quality, lesson learnt! 





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