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I’ve not been to many gigs, a few more festivals though. So this was a set from The Manic Street Preachers during the Reading Festival sometime in the 2010s I think.

I was really looking forward to seeing them live but they were so dull. Came on, played songs, left the stage. I don’t remember any crowd interaction at all. I might as well put a CD on.

For me it was Echo and the Bunnymen at the O2 Academy in Liverpool. It’s a soulless big old barn of a space and you have to really go for it to make it work. So I went to see Echo and the Bunnymen there with a bunch of mates and they did not make it work. At all. In fact they managed to drain any jot of entertainment from the evening. It was their regular pre-Christmas homecoming gigs and they usually do something a bit special for it. The special thing was playing the songs off one album in its entirety, with no others thrown in. All fine and dandy but it was a later album after their peak and hardly anyone there knew any of the songs. To cap it off Ian McCulloch spent a good 5 minutes between each song having a chat with his mates on the front row, which killed any modest momentum. I suppose a few hardcore fans and friends of the band har a great time but everyone I spoke to, from fans to those who knew their big hits (I’m largely in the latter category), all expressed their disappointment with the over-indulgent performance we witnessed.