The band started playing the new album through, but third song in they threw in a beautiful cover of ‘You’re A Big Girl Now’ by Bob Dylan, ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPKMbvHHUss ), which got me tremendously excited me, as I’m a huge Dylan fan. The audience whooped in appreciation.

The band sounded wonderful, and it was great to be able to hear all the details in such a venue, even the clunk of an empty squeezed beer can or the tinny snap of a cameraphone could be heard above the music. So there would be no excuse in such a venue for the audience not to be able to hear Kurt Wagner’s vocals, you would think, but for me (sat upstairs on the balcony to the right), I could only hear perhaps every fifth word, which is such a shame, when the lyrics are such a large part of what I love about the band. Admittedly, I am only familiar with the ‘Aw C’mon/No, You C’mon’ double album and ‘Damaged’, and they didn’t play many songs from those albums, though I would have been intrigued to know what the song Kurt described as being about “smoking weed and drinking beer and not doing much else” when he gave the audience the choice of hearing that, or instead what turned out to be ‘Bugs’.

The inter song banter remained my most favourite part then, with pianist Tony Crow introducing guitarist William Tyler (immortalised in the ‘Aw C’mon’ instrumental classic ‘Being Tyler’) as “my youngest son”, and Tyler responding saying that he hoped maybe the over-hanging Jesus would “now give him his birthday back”, drawing a few cheers of support from a couple of other 25th December-born audience members. Kurt also described the meanings of a few songs, with ‘Of Raymond’ being written about God, from the perspective of the concrete Virgin Mary statue at the bottom of his yard. He described how he was thinking that ‘God’ was just another word for ‘love’, so in trying to come up with an alternate word for God, he thought of the TV show, ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’, and so it became ‘Of Raymond’. Such explanations drew baffled polite laughter from the majority of the crowd, but I hung on every word, and thought the band all came across as intelligent, funny, and with a hefty dose of anti-religious sentiment, which may have struck the wrong chord with some of the audience, who looked like they were only there because of a Parish season ticket perhaps.

Towards the end of the first part of the set, I began to grow weary of just hearing another song I didn’t know, and not being able to hear the lyrics, and the atmosphere perhaps became a little stifled as the rest of the audience may have begun to feel the same. The band went off for the encore, and I saw Kurt have a word with the sound girl, perhaps intimating to turn up the vocal just a little? It may have been marginally louder, but still pretty indeterminable, when they came back out, but the charisma and presence of Kurt brought the encore to life, with a stirring version of a song that morphed into Talking Heads’ ‘Once In A Lifetime’ with Kurt pointing intensely and aggressively at individual members of the audience, as he sang such lines as “And you may ask yourself, am I right or am I wrong?” The band seemed to be enjoying themselves a little more during the encore, but ultimately I was left disappointed at the lack of vocals in what could have otherwise been a very inspiring gig. Hope the soundman and woman read this. I know that even on the albums, the vocals are quite deeply buried in the mix, adding to the confessional feel of the lyrics, and you have to really strain to listen to be fully rewarded, but even at full strain tonight, a mere few metres away, in a building designed for acoustic excellence, to paraphrase one of his song titles, I didn’t hear a word he’d said.