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Mr Cat (Lewis)
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« on: September 13, 2007, 05:47:46 PM » |
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Last night was the evening with RT show, with a band featuring Michael Jerome, Taras the bassist from SW, Pete Zorn and RT. Being lazy, I have copied the setlist from the NPR concert broadcast (download from RT site). This was the set from the first half of the North American tour and was basically the same last night except for the replacement of "Wrong Heartbeat", "She Sang Angels to Rest", "Too Late to Come Fishing" and "Gypsy Love Songs"..more below
Needle & Thread
Bad Monkey
Take Care the Road You Choose
Dad's Gonna Kill Me
I Still Dream
Wrong Heartbeat
Al Bowlly
Vincent Black Lightning
She Sang Angels To Rest
One Door Opens
Never Give It Up
Hard On Me
Mingulay Boat Song
Man In Need
Too Late to Come Fishing
Bright Lights Tonight
Wall of Death
Read About Love
Sunset Song
Mr. Stupid
Gypsy Love Songs
Tear Stained Letter
Clearly SW has gone down well with RT fans as there was no moaning about the opening salvo of four tracks, although RT did promise to get on to the classics later! As ever, the live versions stomp all over the recorded versions with RT firing off solos like they are going out of fashion. having said that. Dad's..would have benefited from a Mother Knows Best type outro solo to round it off. Take the Road is perhaps too slow a number for 3rd up immediately after Bad Monkey. I Still Dream was a welcome hark back to the 80's electric years.
Al Bowlly was fantastic with the band improvising various jazzy solos and RT coming with some Django style soloing on the acoustic. The band then went off for Vincent..This was performed faster than usual with RT's fingers flying over the strings and another amazing solo in the middle. Really made the song come to life again. Then came the major surprise of the set - Who Knows Where the Time Goes. Absolutely stunning to hear RT perform this. He did it in a rather understated way, as opposed to the more emotive readings of recent years by Simon, Vikki Clayton, Julianne Regan etc. The words spoke for themselves as it were and the acoustic backing was superb.
The band came back on for a distinctly middle eastern vibe version of One Door Opens (sadly the only song from TOKB) - made me think of the French Firth et al albums.
From an electric guitar point of view, the highlight was the extended Hard On Me. The first break was subtle, gentle picking of clusters of notes. The second, which must have been a good 4 or so minutes, built up into a crescendo of notes and sounded as if there were three guitarists on stage. Perhaps not quite as good as some of the epic Cropredy solos down the years, but great to hear none the less. The second highlight of the electric part of the evening was "Guns are the Tongues", which RT explained was about a terrorist cell. The vocal performance was perhaps the best of the evening and the song built up nicely from a sparse backing to all out assault at the climax.
There was a funky version of Bright Lights, straight version of Wall and then an extended version of Read About with yet more stinging solos and that concluded the main show. First encores were Sunset (somewhat downbeat for an encore) and Mr. Stupid, sounding a little like R & LT deciding to cover a Stones song!
The second encore was an extended version of Tear Stained, something of a crowd favourite it turned out, which got most of the 700 or so crowd up on their feet. Yet further great soloing and interplay between RT and Pete rounded off a great evening.
This was the best crowd I've seen at three RT Band shows in Vancouver and it seems the message has spread as there were a significant number of younger people there.
By the time the band gets to the UK, they should be really sh*t hot!!
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