Geriatric Punks

Having never seen em before, I had no idea what to expect. Ultimately I really don’t know many of their songs, and in this set I didn’t know a single one. Also, I couldn’t understand a single word that was said/sung by Mark Smith; not in the usual sense of “what is he talking about” but I literally didn’t comprehend a single word during the whole set, so it was really about presence and ROCK.

Their official website has live reviews of this tour from hardcore fans who clearly know every one of the fall’s one thousand albums and two thousand singles by heart, and their comments here tell that they experienced a lot of what we did. The set was good, but Mark looked old like old Johnny Cash, the Johnny Cash of about 3 years ago. (according to these reviews, he wears dentures- that’s a brit for ya- and that really explains the sunken old mouth and weird expressions Smith kept making, sucking on his falsies.) The band, who I assumed was just this year’s pick up but maybe they’ve been around, were good and tight, but sadly no chaos or hypnotism as described by several of these fans. But somewhere about the late middle of the set things just lifted off the ground for an amazing finish, but that’s also around the time the five drinks id had kicked in full, but whatever. They finished and split but the 17 year old girl who plays the casio on a barstool rushed back out and said something about they were going to play some more in the next room (the tipsy tea room has a small and a large, they were in the small), so every drunk one of us piled in there but there was nothing going on AT ALL, things were a mess and it could have been a weird prank, or maybe they did play an encore but a lot of people including us splitskied so who knows what happened next. We swung down to the expo lounge for more drinking, where I drunkenly introduced kortney to somebody I had just met as “one of my wives.” all in all a great thursday night