The Xcerts / Heyrocco / Glass City Vice [Live Review – The Boileroom, Guildford, 10/4/2015]
The Boileroom know how to put on a proper rock show. Support acts Glass City Vice and Heyrocco were a perfectly balanced pair, the former opening the night with tight, polished, and excellent pop rock/punk vibes, and the latter going full-throttle into heavy, rough-edged grunge territory. With plenty of fans in attendance from the off, it was obvious that both supports came equipped with their own hardcore fanbases, who were eager to get involved. Very cool.
The connection that The Xcerts have with their fans is absolutely second to none. With brilliant, idiosyncratic songs like Live Like This, I Don’t Care, Kids On Drugs, the ecstatically received Kick It, Pop Song, Home Versus Home, Crisis In The Slow Lane, and Slackerpop, these guys were on fire last night. Unfortunately, this time around this set’s most vulnerable core (a totally unplugged solo acoustic rendition of Aberdeen 1987) was thoroughly spoilt for most of the venue thanks to a handful of people who shouted over it as if watching a football match.
On that note, here’s what those 250-ish visibly/audibly pissed-off people all would have said, if it hadn’t meant joining the spoilsports in interrupting one of the Xcerts’ best songs: If you go to a show and talk over the performers, you never look cool or clever. You look like a selfish, narcissistic asshole. If you offer unsolicited running commentary over an unplugged song (the most intimate option possible in live music), you just sound pretentious, and should bear in mind that if you charged the same door fee for people to listen to your self-absorbed wittering, nobody would show up.
If you go to shows and act like a dick, the people glaring at you, shushing you, and/or telling you to shut up are not the ones in the wrong. You are – and if you lack basic social skills like respect, empathy, and consideration for others (the kind of stuff which separates us from the chimps), perhaps your rightful place is not in a gig venue spoiling things for everyone else, but rather in a zoo cage fitted with an HDTV looping X Factor reruns.
Once the Xcerts kicked back into in-your-face rock mode, things quickly got better – and with extra anthems like Shaking In The Water and There Is Only You still up their sleeves, the band came out on top in the end. Post-show conversation seemed split between complaints about the spoilsports and joyous raving about how awesome every single band was. As for me, I practically live in gig venues, and can safely say this was one of the best rock shows I’ve seen so far this year.
Links
Glass City Vice official website.
The Boileroom official website.
Follow TMMP on Twitter for more from the world of world-class music! If you’re a regular reader, thanks for the support! Don’t stop, and keep going!