I can die tonight
I've seen everything I need to.
Oh man.
And trust me, when I say 'Oh man', I ain't saying it lightly. I use these words to tell you all that I can't possibly form the words that could possibly describe the brilliance and wonder and joy and gorgeousness and delight and emotions that one goes through when witnessing one of Britain's best female vocalists perform live.
Tonight I went to see KT Tunstall play at the Manchester Apollo. Got to the venue two hours early - I had standing tickets and I wasn't going to be stuck at the back. Got let in around 7 and more or less legged it to the front - not quick enough to beat some bastards who forced me onto the second row.
Waited for a while, fended off some drunk who was showing everyone his signed CD (do I need to go into the irony there?), and at 8 the support act started.
Jim Noir was pretty good. I will consider buying his album if they've got it at Piccadilly Records. Too many ba-ba-baaaaa-ba-baas for my liking, and they looked as though they were trying desperately hard to be Mods. No one seemed to have told them that Mods died out in the 70s at some point. But still, a good start to the gig, their final song "My Patch" - which I'd heard on MTV at some point but couldn't remember if it was indeed Mr Noir) being the notable highlight; with only one lyric it's pretty easy to engage an audience. The only flaw, and this is no fault whatsoever of Jim Noir, is that the aforementioned drunk kept yelling things like "Oasis!" "Happy Mondays!" "Alan Curtis!" - the latter making me both cringe and yell "Seriously, can you shut up?" simultaneously.
A somewhat larger interval than was required ensued, leading the crowd stamp and shout "Come on!" in a hostile manner. KT came out and all things just melted. There she was, about 9 feet away from me. I have never felt so amazingly tremendous.
She played pretty much all of her album. Wait, one sec... nope, she played her entire album, plus most of her second album too. Throw Me A Rope, my joint favourite song along with Heal Over, was played acoustically, just her and a guitar, the band even left the stage. It was gorgeous - my favourite song played just perfectly. Ashes, the initial track from Acoustic Extravaganza was also played acoustically, with the band lining up with their instruments at the front of the stage. The corresponding photo came out pretty good.
I kicked myself on the way to the gig after realising that I'd remembered to bring the camera, but left the memory card at home. Damn and blast, indeed - I had to lower the quality of the pictures to allow me to get the most out of the thing's internal memory, and I snapped 31 pictures in total. Not all of them will make it up to the site, of course. I was rather zealous and most pics look the same. But some are even deviantARTable, which is nice. We'll see anyway.
She finished the set with an electric (in a couple of senses of the word) rendition of Suddenly I See, ending with a drum duet with her and her drummer (and partner, but that's a sore subject). After making what she described as "The best noise" (us I mean, not her... that'd be weird), she came back for the obligatory encore and played that Flaming Lips song I know that has Vaseline in it along with Jim Noir and his band, and finally finished with Through The Dark, and the knowledge that she's finishing the tour to start work on proper studio album number 2.
Bought a t-shirt, of course, which I doubt will come off for a while. Had to rush home due to Laura needing to go to college early tomorrow, and me just having spent emergency taxi money on a t-shirt meant that I couldn't hang around to meet my future fiance. But hey, after an amazing performance worthy of any fucking BRIT award, I'm definitely going to see her again.
Woop.
posted by Cos Ryan @ 11:02 PM
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