A Progmastictastic Weekend!

The past weekend was certainly a progtastic one. Saturday night saw me at the Barbican with Vincie da Fridge to see Twelfth Night play their final gig. It was a superb show and a fitting way to mark the end of a brilliant band that never achieved the success and recognition it deserved. I first saw them back in May 1983 at the historic Marquee club in Wardour Street and immediately fell in love with their theatrical and dramatic music. This show – covering material from ’81 to ’83 – was a heady mix of nostalgia and fresh revelations as (relative) new boy Mark Spencer stamped his own unique mark on the classics from that time.  It was quite an achievement for him to take songs that have been so indelibly stamped into your consciousness and deliver them in a fresh new way that remained totally in keeping with the mood and atmosphere of those original gigs.

Sunday night, meanwhile, saw a long-overdue link up with best bud Alex to see Frost* and It Bites do their thing at the Scala in King’s Cross. Despite doing my best to get us lost whilst driving through London (damn that SatNav!), we got to the venue in good time and bagged prime places right at the very front. Frost* were bang on form, being both musically sublime and hilariously entertaining in one tight little asterisk-shaped package. This was one of those gigs where you couldn’t help but have a big grin on your face from start to end. If the songs themselves weren’t class enough in their own right, we also had the joy of interactive Brummie Speak and Spell and a MIDI-enabled ironing board. Not to mention the sheer brilliance of Craig Blundell’s jaw-dropping drumming, Nathan King’s effortless bass playing and Jem Godfrey’s all round Frostieness.

And, of course, that John Mitchell is pretty handy on guitar too, which is just as well as half an hour later he was back on stage fronting It Bites. For me, their last album was rather disappointing so it was somewhat inevitable that their set contained some of the lower points of the weekend. But on the up side, when they weren’t plugging their new stuff the balance was made up of material from the brilliant The Tall Ships and Once Around the World albums. And let’s face it, the latter’s epic title track followed by a bouncy Kiss Like Judas is about as joyful and triumphant a finale to a wicked weekend of prog heaven as you could wish for.

And yes, I got lost driving home too (damn that SatNav!).