The Posies @ Dingwalls, London - March 5 2001

Review by Gordon Franks

The Posies played a storming gig at Dingwalls last night. Any doubts over how popular the Posies are in England were well and truly demolished as around 150 people were locked out when the Sold Out signs went up. There were people from all over Europe who travelled to London for this gig, I even heard a couple of Eastern European accents as I queued for my ticket.

Support act were Cosmic Rough Riders, who very well received by an audience that quite frankly were only interested in seeing the main attraction. Cosmic Rough Riders don't usually support other acts but as the lead singer said, they didn't mind supporting the Posies as they are 'Fucking Ace'.

The Posies came on stage at around 21.30 opening with Definite Door' which had the place rocking from the start. We were introduced to the new drummer, Darius, whose mom , who is English, by the way, was in the audience and was invited onstage to say hello. They then went into 'Any Other Way' andproceeded to rattle off various tracks off Amazing Disgrace and Success, I think Jon & Ken were surprised to find that most people in the audience had heard Success, as it wasn't actually released in the UK.

They then played a couple of new songs from the forthcoming EP which, most people in the audience hadn't heard before, went down really well, and suggested that the Posies are well and truly back, and aren't, unlike certain other bands I could mention, relying on playing a 'Greatest Hits' style performance.

When The Posies left the stage at around 23.00 the audience were screaming for more, and they didn't disappoint, when they came back on stage, Jon & Ken were clearly enjoying themselves, especially as someone in the crowd gave them a bottle of tequila. They performed a fantastic version of ' I Don't Want to go to Chelsea' and then started messing about spontaneously playing bits of various songs by the Pretenders and various Heavy Metal riffs, until Ken pointed out to Jon that playing heavy metal isn't considered funny in England, it is by the way, so they started playing the opening verse of 'Owner of a Lonely Heart'.

To finish off they did a storming version of 'Flood of Sunshine' where Jon broke a string on his guitar during the solo, so ken put down his guitar, climbed back stage grabbed another guitar and brought it to him and seamless they swapped over the guitars. By the end of the song all the strings were broken on Jon's guitar and Ken's guitar was left feeding back against the amp and they left the stage to a huge cheer.

It was now 23.35 and everyone stood around for a moment shell-shocked by such a brilliant performance.

I suspect that half the audience will be back at The Garage, Highbury the following nights for the solo acoustic sets that they'll be performing and the night after that at Notting Hill Arts Centre for the acoustic Posies set. If they can get tickets before they sell out.