Jed Thomas + Superset: Live at the New Roscoe, 2nd August

As we’re regaining our live feet, one of the things we’ve remembered is that getting gigs is such a fucking bore. You have to try and make contact with the kind of guys that book gigs, for a kick off. And they spend most of their time in pubs trying to ignore people like you because they’ve already got 9 million bands on their books and a stack of CDs to listen to already most of which will be shite. People are the key to the whole thing though – if you know one guy and do a reasonable job for him then he can put a word in with someone else and then hopefully you get the chance of regular gigs and before you know it you’re Coldplay and can enlighten the world about various abstruse trade issues by wearing an armband on the telly and generally being a cunt about it.

Anyway, when we played the Harrogate Blues Bar a few weeks since, we were lucky enough to play in front of local live music legend Jed Thomas. Den knew him a little from back in the day anyway, but generally he liked us on a personal (and musical) level and as a proper man about the live scene, he’s been able to chuck a couple of gigs our way already. Yesterday we supported him at The New Roscoe in Leeds. It’s a proper live music venue with a stage and everything, and a 7 nights a week roster of acts that vary from tribute bands to your usual indie gruel via blues bands and ex-frontmen of late 70s bands that mainly everyone’s forgotten about following that notorious incident in a nightclub with a chicken back in ’82 that ended their career proper.

This was an afternoon gig, which normally means What The Fuck Are We Doing Here? But this being a proper music pub it was pretty full of people there to actually listen to music. So although they were generally craggier and more hirsute than our usual crowd they were also more appreciative. Nice and relaxed – no soundcheck or PA or anything… just get up and play. Oddly, that kind of thing tends to suit our laidback weltanschauung so we were OK with it.

Afterwards, I could only stay for a couple of Jed’s tunes because I took The Kids (in the hope of inculcating a love of music in the boy) and they needed tedious things like ‘feeding’ and what have you, but my review of his guitar playing reads thus: holy fucking hell!!

Setlist (but not in order, because I can’t remember):

1. Mississippi Fishcake Blues
2. In The End
3. All Your Love – John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers
4. Come Together – The Beatles
5. Can’t Explain – The Who
6. Still Don’t Understand
7. You Got It In You
8. Bottles of Pills
9. Sorrow for #1
10. Here Come the Mandarins
11. (I Want You To) Be My Sunshine