Some family traditions you can do without. My father initiated one by dying just before my eleventh birthday. Various male relatives decided to stick with the practice leaving me with an overly romanticised view of the nobility of bus drivers and a gaggle of nephews and nieces whose fathers died before they were twelve. That may be why the first time I heard Daddy’s Gone by Glasvegas I burst out laughing. It seemed to be a song taunting a boy about his father’s death and telling him to get used to it.Given that it’s delivered in the vocal style of an angry drunk Glasweigian doing Ramones karoake it was an understandable mistake. Glasvegas were supported last night by a band called White Lies. If the number of photographers is anything to go by their Killers / Franz Ferdinand pastiche is the next big thing assuming their production is a bit slicker than their very well received live set. Dressed entirely in black they concluded their set with the great line “this is our last song. It’s called “Death””. It wasn’t bad at all and disarmingly upbeat.
Last night’s set from Glasvegas had good points and bad points. The big negative was the atrocious sound quality with far too much bass the the vocals often utterly lost. You get a sense of it from the video. I like to live a concert with slight hearing impairment but last night my ears were still sore an hour later. This may not be a helpful comparison but standing at the same spot a couple of weeks ago you could distinguish every word from the Fleet Foxes.
The big positive was just how much people love jumping up and down while singing. Modern music has a severe lack of great pop songs with anything nice to say about social workers. Geraldine is an effort to put that right and it brings a smile to the face to hear a couple of thousand people sing in unison “My name is Geraldine. I’m your social worker”. Glasvegas have tapped into the need that people have to sing big anthemic songs with lots of their friends but they avoid the drippy Coldplay twaddle opting for lines like “Here we f***ing go”. It’s great fun.
The night ended with Daddy’s Gone, an indispensable song. Certainly the audience singing along with it seemed to think so and as the pre-Christmas mock snowflakes fell on them you’d have needed a heart of stone not to feel warm inside.
Liam redux 
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