Last night Lesley I travelled through to the Carling Academy in Glasgow to see a double bill of Motorhead & Saxon.
I don’t know very much about Saxon who were on first (although it’s not my first encounter with Saxon; see the blog posting Amsterdam), but they were apparently an inspiration for Spinal Tap, and they were very much a dyed-in-the-wool, no messing about heavy metal band last night, with lots of screaming vocals and headbanging tunes – old-fashioned British metal with no concessions to anything that has happened in the world of music since 1983 (and that’s not a bad thing!)
Motorhead are definitely cut from the same cloth, but are a force of nature in the same way that a hurricane is. They exploded on the stage and it’s hard to believe that their sound came from just 3 musicians. Lemmy was his usual rock-god self (“We’re Motorhead – don’t forget us!”), and the drummer Mikkey Dee was absolutely mental – not much sophistication perhaps, but he might as well have been running a marathon for the calories he must have expended on stage bashing his kit about.
The sound quality all night was great (I wish it had been half as good at the Iron Maiden concert at Twickenham in July), and Lesley and I managed to get a reasonably decent view of the bands despite the full-to-bursting venue.
I would say Motorhead played awesomely in-your-face metal non-stop without relenting, but they did relent just once, to play a bizarrely off-kilter acoustic blues track (with Lemmy on mouth organ).
They played my favourite Motorhead track, Kill By Death, which was definitely the high point of the night for me, and they played their most famous song, Ace Of Spades. All in all, it was an impressive performance from both bands of full-on metal rock ‘n’ roll.
You can read Lesley’s blog posting about the gig here.
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