[photos on flickr: Patent Pending / People on Vacation / Lacey – apologies for quality, but I was performing important parental duties a distance back from the stage!]
After selling out King Tut’s just a little too quickly, tonight’s gig was shifted to the Garage with about double the capacity. Not a bad line-up and a bargain ticket price. Fortunately still “young fan” friendly so I could take out eldest.
Despite the queue out front, we managed to nab one of the little booths at the side which allowed both comfort and elevation for short people to see the stage!
Lacey are a young band from Nottingham who’ve just released a new CD and managed to earn themselves the opening slot on this rather cool tour. They fit well with the tone of the other two acts, having a bouncy sound but also a heavy edge at times.
During their short set, they rattled through a fair number of songs. A couple of them had some really catchy choruses that, in all honesty, I could just see ringing out across a much larger venue. They’re songs that simply work and if they can keep on doing what they’re doing then I can see them going far. I certainly found their set too short – I could easily have listened to more.
People On Vacation were up next, and let’s get the obvious links to Bowling For Soup out of the way. Despite consisting of one BfS member and a co-writer, PoV are very much a different band. Even their cover of “The Bitch Song” was their own spin on the original.
The one thing that’s carried over from BfS is the on-stage chatter and banter with the crowd. Both Jaret and Ryan threw teenage-grade comments about boobs, willies and poop around with wild abandon in between songs. Oh, yeah, songs.
With Ryan on acoustic guitar, the band could be expected to play fairly tame numbers, but this wasn’t the case – though they do have some in their repertoire. Instead, we got a rocking forty minutes or so with the crowd boinging around and Jaret acting far younger than he claimed he could manage towards the start of the set.
PoV are a band who look like they’re having as much fun up on stage as the audience are down on ground level. Here’s hoping they’re back again soon to fill the void left by BfS’s UK retirement.
Tonight’s headliners are one of the most energetic bands I’ve ever seen. The last (and first…) time was opening for Bowling For Soup (those guys again) where they absolutely rocked the place. With a longer time slot and a crowd there to see them who knew the material, there was going to be no stopping them.
Patent Pending are a fun live act from start to finish. They’re obviously out there for shits and giggles, and the stage isn’t the only part of the venue that’s their territory. Nowhere is safe during a Patent Pending gig!
With frequent visits to the dancefloor by Joe and a surprise balcony appearance mid-song by Marc, Patent Pending treated the entire Garage as their stage. Like many bands, they talk about the fans being that extra member (in their case “Second Family”), but PP go the extra mile to really make those people feel included for that hour or so the band are on stage.
They’re not all laughter and light, though. As at every gig, Joe took a moment to talk to the audience about a serious topic. While many bands will emphasis the importance of being yourself, or sticking it to The Man, or the fact that you should buy their album, Patent Pending have a bee in their bonnet about depression.
Having lost a close friend to suicide, I can only imagine the questions that must go through your head. Was there a time when I should have spotted something? Did I miss an opportunity to help? Patent Pending’s message isn’t “get over it” – it’s “help someone when they’re down, and reach out if you are”. This led to the popular song “One Less Heart To Break” and was pretty much the only sobering point in the performance. A perfectly-timed one, and highlighting an issue that almost all of their target (teenage) audience will go through at some time or another.
The mayhem continued after that and continued until the brief “encore” intermission, Jaret’s appearance on stage, Joe snogging a (male) fan after recording the crowd chanting “Here we fucking go” for his pregnant wife (congrats, by the way) and finishing the gig by walking into the centre of the audience.
Simply, there is never a dull moment at a Patent Pending gig and I doubt you’ll see a harder working bunch of guys on stage (OK, Suburban Legends may give them a run for their money). Six – count ’em six, self-release albums before getting a deal shows that these guys will work their arses off to get where they’re going and aim to entertain every person they can along the way.
You want a soundbite? Here you go – Patent Pending can slap this on their promo material if they want:
If Andrew W.K. was a band, he’d be Patent Pending.
Yes, they party that hard. If you think that’s hyperbole then you’ve not seen them live. Don’t miss them next time.
Related articles
- Bowling For Soup + Patent Pending, Glasgow O2 Academy (moshville.co.uk)
[…] If you’ve not heard of People On Vacation before, it is the successful musical union of Jaret Reddick (Bowling For Soup) and Ryan Hamilton (Smile Smile). In fact, People on Vay-kay opened for Bowling For Soup’s acoustic tour a couple of years ago. Which essentially means that these two guys have known each other for some time and aren’t afraid to put the hours in. No shirkers when it comes to hard work! They were also through more recently opening for Patent Pending. […]
[…] were next up and we caught most of their set. They’d actually opened for Patent Pending and – at the time – main tour support People on Vacation back in April and they impressed then. […]