The Fly Awards Show

Swim Deep, Bleeding Knees and The Magic Gang

Manchester Ritz

February 1st, 2014

Tonight's concert was a surprise concert as I only discovered that I was going last night.  My husband won tickets to see three bands playing at the Ritz and never being one to turn down a night of live music I agreed to go.

The first band on the bill tonight was The Magic Gang.  These are a young four piece band from Brighton who sounded good  and had some great melodies, but they had a real melancholy sound to them which failed to get the audience excited.

Next up were Bloody Knees from Cambridgeshire and although they only played for 25 minutes they managed to do what the previous band had failed to do.  Their punk rock sound got the crowd bouncing and clapping along, and although they didn't get any takers,  they were encouraging crowd surfers.  (It's a good job no one took them up on the crowd surfing as there was no security presence front stage to catch them).

If you like your music with a bit of punk, these guys are definitely one to keep an eye out for.

Last up were headliners, Swim Deep, from Birmingham.  These guys came on to the stage in matching white long sleeve t-shirts to cheers and applause from the crowd.  Unfortunately  they had a very electronic sound to their music which wasn't to my taste. 

I did however persevere to see if they had any tricks up their sleeves...  until they announced that they would be playing a cover song and launched into Cyndi Lauper's 'Girls Just Want To Have Fun', which is a song I have always liked but when played and sung by men, it sounded really wrong!   Hence to say we did not stick around for much longer after that.

Usually I love it when we gets tickets for these kind of shows as it is a chance to hear music that we wouldn't normally listen to and maybe discover a new band or two along the way, but  had it not been for Bleeding Knees I would probably have walked away very disappointed.