Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation
Aug 31st, 2007 by admin
Another eagerly anticipated gig last night, in darkest Camden.....
This was unlike your run of the mill gig as the band are actually playing their entire classic album, from start to finish. This can make things a little predictible (obviously) but of course you do get to see some absolute classics - '', '', 'Cross the Breeze', '' - well, I could go on....
I've never been to the before, and my brother nearly punched me out when I enquired if it was a new venue - turns out it was the location of the Doors and Ramone's first gig in the UK, Pink Floyd started there in the 60's, and the likes of Hendrix, Kraftwerk, Bowie, Zepplin and others have all trod it's stage. Oops. In my defence it has been derelict for decades and only recently been given a facelift as part of wider regeneration efforts in Camden. It's a pretty cool venue, not too big and from my terrible photos you'll be able to see how close I was able to get to the stage.
All things considered, they fucking rocked it. I will never get tired of seeing musicians attacking their instruments with drum sticks, beer cans or anything else that comes to hand if they can produce music as powerful as this - feedback never sounded so sweet. As well as the album we got one extended encore with tracks from last years highly acclaimed '' album, a number from '', a couple from '' and a second encore where they surprisingly delivered '' a track so old school it was recorded before schools were invented. It was also highly entertaining to hear shouts from the crowd in between tracks stating 'I FUCKING LOVE YOU KIM !!' which showed that still got it....
Camden's quite enjoyably dodgy. On the way to the venue we saw a couple of dealers get chased down to Camden Lock by the old bill, and I got offered various narcotics on the way back to the Tube after the show - the only other place in London I've experienced this was in Brixton. Before you ask I obviously politely declined, ten years ago however.....