Beside You In Time

It pains me to say this but I’m not that impressed with it.

I’ve been a fan since the Broken EP, have bought everything that has been put out since, so I was really looking forward to seeing this DVD. Everything that you expect is present and correct. Great packaging. Cool menus. Brilliant audio and visual quality. The shows that were recorded looked spectacular. Lights, smoke, more lights, lots of thrashing around onstage by Trent and his cohorts. All the songs that you expect if you saw the With Teeth tour. But just something missing… maybe it was Trent’s hair.

The DTS sound seemed a little too cold and clinical. Each song they played had a little twist to it. Not so much that you didn’t recognise it but enough to make it seem unfamiliar. The bulk of the footage seemed to be filmed way back from the stage, no doubt to show-off the lights. And throughout the main 90 minutes you only saw the faces of the crowd twice towards the end. You can’t miss the fans but you only ever get to see their arms holding up mobile phone cameras.

The only part of the disc that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck was a video of them rehearsing ‘The Collector’ that’s part of the extras.

Possibly the greatest live footage of Nine Inch Nails has already been filmed but is not officially available… and that’s Woodstock 1994. All of the band members covered in mud, a really distorted sound and Trent breaking everything that he could.

Rich Hall

The Pink Room is in fact his description of the Quays Theatre at The Lowry. Rich mentioned that he has played The Lowry 18 times and has never been booked into the Lyric Theatre, where Footloose was being staged tonight. The fact that he had held court at the Quays so many times didn’t surprise me as I had seen him there only about 14 months ago.

Before Rich came on he introduced Craig Campbell, a comedian from Canada who now lives in Devon. As he said during his act it’s the only place where he could blend in. Craig looks like Jesus Christ, has the mannerisms of Reverend Jim Ignatowski from Taxi and sounds like Denis Leary. Not a bad combination. Being from overseas he had some great observations about English life. Round-a-bouts should be approached “with confidence and speed” and nowhere on our motorway network does it say what the speed limit is.

Rich Hall had obviously spent the wardrobe budget for this tour on beer. Usually when he appears on TV he is wearing a sequinned cowboy shirt… but not tonight. He touched on many varied subjects :- Bush and his posse, Catholics, The Make Poverty History concerts and gophers. I remember laughing a lot but can’t remember much more that he said. He readily admits that he still doesn’t have a good ending to his act. So, as an encore, he asked for subjects from the audience. Someone shouted out Tom Cruise and another execuglide. Execuglide is a sniglet which Rich made popular in the eighties. From there he ended his act by telling us about how lied to a taxi driver by saying that he was a rocket scientist on the trail of a stray projectile. “So aren’t you gonna make any more sniglets then?”, the taxi driver asked.

Compared to the last time I saw Rich he didn’t interact with the audience as much. Being in a dead centre seat four rows from the front I was quietly relieved. And he didn’t sing or play the keyboard or piano. After all just Rich Hall and a microphone is better than no Rich Hall at all. We should just be thankful that he was there tonight as this show was just a warm-up before Runcorn.

I’ve recently re-archived my video archive onto DVD-R and have been watching programs that have lain in the vault for many years. Including 2 appearances of the legendary Spinal Tap on Tonight with Jonathan Ross. The first is from 27/03/1992 and the second from 08/04/1992 both broadcast on Channel 4. The Tap were, at the time, promoting the Break Like The Wind CD.

Putting this remarkable footage on YouTube has lead me to recall 4 Tap related incidents :-

1) At my previous place of employment a young Stuart Lax once enquired, “Yes Carl, but aren’t Spinal Tap a spoof band?” I immediately corrected him by saying, “No Stu, they’re a rock band… they don’t play spoof!”.

2) On stage at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert at Wembley Stadium David St. Hubbins said, “We have cut our set short by 2 and a half hours because… Freddie would have wanted it that way”.

3) When Kerrang! magazine reviewed Spinal Taps appearance at the above tribute concert they noted that upon leaving the stage their drummer tripped, fell and was rushed to hospital. His condition was later described as predictable.

4) When the Break Like The Wind CD was released, debuting at 0 in the UK album charts, David St. Hubbins was asked why his long-time girlfriend Janine and himself had never had children. He replied, “We’ve had all the tests and I don’t want to apportion blame in anyway but one of us has a low sperm count”.