Truly classic gig with Quire Boys
The Quire Boys Frazer Theatre, Knaresborough
THERE is no hiding place in the Frazer Theatre for what will turn out to be the third greatest rock moment of my life.
The audience, some of whom have travelled from as far afield as New York and Glasgow, can see the whites of the band's eyes.
More importantly, perhaps, the band can see the audience, too, seated a matter of inches away from them below the low stage noticeably free of barriers or bouncers.
The old-fashioned nature of this tiny theatre must take The Quire Boys back to their early days in the early 1980s.
Still loveable rogues after all these years, the two core members exchange glances and quips like brothers who've been too close for too long.
Griff, the guitarist with the knowing smile, healthy and handsome-looking in his stylishly-coiffeured long hair and beard, Spike, the natural frontman, all mouth, still the rock n roll gypsy in pinstripe jacket, jeans and head scarf, swigging Jack Daniels, or whatever his latest poison is, from a plastic pint glass.
From the start they sound fantastic in what is one of the band's first 'unplugged' gigs in quite a while.
You can hear where every second of their two-and-a-half hour sound check went - the mix for this 'unplugged' performance sounds wonderful.
Not only does Spike's tough but tender rasping vocal sound utterly spot-on the whole time, it's wrapped in the gorgeous warm thrum of various acoustic instruments, drums and keyboards from the veterans of this nice and easy, seven-piece band.
A sign of how good this performance lies in the fact it's not only the old classics which impress, its recent, lesser-known numbers, too, which diehard fans tell me later are far better than the album versions.
So for every Pretty Girls off debut album A Bit of What You Fancy we get Mona Lisa Smiled off 2008's Homewreckers and Heartbreakers, for every King of New York off follow-up Bitter, Sweet and Twisted we get Late Night Saturday Call.
Even the unusual choice of covers pays off handsomely. Who would have thought these laidback, bluesy rock n rollers could make gems of schmaltzy tracks such as UFO's Love to Love, Jim Reeves' He'll Have To Go, Leo Sayer's Can't Stop Loving You (all off current acoustic album Halfpenny Dancer).?
The band's own songs may not exactly the same calibre as rock's true royalty, (that riff from Knocking on Heaven's Door is used quite a bit), but they're all good and they're flowing like honey.
What's most old-fashioned about The Quire Boys isn't the instrumental ability on show, it's the passion and lack of that most modern of diseases - irony.
When Spike lifts a glass to toast the dying embers of fading Glaswegian singer Frankie Miller's talent before starting a gently grizzled cover of that 70s soul belter's A Bottle Of Whisky you know it means something to him.
Shorn of electric raunch, the Quire Boys still have rhythm but they've also gained a sweet but not saccharine country-soul swing reminiscent of early Rod Stewart when he was gritty and good or the trashed glory of The Stones slouching through Wild Horses.
The longer this show goes, on the better they get, and the better they get, the more the crowd responds. It's the way it should be, it must be that Frazer Theatre magic. No wonder local promoters Kula look pleased!
Then, as the set nears the two hour mark, it hits you - what we are witnessing tonight is the last of the great British bands with genuine links to those legendary acts of yore which still sell music magazines to middle-aged men to this day.
Time flows, beer flows, the crowd holler, and the Quire Boys keep coming back for encore after encore because they are loving the whole thing as much as their fans.
It's almost as if all of us really are at a classic rock gig in the middle of the 1970s.
And, you know what, in a very real sense, we are.
Graham Chalmers
The support band was The Kerb Crawlers.
The other two in the 'three greatest rock moments of my life': Public Enemy. Dinosaur Jr.
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Weather for Harrogate
Wednesday 08 February 2012
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