We lost touch with Queens Of The
Stone Age a good few years ago. We liked the first couple of albums, saw them live,
then about 10 years passed. This is staggering in itself, but ye gods if it isn’t
15 years since that debut record. However, perhaps even stranger (and this
probably shows how out of touch we are with modern music around here than
anything else) is just how huge QUOTSA have got while we weren’t looking.
This gig, like all the others on this
tour, is in a great big arena, and there are very few spaces to be had.
Frontman Josh Homme could be forgiven for smiling smugly in the direction of
his former Kyuss band mates, who mustered a decent crowd for their show up the
road last month, but nothing remotely like this.
Actually smugness seems to be the
last thing on Homme’s mind at this point, he is rather more concerned with the
fact he is full of cold, which isn’t exactly great when you have 10,000 people
to entertain for 90 minutes.
But he is nothing if not a pro,
shaking off the lurgy with a smile and the phrase: “I love Birmingham, it’s a great
town, so I am just gonna play my guitar till I can’t play it no more.” What
that in practice means is a show that starts with “You Think I Ain’t Worth A
Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire” but then smashes straight in to “No One
Knows” and then “The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret” which is a one-two of hits
that is right up there with any arena bothering act.
In fact, QUOTSA rely on songs rather
than the effects of many arena band, although a big screen does show elaborate animations
during “Monster In Your Parasol” and is used to effect throughout.
“Fairweather Friend” is played with a
slight speech from Homme who says the song is about having someone you thought
was a friend and they turned out to be anything but (a nod to the bitter fall
out with his former bandmates perhaps?) while the show finishes with a three
song encore that not only includes “Feelgood Hit Of The Summer,” which means
that thousands of people get to sing THAT chorus, but ends with “Song For The
Dead” which contains more false climax’s (all puns intended) than Motorhead
playing “Orgasmatron” (all puns intended).
A night that was far more enjoyable
than RTM expected, and one which Homme himself neatly sums up. Spotting a lady
on a gents shoulders, who lets her hair cascade, he says: “That’s the most
beautiful thing I have ever seen. All I have ever wanted to do was make music
that made people let their hair down.”
And there is nothing wrong with that.
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