On Wednesday V and I went to see
The Feeling at Shepherds Bush Empire - one of my favourite venues in London. Let's be honest: given my music preferences (Neil, Tom, and so on), this was more for V than for me (q.v. Bon Jovi @ Twickenham later this year!). However, I must admit to a guilty-pleasure-like enjoyment of the band. Sod it, it's not a guilty pleasure, they play unashamedly derivative pop, and why the hell not? Ok, they always make me think of 70s west coast rock, Queen, early 80s rock, and so on, but then Oasis did the same thing with the 60s (and especially the Beatles, of course) and for some reason they were more acceptable to like.
Anyway, I'm rambling.
The support was a band called
Palladium. They were ok - I'll probably have a listen when they get their album out (May, they said) - and were frighteningly young and skinny, but that's probably just my age and weight being envious... The keyboard player suffered the age-old curse of keyboard players, of how do you play a static instrument and still jump around in a cool manner? (The answer being that you don't, of course). Their set had the same sort of influences as The Feeling - Huey Lewis came to mind a couple of times - and played perfectly adequate pop... They were also very keen on getting us to sign up for their mailing list when we were leaving. I get quite enough spam already, thanks!
The Feeling played pretty much all of the tracks from both albums, and threw in a cover of Electric Dreams during the main set (we left before the encore to beat the crowd). To be honest, they were better than I expected them to be - the band are very tight, I like their songs, basically it was just a thoroughly enjoyable set. In many ways they're a band who are far easier to like than to admire, which makes for easier listening than a lot of the other bands I like!