Taking Back Sunday @ Roundhouse

The great thing about TBS getting all pally again and the original line up being back on stage is, that for the first time in far too long, their live shows are full of the early album classics that we all fell in love with in the first place. Prior to Friday night I had trawled the net to find their set list from the night before and, upon finding it, may possibly have drooled onto my keyboard.

But before I could roll back the years and sing along badly to some classic, Long Island pop-punk there were the support bands. First up, I Am Giant sounded decidedly as if they'd listened to far too much third/fourth album Brand New and decided to try copy it all without anyone noticing. They may well be a perfectly passable band on record, but live they were pretty poor. It was a case of 'that awkward moment when the band goes for it but the crowd stand still and glare'.

Next were The Xcerts, pedalling some pretty intense alt. rock from Scotland. While their live show was a great improvement on the previous band and they had some fairly swish sounding tunes, everyone was, by now, counting down to the main event.

And to be honest, you have to feel slightly sorry for the support, because when a band can amble onto the stage and rip up 'Cute without the E (Cut from the Team)' and promptly raise the roof into the stratosphere it's going to be quite hard to complete. Taking Back Sunday did, of course, just that and in doing so, set the tone for the whole event. Song after song rolled out and song after song was met with rapture-like enthusiasm. Even the likes of 'El Paso' and 'Faith (When I Let You Down)' were met with cheers and sing alongs, despite being from an album not released until next month.

However, it was the older tracks that, predictably, got the crowd hyped the most. 'Bike Scene', 'Ghost Man on Third', 'You're So Last Summer', the list goes on and on. The band were on the kind of form you don't see every day, tight, precise and full of energy. Even between songs they looked like they'd never been gone. The awkward stage presence of a band only just playing together again was nowhere to be seen, instead it was smiles and jokes all round. The generic 'It means so much for us to be here...' speech from Adam Lazzara even sounded sincere.

And so, as penultimate track 'No I in Team', finally being played live again, was sung with lung busting power and the gig wound up you couldn't help but think that in this form TBS are going to rip up the live show/festival circuit this summer and when the new album does hit the shelves in June, it may well be 2002 all over again.





(this is pretty much what the gig was like by the way...be jealous)