New Found Glory/Fight Like Apes/Save Your Breath @ Electric Ballroom

Gigs have been pretty sparse this summer. What with being out of London and working pretty much every day I may have had the money for tickets, but not the time to trek up to the big city. That being said, tickets to see New Found Glory playing one of just a handful of Reading & Leeds warm up shows aren’t the kind of thing you turn down lightly job or no job, and as such I spent most of last night standing in the Electric Ballroom in Camden, possibly the only gig venue in the world that also manages to be an indoor market during the day.

Support wise it was a mixed bag and a half. First act on Save Your Breath pulled of bouncy, fairly mainstream pop-punk quite nicely and were a pretty standard but enjoyable first support. Recognising one of their guitar players as being a member of BWP due to his Purgatory Records tanks top also gave me a nice warm ‘I know quite a bit about the music scene’ feeling inside, because I’m a smug bastard like that.

Fight Like Apes on the other hand, were as dire as dire can be. Kind of like Scouting for Girls crossed with the synth-pop band that Vince Noir joins in the Mighty Boosh but much much worse. Their one redeeming feature was having a backing singer who sounded like a pirate, which at least made me laugh in between the pain of having to listen. Watching the band being pulled apart by the hyper intelligent Einstein/Ape hybrids in Rise of the Planet of the Apes would have been more entertaining that listening to their music by a country mile. Dross.


With that over, and my sanity somehow intact I could finally come to terms with what I was about to see. New Found Glory have been consistently brilliant pretty much since 1997. Any band, from whatever genre, that manages to keep such a high quality going deserves a shed load of respect if nothing else. Add the fact that New Found Glory are one of the very few ‘classic’ pop-punk bands not to have got old/fat/rubbish all at the same time and you would have even more reason to be excited about their appearance on a stage right in front of you.

And Florida’s finest didn’t disappoint one bit. ‘Understatement’, ‘Don’t Let Her Pull You Down’, ‘All Downhill From Here’ and ‘Truckstop Blues’ all featured in the opening barrage of songs and are all the kind of anthemic pop-punk that most bands would dream of writing only one song like. Of course, it didn’t stop there. There’s been plenty of rumours about the new album (out in early October) might not be up to scratch, and certainly the single released recently would probably back up that opinion. Yet when ‘Radiosurgery’ was dropped into the set a little before the halfway mark it sounded like a completely different song from the Green Day-alike studio version. Maybe it was the energy level it was delivered with or perhaps it was that it was followed by ‘Kiss Me’, a song the band have made their own for a generation of teenagers who’ve never heard of Sixpence None the Richer.



The second half of the set saw things only get (somehow) better. ‘Dressed to Kill’ and ‘Failure’s Not Flattering’ were pounded out with a slightly terrifying precision and energy while ‘Truth of My Youth’ was truly anthemic. ‘Boy Crazy’ was another oldie wheeled out for general enjoyment before the pre-encore set was finished with ‘Hit Or Miss’, cue lots of people owning up to the fact that they realised ‘..Thriller was our favourite song’. Not of course that anyone was fooled about that being where it would all end. Back for more only a few moments after the lights went down the first time ‘Listen To Your Friends’ and a high octane cover of ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ only paved the way for a ‘My Friends Over You’ which, in a set of classics and sing along, was the best received of the lot. If New Found Glory were my friends I’d certainly pick them over anyone else, but as they’re not I’ll just have to stick with picking their music instead. If you’re at Reading this Friday, go and take some time to see them on the Main Stage, to miss out of a band of their calibre playing live should probably be a crime.