A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of going to see They Might Be Giants at Rock City in Nottingham. This was a gig that was supposed to happen in 2023 but was postponed due to a car accident. The gig was supposed to be the Flood album, however the band weren’t going to do things as easily as a simple play through. Instead they joked about not rehearsing them and that they’d appear at some point, but they didn’t know what order.
The gig was amazing, including all the songs from Flood and a loads more beside. The current live line-up includes a three-piece horn section which adds a great deal of punch to proceedings. The evening was split into two parts and they ended the first segment with Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love - with a twist! They played and sang the whole thing backwards and filmed the performance. The second set kicked off with this played back in reverse and it was pretty bloody close! The crowd, understandably, went bananas.
This was probably the first time I’d been in Rock City in about twenty years. That’s kind of weird given that I spent a substantial part of my life there in the 1990s when I lived in Nottingham as student and for a while working afterwards. The place hadn’t changed that much in all that time. It was probably as rammed as I’ve ever seen it, which shows how beloved TMBG still are. We’d ended up going next door for a pint rather than queuing to get in, so couldn’t really get into the area in front of the stage. By default that forced us in front of one of the bars, which was actually okay, as it gave us room to have a jig about. Whilst the view from there wasn’t brilliant, we were able to take it in turns to stand on the stairs to the mezzanine floor.