To a half-filled, jaded Forum, The Wonder Stuff are by now, just another gig on the reformation trail. It’s yer money I’m after bab....

And for a hefty fee any difference can be overlooked until the cheque clears. How long you can keep those differences patched up is a different matter entirely. Last years highly public split between the bands two halves proved  that.

Five years ago on the first step of the reformation The Wonder Stuff sold out five nights here. Tonight, they sold about one tenth of that number. Unlike most gigs, there is no crush near the front. The crowd is almost as thin as my hair. Things are rather different now : there’s new people on stage, and new songs – the dreaded nemesis of many a nostalgia act. Andres Karu on drums, and the fabulous Mark McCarthy on bass who adds a previously unhinted touch of menace to the bands sound are also joined by Erica Nicholls, a fiddle player whose been in the band three weeks. Hence then, the somewhat limited number of songs from the “fiddle years”.

In the meantime, the band are trying their best to gamely fool us that they have currency in today’s bland times. Not for Miles Hunt, the bland, piano ballad and the self-pitying, vaccous lyric. It’s almost as if they have a little too much personality. In the meantime, new songs are tolerated, irrespective of how good they are. There’s no quality gap with the new stuff, but a familiarity gap : the new stuff stands out by falling flat on a largely unappreciative room, the old stuff is eagerly received. Too eager one could say.

Jump up and down like the drunk wanker you are during the old stuff, grab and grope less then happy females, yell a bit, and then go home alone and cry and want to die. If nobody minds too much, have a bit of a fight during the old hits . Yes, you, you fucking jerk. Feeling up the girls cos you’ve had a drink. One wonders how long can you continue as a new band, a new lineup, with new material, when all the majority of your consituency want are the old songs? Do you start to resent the old songs? Or do you play them, knowing that without them, you’d be working in middle management somewhere in London, remembering the days when people would pay to hear you sing?

Sadly, tonight was, in the eyes of the Joe Schmoe punter, all about the past, the millstone that hangs around the necks of every band, whilst the band try to bring us to the future, and leave some of them behind. The old stuff still sounds as good now as it did then, the new stuff stands up next to it as an equal, if slightly more mature beast. But it’s howling into a void. Play us the old songs, there’s girls to grope, punches to throw, drinks to spill. Yes, you, living in the past, enjoy it.

You’re killing the band you love.

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