October 24, 2000

Cardiff University Great Hall

Preaching terminally unspectacular music to an undemanding audience...

Mansun
Cardiff University Great Hall

Mansun fans descend on Cardiff, home of One Live - Radio 1's yearly celebration of the live music art form. Tonight is, if you will, this week's baptism of cider - the day where the indie hordes finally descend on Wales' capital, drink the bars dry, and indulge in a Bacchanalian orgy of rawk excess.

It all starts here. But the trouble is, all ain't well aboard the Good Ship Mansun. Tonight, only the true devotees are present, after their most recent long-player - the widely derided 'Little Kix' - landed with the most modest of commercial and critical success.

You can't blame them for trying to blow the doors off with a tremendous opening salvo: a full-blooded, muscular thunder through 'I Can Only Disappoint You', and a frenetic rendering of the finest Mansun song ever, the explosive 'Being A Girl'. But elsewhere, oh woe, it's business as usual; Mansun sound like a cult not just destined, but determined to remain a
strictly cult affair: it's all there in the prog-mungous eight-minute take on 'Taxloss', which rumbles through a maze of different time signatures and ferociously operatic guitar solos, but still manages to paraphrase Little Jimmy Osmond on that clunky "I'll be your taxloss lover from Liverpool" lyric. And
where we need the truly iconic - a leather-kecked Brett Anderson, or a lean-jowled James Dean Bradfield - we're left with only slightly inadequate imitation; when frontman Paul Draper tries to strike the defiant pose of the rock rebel - foot gloriously poised on monitor, toppled microphone stand clutched heroically in fist - well, frankly, it?s hard to watch.

Still, the devotees remain devoted. And perhaps that's the idea. Trapped in a bubble, far from the harsh critical barbs of - gasp! - the real world, Mansun toil ever onwards, preaching terminally unspectacular music to an undemanding audience. You know what? They deserve each other.
Louis Pattison