Date: 13th November 2007

Venue: Glasgow ABC

For those of you that know my music taste, you will know that I have a real love/hate relationship with Unkle founder James Lavelle. I love the fact that he gave us Mo’ Wax record label the introduced me to the likes of Attica Blues, Rob Dougan’s “Clubbed to Death” before it got played ironically to death after being featured in The Matrix, and probably his biggest gift to me personally…. DJ Shadow. What I hate is that he surrounds himself with all of these famous people and seems to feed off their cool without really having any apparent musical or production skill.

Unkle is essentially Lavelle as Shadow came in after former partner Tim Goldsworthy and has since be replaced by Richard File, and as a huge fan of Shadow and his work on the first full Unkle album Psyence Fiction (tracks like Lonely Souls is just amazing) I found it difficult to pick up the following album “Never Never Land”, which is ironic as I grew to prefer the non-shadow track to Psyence Fiction (I really hope Josh Davis is not reading this!!!)

This tour was for the recent long player by Lavelle and File “War Stories”. Again it is a grower, slightly different from what has come before, but then Unkle has always been evolving and a bit more rocky, so that gave me an idea that it should be a high energy show tonight….. and it was.

Lavelle and File behind a mixing desk and an Apple Powerbook, a frantic bass player, a punk-esk guitar player, a manic drummer that put Animal from the Muppets to shame and a comfortable looking dude playing piano and keyboard parts, plus a big lighting rig covered in strobes and Scans. The hole show was energetic from start to finish, starting with “Chemistry” from War Stories, all the way to “Eye for an Eye” from Never Never land and plenty of juice in between. Despite Ian Brown not being there we were treated to “Reign” much to my delight (vocals played off samples), despite no Josh Homme, we got “Restless” (again vocals off a backing track, despite no Richard Ashcroft we got “Lonely Souls” with Lavelle and some guy singing Richard Ashcroft’s part(although I should point out that Shadow plays this in his set and I prefer his version ), No Thome Yorke was not enough that we didn’t get “Rabbit in My Headlights”.

The tracks were mostly from War Stories and Never Never Land, Marc was please cause they played his favorite “In A State”. The crowd loved them and people were dancing right through the set, I even partook in a spot of pogoing myself!!!

Kung Fu Kitten sent me a text asking if I heckled Lavelle tonight, after he and Unkle’s performance I will need to re-evaluate my opinion of the guy, in fact if I see him in the pub, i may even buy him a drink