Guillemots Cardiff University – Solus Thursday 26^th October 2006

Its fair to say the current glut of angst ridden, goth-a-like, whinging emo bands does my head in, most of them are barely out of their teens and its all woe is me etc etc. So the arrival of Gulliemots on the scene at the start of the year was warmly welcomed as far as I was concerned. 

They have charisma in bundles and the energy to match, bouncing round the stage like Tigger on acid, indeed, its not very usual that you arrive at a venue and find the lead singer of the main act (Fyfe Dangerfield, real name apparently) swanning around (at least one bad bird pun allowed surely) at the front of the crowd talking to fans and having countless photo’s taken with starry eyed teenagers. 

If the measure of a good live band is how quickly they can get the audience tapping their feet then Guillemots have it made.  By the time they reach the fourth song “Go Away” they have the Solus crowd eating out of their hands. This is quite a feat given the venue is mostly full of students running low on loan funds who were more interested in checking out each others hair than listening to support act “The Last Town Chorus” who incidentally were 2 girls and a guy from New York, Brooklyn I think, playing just keyboards, acoustic guitar and electric guitar. Quite a short set of slide guitar driven songs with beautifully woozy vocals, they chucked in a slowed down, fuzzed up cover of Bowie’s “Modern Love” at the end as well.

Back to Guillemots though, led by the aforementioned red suited, white booted lead singer Fyfe, they take us through their debut album “Through the windowpane” starting with “Little Bear”, you can hear a pin drop as Fyfe sits at the piano on his own tinkling away. They then launch into “We’re Here” which on record is a massive orchestral sounding number, but surprisingly doesn’t  lose much when they play it live despite the obvious lack of a string section. At this point the obligatory largest bloke in the venue stands right in front of us so we move back and to the left a bit.  He follows and stands right in front of us again, I’m getting a bit paranoid at this point but thankfully he soon gets bored and wanders off, just as Guillemots launch into “Made up lovesong #43”, “Go away” and “Cats eyes” which has a wicked cartoon backdrop full of cats to accompany it. Fyfe then shows us he can move as well as play when he demonstrates some of the rather less used settings on his keyboards a la Alan Partridge whilst robotic dancing at the front of the stage. The kids love it.

They move through the rest of the set effortlessly somehow managing to incorporate, a theramin, a typewriter solo and some traditional Norwegian folk singing from one of their roadies.  The set ends with “Redwings”, Fyfe accompanied by the singer from support act “The Last Town Chorus”, band exit stage right to rapturous applause and very quickly return for the encore consisting of my two favourite songs from the album, “Trains to Brazil” and “Sao Paulo” which starts as a ballad and ends up a mad 120 beats per minute samba extravaganza!

Everyone leaves the venue with a smile on their faces probably purchasing Guillemots stripey socks or shoelaces from the merch stand on the way out. Something tells me that Guillemots are in a very special place at the moment and they certainly make you tingle from the tips of your fingers to the ends of your toes…    

by Kate and Rich