Originally published by L.S. Media. April 22nd 2011.
If pushed for an answer, where would you say that Britpop started? Some will stand and yell Oasis till they are blue in the face; others will cite the works of Blur and the talent that is in no doubt in the shape of Damon Albarn, Graham Coxen, Alex James and Dave Rowntree. If pushed a little harder there are those that would even declare that without Pulp, the other two wouldn’t matter and for certain Jarvis Cocker has his moments; however to anybody in Liverpool you only have one answer that has to be The Real People.
Watching them all come on stage at the Cavern reduced some members of the audience to wide, open mouthed grins as they remembered how the band once stood aloft and head and shoulders above those that tried to emulate them and in a different plane to those that came after.
With the release of Think Positive last December, the band have arrived back to a place which has long missed their distinctive feel and which had them rightly lauded from fans and contemporaries alike.
The album may be fresh but the bands approach to giving their audience a good night out has stayed firmly where the crowd want them to be, up on stage, and belting out top notch songs that they can forget their everyday lives to, even for just a couple of hours.
The Cavern witnessed one of those nights where the conditions are just right, where the perspiration ran down the walls and the beer flowed just as easily as the band played Think Positive in its entirety, starting with Twenty Seconds and the flowing Can You Hear Me to a cacophony of approval. There was really only one way they were going to improve on the seemingly un-improvable and that was by having local violin player Kate O’ Brien on stage to join them on a selection of songs during the night went down a storm.
Christopher Griffiths and his brother Tony looked pleased with the crowd’s reaction as they played tracks such as the excellent When it Rains, Facebook and Get over Yourself to a crowd that seemed to swell in size as the evening progressed.
The band, after a small break, proceeded to play into the small bank holiday Saturday hours carried on having the most enormous fun and played a set that included some of their songs from the previous albums including The Truth and The Same from the debut album, Too Much, Too Young from Marshmellow Lane before finishing off the evening with Rayners Lane as part of the encores.
Too those that had to leave because of the bank holiday traffic, they would have missed a superb show, one that hopefully will be repeated very soon.
Ian D. Hall