MUSE, Drones tour, SSE Hydro, Glasgow, Sun 17th April 2016

I was really looking forward to this gig. 'Drones' was my favourite album of last year and, although our seats were in the upper section, MUSE had promised a spectacle.

The first disappointment came on arrival when everyone was being funneled into huge lines through the south entrance. At this point, the doors had been open for forty minutes so I wasn't expecting such a long queue. It took fifteen minutes to get through in a bitingly cold wind as security searched (almost) everyone for booze or weapons. Our queue didn't have a female security person so the women didn't get a frisk. The man who searched me was in a right mood, pausing his search to repeat, 'I said are you carrying any beer, bottles or cans?' when I failed to respond to his initial mumble. If you expect an answer, don't address my chest, talk to the ears. Welcome to the Hydro.

The second disappointment was realising we couldn't see the round screen above the stage from our seats because the sound and lighting rigs obscured our view. This was a small irritation but enough to trigger my negative mood.

The support act were not the ones listed on the Ticketmaster email. Instead, we got Phantogram, an American electro-rock band with a female lead singer. They never managed to own the large circular stage. Being unfamiliar with their work, their songs never engaged me and I was glad when they stopped.

MUSE have a powerful sound. It's a shame they didn't get the acoustics right last night, with a lot of sibilance on Matt Bellamy's vocals. I didn't think he was on top form, his guitar work occasionally sloppy, his vocals missing the big notes consistently. Matt also failed to personalise the show for the Glasgow fans, bar three obligatory mentions of Glasgow and two of 'Scotland'. No chat, little crowd work; it was the same show that everyone else gets. He didn't even introduce his bandmates.

I did think the staging was imaginative, with its turntable centre and raised wings; the lighting was amazing and the floating spheres added another dimension. The screens that descended occasionally worked well sometimes, such as when displaying the hands pulling the puppet strings, but were weaker when projecting live images of the band. Maybe it was the angle we were looking at them, though.

The crowd on floor level looked like they were really enjoying themselves, bouncing and rippling, with an occasion mini mosh pit erupting during the faster numbers. Upstairs we wobbled our legs, nodded our heads and were told to sit down if we deigned to stand. Probably for our own good given how drunk some were. The chatting behind me really irritated me during the quieter numbers but that was perhaps due to a lack of engagement with the band. It didn't stop me imagining turning around and lifting the squawking woman bodily from her seat and propelling her over the balcony to the floor below. Give her something to really talk about. A couple of rows in front of me the tall lads, in their late twenties/ early thirties, with formerly athletic frames built in the gym and lost in the pub, regularly popped off for another quartet of pints, forcing everyone else in the row to stand up to let them out. I understand why they don't but it would be great if the venue would shut the bars during the performance to avoid this disturbance. I was amused by their air hugging at the end, necks too tired to support their lolling heads.

If I went to see MUSE again, I would only want to do so if I was standing. I'm left with a feeling of 'seen that, done that, box ticked, move on' which I'm sure is not the impression MUSE want to give their fans.

Setlist
Drones (Intro tape) 
Psycho
Reapers
Map of the Problematique
('Who Knows Who' riff + Rage Against The Machine's 'Maggie's Farm' riff outro) 
Dead Inside
Bliss (Extended outro)
The 2nd Law: Isolated System (Shortened)
The Handler
Supermassive Black Hole (The Jimi Hendrix Experience's 'Voodoo Child' intro)
Prelude
Starlight
Citizen Erased
Munich Jam
Madness
[JFK]
Stockholm Syndrome (Rage Against The Machine's 'Township Rebellion' riff + 'Execution Commentary' riff outro)'
Time Is Running Out
Uprising (Extended outro)
The Globalist
Drones (Reprise)

Encore:
Take a Bow
Mercy
Knights of Cydonia (Ennio Morricone's 'Man With a Harmonica' intro)

Mark Thomas. ‘TRESPASS’, The Tron Theatre, Wed 13th April 2016

Mark Thomas is a political comedian, an activist, a trouble maker and, most of all, very funny. With an impish demeanour, he can be playful, indignant, raging and serious all in one sentence. Throwaway lines explode like comedic hand grenades. He prowls and parades across the stage, owning the space (an apt metaphor), commanding and demanding our attention for the words he speaks are a gospel of truth designed to open our eyes to the injustices around us (with wank gags: he assures us the political stuff is coming later).

In the first half, the fifty-three-year-old performs as his own support, describing what he was up to last year with his 100 acts of minor dissent. The audience supply him with four random numbers between 1 and 100 and he describes those particular acts from his book of the same name. They encompass things like having three female friends racing a pink remote control car on the pavement outside the Saudi embassy to rearranging the letters on the overhead banner promoting the films playing at the Curzon Cinema to highlight their policy of using zero hour contracts and paying less that the living wage. It was in this half that he notices an audience member lit up by his mobile phone. He then pauses the show to lecture the person about how, having paid for his ticket, he may feel entitled to use his phone but in reality, he was not only putting him off as the performer but he was also being rude to everyone around him who had also paid for their tickets. Such an act of selfishness could only be regarded as that of a Tory, he commented. This serious aside kept the mobiles away for the rest of the performance, a novelty.

In the second half, he starts the show proper. ‘Trespass’ is a show highlighting how our civil freedoms are being eroded by privatisation to such an extent that the very land beneath our feet is being sold off. A public footpath between the Thames and a high rise complex (30% occupied but 100% sold, at a cost from £2.5 million an apartment) has signs erected by the residents saying ‘No Loitering’. Mark takes umbrage with this curtailment of his right to loiter on public land and arranges a tea party with cake to encourage passers-by to stop. Then it escalates to a full-blown fete the following week when the residents complain.

He runs a 5K along the two public edges of the 15 metre triangle outside the RBS London head office to highlight that this former public pavement is now owned by RBS. He then attempts to get the walk recognised as a heritage trail. Just two examples among many that inform the show so I'm not spoiling too much.

The joy in his work is the way he uses absurdity to shed a light on injustice, which in itself can be equally absurd, e.g. Salford Council wished to introduce a swearing ban so he asked them to indicate which from a list of 240 words could he use during his show at the Arts Centre, not wishing to break the law. They replied he could use any of them because his show was art and they did not wish to curtail his freedom of speech. As such, he arranged a choir to sing a song consisting entirely of those swear words outside his show afterwards, a video of which appeared on the Mail Online with almost every word bleeped out (everything apart from ‘cunny’). Hilarious!

He is smart, witty, vulgar, challenging, righteous and preachy but right on the nose. He may be too old to flirt anymore but this audience loved him and his message. His three dates at the Tron are sold out and on the strength of this material, I can understand why.