March 21st 1991 – Leicester Poly
The Raw Tour. If it was a funny time at the last Alarm gig, it was even stranger for this one. Sometimes music is a funny old game and when you are growing up with a band and changing yourself and seeing them grow up and change too, you feel fully bought into their ways and feel for them in a human way…………tonight they were shocking!
No, actually that just isn’t fair and I’ll add a bit of hindsight on to the end of this piece, because from a fans perspective, you expect a good night and with The Alarm, you know you are going to get one.
I’d love to get a band’s perspective on this too, as living in each others pocket, day in, day out and still needing to be creative, must be so very hard. It is after all, their job, their livelihood. Maybe one day, I’ll catch up with Mike Peters and ask (I reckon this is one hero I could chat to….)
I never bought the “Raw” album, I didn’t really get into the tunes at the time, wasn’t boisterous enough for me, maybe I should give it another go years later to see how it really stood up musically.
The gig started really well with 4 great opening songs and a really good band sound, but plenty already felt missing. Mike had long straight hair, no spiky hair from Dave, Eddie or Twist…strange.
The next few songs took the mood down a bit, a few good songs interspersed with slow ones from “Change” and “Raw” albums…this is NOT what you want from an Alarm gig. You could hear the crowd drifting away and talking to each other, by the time Mike was singing “God Save Somebody” (a very poor song from “Raw”) The Alarm had lost the crowd.
you couldn’t really pogo to the next few songs either, there had been too much middle gig time devoted to country bluesy music without the energy we had come to expect from the guys. It wasn’t until “Bell of Rhymney” that the crowd started to get back on board, but the mood had drifted and even though we got “The Stand (Prophecy)”, “Rain in the Summertime”, “Spirit of ’76 “, even these were broken up by the slow moving “Moments in Time”.
“Rockin’ in the Free World” signalled the end of the concert and actually only a two song encore (also strange). We left quite frustrated and it felt the band were going through the motions.
The tour ended at Brixton Academy on 30th June 1991, at which point Mike stood on stage and announced, to the surprise of his colleagues, that it was his last moment with the band and he was leaving The Alarm. I hadn’t had many of the bands I followed split up at this point, especially one I had dedicated so much time to watch and pay attention to their music and lyrics….this was sad.
The fact that they did split put a bit of closure on the last couple of gigs being not quite what you would normally expect and thoughts were with how everyone would move forward.
Set List
- Change II
- The Road
- Rescue Me
- Knife Edge
- Raw
- Sold Me Down the River
- Hardland
- Shelter
- The Wind Blows Away My Words
- God Save Somebody
- Devolution Workin’ Man Blues
- Scarlet
- The Bells of Rhymney (Pete Seeger cover)
- The Stand (Prophecy)
- Moments in Time
- Rain in the Summertime
- Encore: Spirit of ’76, Rockin’ in the Free World (Neil Young cover)
Leave a Reply