I managed to catch Peter, Bjorn and John live at Scala tonight, it was an evening filled with scary monitors, crazy dancing and a nice dose of music from Sweden.
“You like Sweden?” asks the first support band, First Aid Kit, at the Peter, Bjorn and John’s gig in Scala. It was a no brainer question, Ive already seen the likes of Wildbirds & Peacedrums, Shout out Louds, Lykke Li, Loney Dear and a whole bunch of other bands play and they definitely know how to deliver. Tonight I was promised dancing.
First Aid Kit were a nice band to sit down and chillax to, the main singer was friendly and bubbly, engaging with the audience every now and then, jokingly doing the whole “who’s excited about Peter, Bjorn and John” thing and teasing the crowd with the ever so clichéd reply of telling the audience to do better than that and shout even louder (no reference to Shout out Louds).
Read this paragraph if you wanna know more about the scary soundcheck, if not I urge you to move on for the rest of the gig. It was one of the scariest sound checks I’ve ever had :P, around this time I’ve been worn out immensely by gigging that I was feeling a bit weak and tired, this meant being slightly buzzed out from coffee in the morning (I was nice and shakey). When the roadies did soundcheck on Bjorn’s mic, it would make me jump over it’s staccato and bassy qualities, picture a lot of sharp swift “two”’s being muttered on the monitor. I kept giggling over how funny it was that I kept jumping up over a mic test, I bought some coke to drink (mmm £2.50 coke) because I was starting to dehydrate at this point.
Peter, Bjorn and John’s set was pretty epic, I did quite a healthy amount of dancing during their set and was no longer worried about the crazy monitors (probably because I wasn’t facing it anymore). The band certainly won theh hearts to the fans as they kept screaming and jeering over them, the front row was filled with young girls, kinda looked like it was their first gig because I saw three of them filming the same song in the same angle (kinda felt weird because you’ll just end up with 3 fairly identical videos of the gig). Speaking of videos, here’s my video of Nothing to Worry About
As you can see, I REALLY wasn’t focused on keeping the camera steady, Max was like “WTF” the whole time when I was doing all this camera moving haha, but yeah, the really wasn’t much to film anyway to the crazy camera dancing makes up for it. They played Past, No Move Me, Lay it Down, Beats Me, I want you, Nothing to worry about, Living Thing, Losing My Mind, I Don’t Know, Fa Si La and Objects
They did an encore which included the ever so catchy and whistly Young Folks with special guest singer Anita from thecocknbullkid. The last song, Up Against the Wall kinda dragged on a bit with extended jamming and guitar thrusting from Peter. I got slightly excited that I managed to get some fancy green plectrums from the gig but I eventually gave them away to fans during the commute back (hopefully they’ll read this :)).
