Nite Songs

  The Lightning Seeds always seemed to be one of those bands cursed with being regarded as a great singles band who never really made an all time classic album which is very unfair as they actually managed two very good long players back in their first run in the form of 1995's Jollification  and 1997's Dizzy Heights . Providing a more honest heart-on-sleeve counterpoint to the haughty cool of Britpop, they marked Ian Broudie out as a great songwriter with a very keen ear for melody. See You In The Stars  is the first Lightning Seeds album in 13 years (and, to be honest, the first one your correspondent has listened to since 1999's Tilt ) and the initial feel here is that this is a much more stripped-down and skeletal sounding band than the one you probably remember from songs like Lucky You  and What If . The opening duo of the semi-acoustic lament Losing You  and the pared down Emily Smiles  still show Broudie's sense of tunesmanship is intact but there's...

So your correspondent finally makes it back to a festival a mere decade or so after his last one (well, if you discount a few trips to the Bishops Stortford Music Festival when I lived down there). Kubix Festival is now in its seventh year (discounting 2020 where Covid put paid to it) and this is your correspondent's third attempt at attending - as I mentioned, the 2020 attempt was wiped out by the pandemic and the 2021 version ended up moved back to October for the same reason. And maybe this is just a sign of me getting older but the prospect of sitting at the bottom of Penshaw Hill to watch some bands in the freezing autumn rain didn't appeal somehow. Still, better late than never... Local lads Crashed Out  are pretty much a perfect band to open this festival and draw an impressively large crowd for this point in the day. With a barrelling punk energy, they even manage to get a small moshpit going as old favourites like The Town That Died  and Jarrow Song  rub shoulder...