"L" is for Live this Friday: The Madding Crowd

The Madding Crowd play at Night & Day on Oldham Street this Friday 3 October. Manchester is their home town and they are a powerful group who deserve to be better known - they have strong social messages to convey and a sound with an edge and originality.

Intelligence, joy, beauty and reality merge with their poetic passion to rail against the greed of this corporate disunited kingdom that we inhabit.

They put it better in their own music and promotional material than I could do here, so here are a few quotes that I hope will encourage you to catch them live this week and at future gigs, as well as buying their music. Only £5 for Friday's gig, and a ep A stitch in time is out now. (£4 for CD).

“We write about where we're from, Manchester, with all its scarred and tarnished beauty, with its relentless individuality…” 

 “…weary purveyors of songs of love, hate, happiness, chaos, rebellion, glamour, intelligence, wit, imagination, bile, passion, despair, rejection and protest. We are everything that is lacking in a mainstream music industry that has become whitewashed, full up with corporate puppets charlatans, nonentities, agreeable pawns and vacuous, transparent bores.” 

“We come from a Britain of hysteria, of hate, of mass, seething idiocy, a place where there are very few shining lights. So we write songs about it, in order that we may perhaps shed light on it, and maybe change it for the better. We write songs about the paranoia, insecurity and uncertainty of the modern age, the fragility of the human psyche in a time when information is endless.” 

And so … I find myself spoilt for choice for live music this Friday, with no less than three fabulous bands I want to see. As well as The Madding Crowd, there's the amazing electro trippy sounds made by The Egg who are playing in London while The Carpet Crawlers perform the epic Genesis album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway at the Picturedrome in Holmfirth.  A friend has got me tickets for the latter, so I will have to catch The Madding Crowd again soon (please all go along in my absence!) and one day I will get to see The Egg.

Taking part in ABC Wednesday, albeit a day early, due to City Daily Photo's theme day on 1st of the month tomorrow.