Bare Wires At The Prince Of Wales, Caversham
Live at the Prince of Wales tonight were Bare Wires. Guitar-based blues-rock with guitars that cry and sing (unlike George's), this was the best gig in the current series, in my view.
It was very much a set of two halves. In the first half the emphasis was on blues. The highlight was a slow blues I didn't recognise: a courageous choice for a pub band. The lowlights were three brutal murders of Cream songs: the rythmn section were okay but neither guitars nor voice could cope. To be fair, in the second half they did do a good version of Crossroads, although that's not exactly a Cream song, really.
During the second half the emphasis was more on rock. The highlight of this section is harder to pick. They did a version of Walking by Myself which had far more energy than Gary Moore ever put into it; then again they did Hey Joe with the guitarist, instead of trying (and failing) to imitate Hendrix like most do, playing his own style ... and it worked well. For total wierdness, though, my vote has to go to their opening number in the second half. They started with the bouncy bit from Black Sabbath Volume 4 (the bit that was supposedly done with crucifixes bouncing off guitar strings, although I didn't see any crucifixes here). Then they morphed into an early Pink Floyd intro (I think from Astronome Domine, but it's too late to check now), which led (somehow) into Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love, which then (via another spacey bit) turned into a fairly well known bit of US seventies rock (I can't remember the title now, but I think they credited it to Joe Walsh).
Bare Wires' approach to the encore was decidedly odd. The set just kind of faded out at the end of a Rolling Stones number, when they said they were going. A rather confused audience mustered enough clapping to get them to do another number, which turned out to be a rather bland bluesy thing (it sounded vaguely Gary Moore-like) with not much going for it. A rather anti-climactic end to a very good gig, really.