I think it is a sign that a performer has forgotton who it is put him there in the first place. I really hate when artists do this. To truly enjoy a gig you need to be familiar with the material. Down with that sort of thing!!

Well, on one hand, the tour is the "Rock and Roll" tour - meant to promote the new album/EP. He played 11 songs from "Rock and Roll", 3 songs from "Love is Hell EP", 2 new songs (in his first encore), and finally, for the second encore, "I See Monsters" from the unreleased "Suicide Handbook". However, I do agree - a little of Gold & Demolition would have been nice. My main problem was the length of the gig - last year, he played a 2 and a quarter hour acoustic gig, full of humour, songs from Heartbreaker, Gold, and some new stuff (which is now on "Love is Hell". This year? An hour and 10 minutes. I would have been really dissappointed, but I felt that the support band were excellent - Steve Wynne & the Miracle 3. If they hadn't been as good as they were, then €32 would have been FAR too much. As it was - a disappointing gig.

I remember seeing the Dandy Warhols in the Olympia last May and that was even worse because that gig was on about 5 days BEFORE the new album's release (unfortunately). They did something similar to Ryan Adams there and consequently it took a long time for that gig to take off. The songs on that album (called Welcome TO The Monkey House) are not nearly as catchy live or on disc as the previous 2, but still, the main set consisted of songs from that one only and the audience knew very few of them. I suppose there were about 5 songs at most from Come Down & Urban Bohemia. I remember my girlfriend and I went to the bar for a pint and ended up sitting down & chatting for half an hour, because we didn't think we were missing much. When you pay the extortionist prices for tickets as we do in this country, you would expect a gig to be less self-serving and at the very least, shouldn't be so easy to be distracted from. Courtney Taylor even told the crowd to f**k off at one point when they started shouting for earlier songs. The encore sort of rescued things. Nevertheless, when I was leaving that gig, I had the impression that if the support group hadn't pulled out at the last minute and the Dandys wouldn't have ended up playing such a long set, it would have been an utter waste of time & money. I suppose we just about got away with it, but bands should not be so selfish. Q2