The Pete Green Corporate Juggernaut, The Kabeedies, The Bobby McGees - The Buffalo Bar

Pete Green is a fine chap, commonly found playing solo acoustic sets of happy Midlands-based happy sparkly songs, but always low down on the bill. Figuring this was due to his playing solo, he sold his soul, recruited a band and changed his name to The Pete Green Corporate Juggernaut.

Tonight, somewhat ironically, they are first on the bill. I missed a couple of songs, stumbling in late cos a road was closed and I had to park miles away.

Same songs, with a meatier backing. More like you'd expect a Pete Green band to sound like than a band playing Pete Green songs. Does that make sense? Imagine a band, any band, now imagine them playing Pete Green songs, The Pete Green Corporate Juggernaut doesn't sound like that, they sound like Pete Green as a band.

I'm unconvinced until "Everything is going to be sparkly" which works really well as the band are used to punctuate the song rather than play it. 'More of that sort of thing', I thought, until their last song, which sounded almost exactly like early Sultans of Ping FC playing Pete Green song. Now with that sort of direction the 'Corporate Juggernaut could end up headlining.

Free CDs on the door, from The Gresham Flyers and tonight's second band, the Kabeedies. I wasn't too impressed with them last time, a chronically short set at The Social, but Thom Gresham Flyer swears by them so maybe I'll see their magic tonight.

Crikey!

I get a better of them this time, wee bouncing spinning girl on vocals, sandwiched between her axe-wielding brothers, righty with a half length guitar strap and lefty with a three quarter length bass strap, and rather surprisingly, Orlando Bloom, the actor, on drums.

A fun-filled yelping set, with the sort of smart haircuts the Glasgow art school crowd would love. The Kabeedies would make a fine support act for Franz Ferdinand four years ago. As it is, they're going to have a hard time re-igniting the angular, unison yelps and stabby guitar fires of old. They ought to tell more people about Orlando in drums. He's very good, faster than you'd expect.


Not so pleased with the Bobby McGees, the over reliance of their songs which are introduced with the lines "You know when your girlfriend...", this makes me feel uncomfortable.

This is why I don't write reviews for The List or Time Out. From that what do you think the Bobby McGee's sound like? See, it tells you next to nothing about the band, and just shows too much of me.

For most of their set I was pondering if I were to write a six song set to play in a shadowy corner of Indietracks, whilst there'd be a great song in "moaning that after I appeared on The Culture Show, loads of old chums got in touch to say hey, and it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling, the girl who I still dream of never got in touch, so it was hardly worth it at all", the rest of the songs would be similarly ex-girlfriend based, so I'd better abandon the idea and just learn a load of friends cover versions.