Silverchair @ Brixton Academy

First, I would like to dedicate this post to Nik, who couldn't make it to the gig. Curses on Tina the evil twin!

The crowd was surprisely young I think, for a band whose first album was released in 1995. And it was not Aussies only either, as I would have expected considering the closeness to Clapham (aka Sidney central). Not that I have anything against Australians... Obviously..

So, the opening band was Forever Like Red. Not bad at all, the singer has a brilliant voice, that reminds of Jeff Buckley when he pushes it. The songs tended to be a little too middle-of-the-road pop/rock for me though. Kind of like U2 in the All That You Can't Leave Behind period. This should allow them to get some radio airplay though so I guess it's not too bad, just not really what I like.

Then Silverchair entered the stage and started playing Young Modern Station, the first (and best) song of their new album, Young Modern. And I must say there that the sound was really, really messy! I don't know what was wrong but for at least 30 minutes the sound was just awful, I could hardly hear any vocals. That's a shame because that's when they played some of my favourite 'chairs songs, most notably Emotion Sickness.
It's only when they started to play Straight Lines, the new single, that the sound got better and the crowd bouncier (incidentally, that's also when Daniel Johns, the singer, dropped his shirt... Still not sure if there's a link though...)
They then swiched to some of their earlier, grunge material that I (and many other I hear) prefer, but no songs from their first album. What a shame...
In the encore, If You Keep Losing Sleep was just brilliant, getting the crowd shout at the drumkick, and repead the tuut tut tut tut tuut, tudut tudut (if you know the song you know what I'm talking about). That song is becoming one of my 'chairs favourites, even though I had massively overlooked it the first time I had heard it...
And then they finished with a brilliant rendition of Freak that you can watch below (if you look closely, about half way through you can see me crowd-surfing ;-))

So a great gig definitely, they are a brilliant band live. I still regret the lack of first album's songs, and also the shortness of the set (1h20)...