David Devant and his Spirit Wife

Well the gig was fantastic I'm very glad to report, a homecoming to Dingwalls (now called Lock 17 for some reason), the launchplace of their first album, was somehow appropriate. The place was packed, perhaps partly because of an enormous free guestlist, but there must have been a generous sprinkling of paying punters (like us) too.

A shamelss attempt was made to return to glories past, with Vessel coming onto the stage in silhouette form first of all, but without the fully elaborate painting-himself-real thing. And the stand-in spectral roadies ripped the paper too. They were reasonable lookalikes, but we weren't all fooled, particularly not Iceman who was in the crowd. The balloon animals were a lovely touch, and the instructive illustrations too.

The set was a mix of very new and very old, almost none from the difficult second album "Shiney on the Inside", but a good few early rarities, including my personal favourite "Cookie", also "Slip Into Me", "Life on a Crescent", "Ballroom" and more. The new material all sounds good, get the new album from Outstanding Records, I keep leaving my copy places, so am not entirely familiar with it yet. It's got "Gentleman Jim" on it though, which is ace.

From comments on the Devant yahoo group it seems there were a few more songs on the setlist which weren't played, I'm kind of glad they didn't encore with "Ginger" though. GRATE though it is, that song signifies a point when they were written off by the mainstream music press to me, which is sad. What with all things Simon Pegg (OK, just Sean of the Dead doing well at the moment, hopefully someone will find a way of re-releasing "Asylum", the comedy series that featured the songs of the Devants from about 1996. I heard on the David Walliams website that he was in it too, don't remember him, only Simon and Jessica really.

Anyway, see my pictures of the whole band in action or just Professor Rimschott and here's a pic from Ice-man's phone more later, don't want to spoil you.

Blimey, I only mentioned Quentin Hann here once and suddenly I'm getting loads of traffic, is he the new Keira Knightly? BBC says Hann's ready to meet Hicks in the ring! Saw Steve Davis ALMOST get the highest break of the Embassy World Championships earlier. But not quite, he positioned himself badly on the last pink, did a fantastic pot and left a long but OK black. And missed it, only 127.

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