Sing Along Forever

It wasn’t the warmest evening, so when I arrived at The Cockpit in Leeds I was glad to get indoors and out of the cold. Or so I thought. It was actually colder in the venue than it was outside. It’s safe to say that the only other building in the world which is colder than this is a Swedish ice hotel.

The first band on was Luther, not to be confused with Martin King, Vandross or that TV show with Idris Elba. They weren’t very good and I soon found myself making a mockery of my “I won’t drink tonight” claims.

Next up were Cheap Girls who were neither cheap nor girls. This lot weren’t very good either and looked like they couldn’t be bothered to be there. The bar came to my rescue yet again.

In the interest of fairness I asked a guy at the bar what he thought of the support acts. “Fucking shit” was his verdict. Can’t argue with that.

There were perhaps as many as 300 people in the small room by this point and it was starting to warm up a bit. The Bouncing Souls walked through the back of this room before taking to the stage and they were all close enough to touch. I gave the guitarist a thumbs up and he nodded at me, but I’m not the kind to get starstruck by such events. Oh, alright: it was dead exciting and I think a bit of wee may have come out.

As they launched into Sing Along Forever it felt like the roof was going to be blasted off, if it weren’t for the fact that the roof is under the railway lines running into Leeds station.

I lost count of how many songs they played, but I reckon it was around 30, including almost all of the excellent How I Spent My Summer Vacation album (except Manthem, the bastards). The fastest version of Hopeless Romantic I’ve ever heard was a personal highlight. I would have liked to have heard Born to Lose and Apartment 5F as well, but they couldn’t play everything. There was plenty of singing along and pogoing being done and even a bit of stagediving. By the time they finished with Gone 70 minutes later, everyone had a grin on their face.

The couple who decided to obscure my view with constant snogging, the man with a giant teardrop tattooed next to his eye and the guy who looked like Timmy Mallet wearing a scarf Roberto Mancini-style all seemed to enjoy themselves as well.

To round off this evening of fun, some nutjob decided to pull the emergency cord on the train because the toilet door wouldn’t lock. Thankfully this only delayed us for about 5 minutes and caused the guard to do much eyerolling. Fantastic.