Athlete live at the Carling Academy, OxfordBoth papers sniggered at Athlete in their listings section last week, the full weight of Oxford snobbery crushing down on their mainstream success. When taking this review I was determined to counterattack; this article would be a spirited defense of the popular, how a band could be great without being controversial. Thus, I was left disappointed when they didn’t give me that chance. Still, it feels rather unfair for me to blame them for that, since it was in fact a good gig, well played and engaging. Nonetheless, it did live up to the stereotypes. Take the audience: middle-aged couples predominated, and I’m pretty sure I saw someone taking a gig pic on a Blackberry. A group of eleven year olds at the barrier drew singer Joel Pott’s attention (odd considering it was an over-18s event). ‘Did your dad sneak you in?’ he asked, ‘Thats the kind of dad I’m gonna be’.Support act Boy Kill Boy acquitted themselves well, providing perhaps more energy than the headliners with their heavier sound more suited to live performance. Athlete divided their time between tracks from the latest album Beyond The Neighborhood and their previous work The Tourist, which was a No.1 album in 2005. The Tourist tracks sounded fuller and went down better with the crowd, ‘Wires’ and ‘Yesterday Threw Everything At Me’ being highlights for me and everyone else. The band’s oldest material didn’t get much of a look in. When an audience memeber shouted a request, Pott was unimpressed. ‘I don’t think we’d remember how to play that.’ The audience didn’t really seem to have paid money to listen to the band’s older material at all, and the band played hit song ‘Beautiful’ more or less for their own benefit.New song ‘Rock Scene’ was a popular number, but I couldn’t really work out why apart from the annoyingly memorable lyics. Athlete’s new album has fared less well than its predecessor, and the most recent single ‘Tokyo’ charted at an embarrassingly low 198. It seemed to me this was a group already past its peak. The band made the unusual decision of finishing on a song no-one seemed to know, ‘Flying Over Bus Stops’. It wasn’t a bad song, but it was hardly a rousing finale. Last night was a good show and everyone (including me) seemed to enjoyed themselves. It was just a shame it turned out to be so predictably mediocre.
– Michael Bennett
Running Out Of Steam
