Shiny and New Family Outing!

All three of your favourite S&N-ers paid a visit to the cavernous and sticky Manchester Academy (mere metres from our Manchester "offices") last night in order to pay our dues to the pretender to the throne of Kate Bush, aka the artist in every other decade who is actually really nice and normal in day to day to life but suddenly inhabits this magnificent, grotesquely beautiful character through their enveloping and breathtaking musical and visual art. Maybe we need to take a few classes in "Breaking up your paragraphs with that old nut, the comma".

As you may see, her stage show was beautifully atmospheric, helped along by actually very well done lighting - so many acts utilise painfully bland lighting these days - and lots of light boxes of sorts which illuminated large, gorgeous photos presumably from the same shoot as the cover of the new Two Suns re-release. Think lots of joshua trees, deserts, sunsets, silhouettes. Gorge gorge. At varying points in the gig certain aspects of the light boxes illuminated, so at parts you would only see the outlines of the jagged joshua trees, and at other parts you were would just see the sun setting on an American desert. The one minor let down, as agreed by all of us, of the entire gig was what Miss Khan was wearing! She has spoilt us too much with the ridiculous outfits she has worn in the past, so one can only describe the cute little Suri Cruise dress she was adorned in last night as 'disappointing'.

If you are a Bat For Lashes fan (which we hope you are, or you're doing yourself a massive injustice) you will already know how rich, layered, deep and immersive Natasha's music is, which was genuinely excellently replicated on stage. In fact, it was improved upon, which may possibly be a requirement in order to fully project the varying degrees of strength, vulnerability, emotion and power in her music upon a live audience. We were treated to the full potential of Natasha's voice - at one point we were surprised to find that what we formerly believed was a very high pitched synth was in fact air escaping from her lungs - and the full array of diverse and exciting instruments used during the recording of both of her albums to replicate the sounds and feelings the listener experiences. We are over the moon that we finally got a chance to see Bat For Lashes - we were at the very back of the audience at Latitude Festival after rushing from the Pet Shop Boys to see her, so we didn't actually see her, and the time when we actually won tickets to see her perform at the Camden Roundhouse we were... at Latitude Festival. So it's been a long time coming, but it was well worth the wait.

Bat For Lashes played;

1. "Glass"
2. "Sleep Alone"
3. "The Wizard"
4. "Siren Song"
5. "The Bat's Mouth"
6. "What's a Girl to Do?"
7. "Daniel"
8. "Good Love"
9. "Trophy"
   
10. "Tahiti"
11. "Horse and I"
12. "Pearl's Dream"
13. "The Big Sleep"
    
14. "Wilderness"
15. "Prescilla"