Editors @ Monto Water Rats, 27th January 2010

All sparks will fade out

Editors are used to playing venues that hold thousands rather than hundreds, so the 200 people at the XFM Live Session at the Water Rats were significantly closer to the action than they would be at a regular Editors gig.

Opening the evening's entertainment was a singer-songwriter called Karima Francis, hailing from Blackpool if the tattoo on her neck was anything to go by. She had a really pure voice and began proceedings with a beautiful song called The Author and was rewarded by an almost silent audience. She seems really personable and was joking and interacting with the audience very comfortably. The 5 song acoustic set went down surprisingly well with an audience primed and ready for some loud rock music - check her out on myspace here to hear what caught their attention.

Just after 9pm Editors took to the stage and performed a set lasting just over an hour. They got a great reception from the crowd with a mini mosh pit forming at the front, and the biggest reaction saved for All Sparks and Munich, the biggest hits from their Mercury Prize nominated 2005 album The Back Room, and closing number Papillion.

Editors continues a trend I have noticed recently in several others (most famously Das Pop and Noah and The Whale) where one member of the band looks like they are actually supposed to be part of a different group entirely. In Editors, this role is filled by their bass player Russell Leetch, who looked a little bit like a public school boy and wore a granddad collared shirt, which stood out like a sore thumb amongst the black-t-shirted-indie-rock vibe of the rest of the band. Strange.

Also strange was the mix of fans the band seemed to have attracted. Only a small number were heavily tattooed goth rockers; at the front there seemed to be a high proportion of both large sweaty men, and woman in their early 30s, with younger kids (late teenage, early 20s) slotting in just behind.

Editors put on a good show and front man Tom Smith is certainly a showman and has a fantastic voice. His posturing was positively snake-like and he sort of writhed across the stage, seemingly dislocating his jaw at least once every 5 minutes and looked like he could have swallowed a watermelon whole. But for all the intimacy of the small venue, he didn't engage with the audience much at all. The guys all seemed to be excellent musicians and spanned both guitar based music and electronica, but what disappointed me about the gig was the lack of texture and contrast in the performance. Everything was loud, like a wall of sound pounding you around the ears. And I felt that they lost some of the subtly and impact that could have been achieved if there had been just a bit more variation in the volume - more light and shade please. Interestingly I did get this from their records but in a relatively short set they seemed to get overrun over by the noise and the sound.

But a good concert (if not a great one) and thanks again to Barclaycard for providing me with another free night out.

Editors' third album, In This Light and On This Evening, is out now.