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UK indie rockers The Charlatans played their first New Zealand gig last night. Our reviewer Scott Kara reports
Even though we're at the deliciously grubby Powerstation we could be standing in the Hacienda - that bastion of the acid house scene in mad old Manchester during the late 80s and early 90s.
The Charlatans are up on stage, the band's trademark bursts of trippy organ make you swagger and swoon, and singer Tim Burgess is out front with his foppish bob, prancing round like a rigid flower and lashing us with his microphone chord.
Honestly, it could be 1990, especially when anthem The Only One I Know from that year gets a good chunk of the crowd bouncing in the air like they're on a certain substance that was in plentiful supply in the Hacienda's heyday.
But alas, it's not 1990, it's 18 years on and while the Charlatans - bar Burgess who still looks like a rogue page boy - are looking older they still put on a cracking show.
The band emerged a few years after the Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets - the leaders in the Madchester scene - but as tonight's career-spanning set proves they have been the most consistent and prolific of the bunch. They have never split up for starters.
While opening track, You Cross My Path, off the band's latest album is fiery and angry they're a little shaky in the first half with older classics like Weirdo and Then lumbering and lacking that E-for-energy.
But onwards from Here Comes A Soul Saver, through the rousing Sympathy For the Devil rip off One To Another, and The Only One I Know, they are tight, spirited and, most importantly, having fun on their first ever trip to New Zealand.
If the sing-a-longs to encore North Country Boy and One To Another are anything to go by it's clear the mid 90s Charlatan's albums are the band's most popular. But the reception to new songs like Oh! Vanity and This Is The End prove the band has had a mini renaissance following the latest album.
They end with the sprawling Sproston Green off first album Some Friendly. Fittingly, when Mark Collins guitar gives out mid way through the song, it brings the gig to a jumbled yet happy end - just like it would have been in the old Madchester days.
