Bowling For Soup (an acoustic evening with Jaret & Erik) - Oxford O2 - April 11th 2010

I love Bowling for Soup.. my kids (bar one) all love Bowling for Soup so it was a rare family gig with me, my eldest  daughter and my son off to see the same band, at the same time. (The last time we did that was to see Cheap Trick/Def Leppard which prompted some bloke in the bar to comment "Christ - how naughty have those kids been if the punishment is this bad! - which nearly caused a fight as he was talking about the people I love..Cheap Trick!)

Anyway, support was from a band called We Sunk Atlantis, which the Eldest declared as both "fit" and "lush". Music-wise was hard to tell as they were playing acoustic (except the drummer who just sat there and chipped in with vocals) but seemed just as good as the other stuff that blasts from Eldest's iPod. No doubt I'll be hearing more of them.

Now Bowling for Soup.. or more accurately An Acoustic Evening With Jaret and Erik. This is BFS stripped down to just the vocalist and the bass player, but both playing acoustic guitars. It was an intimate setting, a couple of chairs, some table lamps and a lectern holding the BFS Songbook. Bowling for Soup are normally a high energy Pop-Punk band who tend to sing about love, high-school and knob jokes. But in this chilled out setting it still worked. A good crowd sang back every word in what became part rock-gig, part stand-up. The banter, the stories, the Monty Python impressions and of course the music made it a really fun gig.  Hearing the BFS back catalogue unplugged in this way gave it a different dimension. You really appreciate how good these two are at vocals & harmonies and what cracking songs they write, (although we later discovered that Erik is a songwriter and Jaret is a song maker-upper). They took requests from the audience (although ignored the frequent calls for Emily - which I imagine is a bitch to play on an acoustic guitar), played songs from years ago through to the brilliant latest album ("Sorry for Partyin'") and, after discovering that Two-Seater had the same chord progression as a recently revived Journey song, they played a blinding version of Don't Stop Believin'

*stop press* I forgot to mention (thanks for the comment below for reminding me) .. We got a mammoth two and half hour show.. all for less than the price of parking at a B*n J*v* gig !  ..

Top marks - look forward to the full band tour in October.



NR

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