GBH - Reviews - Ashton-Under-Lyne, Thursday March 16th, 2000

Well this was definitely a night where things didn't go as I had planned them to. It certainly wasn't a night where the band gave one of their best performances either but I suppose that having seen GBH play three excellent shows the previous year then things are bound to slip on occasion sooner or later.

I'm not going to bore you with the gory details about getting to Ashton-Under-Lyne because I've done that already, it suffices to say that Ashton is a pain in the neck to get to unless you happen to live in Oldham or Rochdale. It was a bloody freezing evening outside and seemed colder still in the Witchwood, not that anyone probably cared so much about that. The Witchwood is as I have said before a good venue and with three bands on the roster, C3R, the excellent Pink Torpedoes with GBH headlining then who cared about how warm it was anyway ?

To summarise my plan of action for the night. More than anything, I wanted to get some photos of the band, have a good chat with them and catch up on things in general. What actually happened in reality was that just before getting into Ashton, Colin phoned me whilst I was still on the bus and asked "Nige, could you do us a favour and do the merchie ?". Like a mug I agreed to do it and that sealed the fate of the evening really which is basically why this review isn't so big. I manned the merchandise stall once the first band went on and was pretty well stuck there for the rest of the evening.

What I could salvage pictorially speaking is as follows ..

I managed to get this one whilst standing behind the merchie table, god knows what Scott was up to but it isn't a bad photo, more the remarkable for the fact that it was nearly pitch black when I took it.

This was the one and only 'action' shot of the evening .. snatched whilst the band were warming up, they needed to .. it was freezing in there. As for the show itself ? Well a fairly standard set from the boys played ok but in my opinion not as well as on some previous gigs. Can't be perfect every time, 'nuff said really.

Having watched the show from the behind the merchie desk and finally made my escape, it was after-show party-time though for some people it had stopped before it had even started. If you look carefully at the bottom left hand side of the picture you can see what I mean.

I observed that as soon as the band finished . Scott quite literally raced into the dressing room, crawled into a corner and dropped straight off to sleep, sprawled out, flat out !

It was rather strange to see him doing this though apparently this is a regular habit and worse than that, he's impossible to wake up when he gets like this ! The Witchwood staff were trying their best to get us all out and there was Scott snoring like there was no tomorrow. Shouting, shaking and general cajoling did nothing to raise his state of consciousness .. Rip Van Winkle had nothing on this guy. There was a certain reluctance to do anything else to wake him up as to quote "He tends to lash out when you try and wake him". Bloody hell, Scott may be several inches and several Stone lighter than myself but there was no way I was going to put myself within range of those tattooed fists once they started flailing ! In the end, Scott was brought back to the realms of consciousness by two people dragging him off his feet, funnily enough, he seemed as wide awake as anyone else in the van on the way home afterwards.

The final shot has to go in since Rob and his wife pictured in the foreground had managed to find the Witchwood whilst on a trip to Britain from the USA .. and I found it bad enough living down the road. It really wasn't one of the bands' better performances (they didn't seem too 'together' to be honest), but then this was hardly helped by Jock managing to knock himself out within a few minutes of the band starting. Our American visitors seemed to enjoy it all anyway and if nothing else, it was good to meet up with everyone again.