Someone take the handbrake off!
It's always going to be tough for a band on at midday and today things aren't helped by the fact that crowd numbers (overall) are well down on the previous day. There are about 60 people in for Overdrive and more filter in throughout the set and they'd be happy with that in a club venue so it's not all bad.
Coming on to polite applause they start with a pastiche of Queen's 'We Will Rock You' before going straight into a cover of 'Paranoid'. Not a bad version at all with some crisp guitar work but it's nothing if not obvious. Amazingly after the opening the singer (Simon) asks the crowd to stand up, and they do! Fair play to the guy.
'Lone Ranger' is the first song the band ever wrote, a fairly simple but effective song with a mellow intro and verse. The vocals unfortunately are a bit flat in the verse and they need to work on their delivery, there is a definite lack of passion about the whole performance. Simon looks completely lost on stage when he's not actually singing, his earlier confidence appears to be ebbing away by the second.
The songs are pretty standard rock but they do show promise in places. Another cover, this time the Corrosion of Conformity song 'Clean My Wounds', is well handled but they need to up their own material to the same standard before they can really mean business. I'm just thinking that a few faster songs would add welcome variety when they duly oblige with the final song 'All This Time', one of the better self penned songs. Not a bad performance but Overdrive need to come a long way from this to justify moving up the billing order.