Lighting Up A Rainy Day
In 2006 the Lightning Seeds played a triumphant greatest hits set on the main stage at Guilfest and were introduced on stage with the suggestion that it could have been their final show. The Lightning Seeds were indeed put to bed soon after, although this wasn’t the first time in recent years that had happened. Ian Broudie has now awoken this particular animal once again, with a new album ‘Four Winds’ released in May of this year, and he’s back at Guilfest, although this time it was the second, Ents 24 stage. Truth be told though this lot have enough hit singles behind them to be able to top the bill on this stage, rather than play an early evening slot.
This performance didn’t quite reach the heights of three years ago, that day it was a celebration of nearly two decades of writing music, this was a return with something new to go alongside the old. They opened with the laid-back ‘All I want’, following it up with ‘Sense’ and ‘Lucky You’.
The tempo took a downturn midway through, with a stripped down version of ‘Marvelous’, the mellow ‘True’ and a couple of offerings from the new album which, on the evidence of today and some further research online, would appear to be a more chilled out, reflective record than we might expect. Given a personal life which has seen a marriage break up and the death of close family members, this is hardly a surprise though.
A real crowd pleaser moment came when a cover of The Ronettes ‘Be My Baby’ was played, with Broudie describing it as one of the greatest songs ever written. This was followed up by two of the great pop records of the past two decades, ‘Life of Reilly’ and ‘Pure’. The set was brought to a close with ‘Sugar Coated Iceberg’ with Broudie and co leaving the stage having reminded us that, for the pop music junky amongst us, the world is a better place with Broudie’s work in it, be it his own band or the multitude of production work to his name.
There were a few in the crowd who, given their chanting at the end, were disappointed ‘3 Lions’ wasn’t played. There’s much more to Ian Broudie’s work than a football classic, great though it was in capturing a moment on the main stage at Guilfest in 2006 when, in case we needed reminding, the line was slightly altered to reflect the unavoidable fact that it was then “40 years of hurt” … and counting. Why wallow in football failure when the season is still a month away and you've a stack of pop classics to light up a rainy summer day?