Puressence - The Veils
Live at the Islington Academy 08/09/05

Will it mean something if you notice that more and more often you are going to concerts for the support bands – I am really becoming quite alternative. I mean: once upon a time, openers didn’t even know of each other's existence, and now there's a support band that you thought was big, or at least that's how it seemed to you because the opposite seemed inhuman. And yet The Veils play before Puressence, who until a few years ago had also forgotten their existence (and someone strangely noticed).

At the Islington Academy, they will play a good set, robust and well assembled that all things considered doesn't even make me regret the 14 pounds, but there's one thing they need to explain to me: why do Puressence have such frighteningly old fans – sprightly, of course, but really old – and why they insist on appearing glam. Or maybe I have become unbearable: I have just started my personal crusade against the cloakroom institution (since the attack they invented the backpack ban and then you pay 3 pounds to leave it with a girl bored with life). I find myself running away like a thief for 3 bloody pounds, and the funny thing is they search your backpack too, before leaving it at the cloakroom.

I adore everything about Finn Andrews: his clumsy mobster style, his wonderfully pure stardom, and his voice – and what a voice: go ahead and sing "Mi Ricordo Montagne Verdi" and I will be moved. Destiny is on his side and in the meantime – whether you understood the first record or not – get ready again for such splendor: the new compositions performed while waiting for a band-once-called-Puressence disturbed me quite a lot. For the record, six songs in less than half an hour, and in the first one, after 10 seconds, he loses the microphone and they go instrumental till the end and in the last one he trips over the drums and wrecks everything, and when he gets up he even tells us to go to hell.

All very nice indeed, if we add a maiden of heavenly grace playing the bass like a Russian miner: a lethal combination and in the photo, if I wasn't too drunk, she should be somewhere.