A red-hot reception for Gomez

by Zoe Burn, Evening Chronicle

BACK in 1998, all the cool kids were listening to Gomez.

And a decade on, the Southport band returned last night to give them a second helping of the Mercury Music Award-winning debut album, Bring It On.

Their five-date 10th anniversary tour was billed as “the Bring It On album in its entirety”, and that’s exactly what the Carling Academy received, to what can only be described as a red-hot welcome.

Bursting on to stage to open with Get Miles, it quickly became clear this was a gig which was to follow the same order of the album, and everyone knew what was coming next – Whippin Piccadilly.

Long regarded as perhaps their finest moment, the crowd were well and truly whipped into an excitable frenzy as the guitar-fuelled five-piece grabbed the place and owned it.

As they brought the pace down with the beautiful Without A Sound, guitarist and main vocalist Ben Ottewell’s distinctive raspy voice filled the auditorium with remarkable power and control.

Gomez is a band renowned for strong melodies and harmonies, and although fellow guitarist Ian Ball and keyboard and vocalist Tom Gray had their own moments in the spotlight, it was always Ottewell whose voice stood out the most.

That’s not to say it was Ottewell’s show.

This was a strong band, one which took to the stage as a group, and performed as an equal collective, bouncing off each other with a natural ease.

The album rocked along with perfection and, as expected, ended with an even more impressive and epic version of Rie’s Wagon.

The encore was a mixture of new songs and classics from the second Liquid Skin album, and great as it was, it never quite brought the same highs as the earlier stuff had. If they’d ended on something like Here Comes the Breeze or Get Myself Arrested, they’d have struggled to get the crowd down from the rafters.

Gomez promised to Bring it On... and they brought it.