29/3/2006 Ginger & the Sonic Circus @ Islington Academy

Subject	Ginger & the Sonic Circus @ Islington Academy
PostedDate	3/29/2006 3:33:00 AM
	This was a gig I'd been looking forward to for some time.  Like the show at the Garage earlier this year, this one was also sold out. What a show it was! The setlist was mostly the same as for the Garage show, with the ever present '29 x The Pain' and 'Sonic Shake' being only Wildhearts and Silver Ginger 5 songs aired. Ginger's new solo album is so rich in strong material that most of the set was taken from it. I think he could have just played 'Valour Del Corazon' all the way though and left it at that and most the people present would have been satisfied, but we also got a handful of covers, including popular crowd pleaser 'Pump It Up'. Another popular crowd pleaser was Jon 'Random' Poole on bass duties - always great to see him gracing a stage with the red headed one. Electric Boy and current Hanoi Rocks man Connie Bloom was also adding his 'rock star' persona and guitar talents - to the entire set this time. And as if we didn't already have enough guitar talent on-stage, then we also had Jase Edwards from Wolfbane to send us into total guitar overload! There were addititional backing vocalists to fill out the sound even more - including at times the very busy Sammy Andrews. There was much audience approval when Ginger announced that after the New York shows the band are off to play - they will be starting on recording a new album very soon!  As at virtually every Ginger related gig, the atmosphere was terrific - with the crowd singing along to virtually everything including all the new stuff. The pit was quite active, but never in a dangerous way as people were too into the actual music itself than mindlessly slamming people around for the hell of it. Particular high points for me were 'Sonic Shake' and 'Bulb' as I love Ginger's guitar solo in that song. Pretty much everybody's favourite songs from the current album got played and I enjoyed the show as least as much - probably more than the London show a few months ago! It was great to meet loads of friends as well - some of whom I haven't seen in ages. I found myself at the aftershow party and spotted CJ Wildheart - also apparently due to start recording a solo album. The aftershow chucked out at the unfeasibly early time of around one in the morning, so we ended up at Crobar until that also shut. I seemed to be quite wasted by the time I eventually staggered through the front door around 4.30 that morning...