28/10/2007 - Part 2. Obsessive Compulsive @ the Old King's Head

Subject	Obsessive Compulsive @ the Old King's Head
PostedDate	10/28/2007
	Soon after In So Far finish their set at the Barfly I have to depart for my second gig of the night - ironically, it's at the last venue I saw In So Far play. My well planned but simple route soon proves to be not so well planned after all when I discover Holloway Road tube station is shut.  I am forced to alight a stop early at Caledonian Road, but find it's only a short distance further to walk to my destination in Holloway Road. I arrive at the Old King's Head to find I am still in plenty of time. It's taken me some time to get round to seeing Obsessive Compulsive. I think they sent me an 'add' request a year or so ago - which I never got round to checking out - it faded away down the list with all the other many 'random' band requests that I never get time to check out. Note to bands: don't bother sending me add requests if I don't already know you. I don't usually deliberately 'deny' bands - I just don't get time to look at their profiles as there as so many and they often take ages to load as they have too many videos, slideshows, Maceys spam comments, and spam pics and videos from other bands. If I don't add you it's not because I'm being deliberately rude and ignoring you or I think your band is shit (although that might actually be the reason). I very rarely even look at band profiles after they send me add requests - let alone actually add them. Their 'add' requests just sit with all the others and slide down the list until they fade away - I think MySpace deletes them after 2 or 3 weeks... Anyway, this is what happened with Obsessive Compulsive and I forgot about them without ever even looking at their profile. Then I was listening to one of the recent free CDs which came with the excellent Bubblegum Slut fanzine. There is a reason most of the bands on such free sampler CDs get no further, but there are always a few songs on them which stand out. One of them on this CD sounded rather good - a decent song and a girl singer who could actuallysing. I looked at the notes to see who it was? Yes, it was Obsessive Compulsive and the song was 'Dying Dying Dead'. The band name sounded familiar, but I thought no more of it until the following week when I was in one of my regular haunts and noticed a poster on the toilet wall proclaiming that Obsessive Compulsive would be playing there very soon. So I find myself at the Old King's Head catching the band on their Halloween Tour. It was worth rushing from the Barfly for - a good heavy riff based sound, good players who were obviously well into what they were doing, and some decent songs - decent enough to make me buy a CD after. It's good to know that Manchester can still produce good rock music in these days when people only connect Oasis with that city. There's probably some Wildhearts amongst the other influences in their sound - heavy, but with some actual tunes in there too - which makes them stand out from other more metal influenced bands. Certainly well worth checking out - good enough to make me buy a CD from a band for the second time tonight.

PS: This pub was starting to turn into a nice little rock venue and was taken over to become 'The Gaff Club'. For a couple of years it was a great little venue putting on some terrific shows and won a Pure Rawk award. Then it closed at short notice and became a Costa Coffee bar. No other venue has since filled that void in the area, although Nambucca further up Holloway Road came close for a while...