Span

With new bassist, Kim, perfecting Span as a band (rather than the Joff, Jarle… and the other two, as before), they’re back in [almost] full health and on better form than ever before.

Stacks of airplay on various music television stations has set ablaze under a rocket that has been waiting years to explode; a rocket so packed with adrenaline fuelled kinetic energy that it has the potential to shoot off with a bang that will implode every last eardrum in the country. And the kids know it. OH do they know it.

Alcopops are hungrily passed around groups of 5; eyes glinting with adoration and excitement as four gaunt mid-tour figures take to the stage. The band belt it out, check-listing the rock’n’roll clichés and giving an unflinching nod in the direction of the latest and greatest as they go. Inside a room vibrating with sound conjuring images of everyone from Aerosmith to AC/DC, but with a quirkier bubble frilled edge, a hundred pubescent bodies tear and collide, hurtling in all directions.

This is the audience Span have been playing to for some time, but whose presence has been lacking; an audience to play putty in their hands, honest enough to remember how to have fun and to move to music they love; an uninhibited rabble whose energy and fun-loving mentality competes with that of the band themselves. And it ain’t just the kids.

This has been, what you might call Span’s “break through tour”, but it’s what I’d call their “fucking shattered into razor-edged slices of dynamite tour”… or something…