Why Weren't You Special?

Now that I've got some distance to our club night two weeks ago, I feel ready to say something about it. I'm still unsure of whether I will ever do anything as significant though... As you may know, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart played live. They played those songs above, and "The Pains of Being Pure At Heart" for the encore. It felt so good after worrying that people might not turn up, that the band was late, that the drum kit would fall apart (if it even got there!) etc, when we even managed to fill På Besök. And there were smiles aplenty.

Actually, I found the band members already there when I got to the venue - sitting around a table with a beer each. They had a sound engineer with them, Danny, and already when they were soundchecking I was amazed at how good the sound was. They kept it clean though, and didn't play any fuzzed-out songs like "Come Saturday". The thing I feel most pleased with at the moment is that we caught them at just the right time. This was probably one of the last small gigs they will do (they're supporting The Wedding Present in the UK soon for chrissake!). If they ever come back to Sweden they will no doubt be in the hands of a monolithic booking agency. Even their gigs in Gothenburg and Stockholm were much bigger. I mean, we were standing/sitting right under their noses when they played! And of course it was great that they compared På Besök to the Cake Shop in NY... And I'm proud that I was able to give everyone who turned up the opportunity to see them, and that in a small way I managed to make them that little bit happier. At the end of the night we'd made more than double the meager sum I'd promised them, and that's not counting those who sneaked in without paying.

At the time it was all the little things that made it amazing. Just finally meeting Alex, Kip, Peggy and Kurt. That they genuinely liked the music me and Anna played. The nationalist t-shirts they were really trying to get rid of. That G.O.O.F. did such a great job supporting them, with Henrik on second guitar probably for the first time. It really made the songs gel into complete entities. They were all new to me as well, and by the sound of it I'd say it's time for that fourth album! And of course I got my hands on this little cutie.

By the time you're reading this, "Everything With You" will be available from Slumberland, so you can get it too! And you don't have to wait until 2009 to hear the forthcoming album - I just discovered the whole thing is streaming on last.fm. The album contains new recordings of "Come Saturday" and the old ep tracks "This Love Is Fucking Right!" and "Hey Paul". The real drums version of "The Pains of Being Pure At Heart" is incidentally the b-side to aforementioned 7".

The playlist from the night as well as more pictures can be found here.