DMW: Digital Music W...

All photos by Amanda Nanawa

Thursday night at Webster Hall in New York City, I had a chance to watch UK group UNKLE perform for the very first time to a NY audience.
Being that the show was part of the CMJ Music Marathon showcase, I knew that the show would most likely run for about 2 hrs. You know, UNKLE has released only three full-length albums since 1998 starting with Psyence Fiction (which I proudly own on vinyl) and the album featured some great guest vocalists from Thom Yorke, Richard Ashcroft and Mike D among others. It was the album that featured the morose "Rabbit in Your Headlights" and mesmerizing "Lonely Soul". Then in 2003 Never, Never Land was released and that had guest vocalists from Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) to Robert Del Naja (Massive Attack). That album featured songs such as "Eye for an Eye" and "Be There". And this past July, War Stories was released and continued to feature guest vocals from Ian Astbury, The Duke Spirit, Josh Homme, Autolux and finally by James Lavelle - one of UNKLE's founding members.

Two bands opened for UNKLE. The first was Chicago's Walter Meego
while the second band was Toronto's own Holy Fuck. I enjoyed both bands. Holy Fuck has that song "Safari" that sounds like samples from '80s video games thanks to those mini Casio synths that they used to sell at Toys 'R Us for something like $50 bucks.

For the UNKLE show, I was curious to see which guest vocalist would make their appearance. It turned out that Ian Astbury, famously known as the lead singer of The Cult - newly reformed may I add, was the only one. Apparently, Richard Ashcroft was supposed to be there to do his "Lonely Soul" song but Ian ended up singing it.
I give him kudos for doing the song. I could tell that he wasn't comfortable singing it. In fact, he missed out on the first few lines of the song. James Lavelle was about to help sing the song when Ian got up to speed. I had a weird feeling that Ian had the lyrics of the song cupped in his hand because he kept the mic and right hand pretty damn close to his mouth.

Most of the songs performed last night were from War Stories.
For their encore, they did "Eye for an Eye" and "Rabbit in Your Headlights" (no Thom BTW). It was funny how at the end, James would tell the crowd (which apparently had David Bowie in attendance in the VIP balcony - at least that's what I heard) that he appreciated everyone coming out to watch UNKLE live -- the venue was packed -- and he went into a diatribe about how Richard (we can only assume Ashcroft) failed to appear on stage. Oh well.

Viva la CMJ!