Mouth of Tyne Festival - 2012

The omens for this year's Mouth of Tyne Festival didn't bode too well. The street entertainment in previous years had been reducing , this year's headliners wer Heaven 17 , not my idea of a headliner and the cost of tickets for the Sunday gig was now £10 a ticket and £5 for children. Added to that the weather in the run up had been mostly torrential rain.

Then .....

Sunday morning glorious sunshine ,  great start to rhe day. Arriving in Tynemouth I found  I'd missed The Undertones  , Richard Hawley , The Wanted & McFly and the Festival actually started on Thursday , but I didnt have the cash or time to see the other act, and some of tem I would rather not see!!

Lots of street entertainment and the weather stayed good . Two highlights were a couple of weird cycly taxis for children which were going down very well. The trad jazz stage att the entrance to the Priory is still there and the crowd in front fairly rammed. Always well attended.

Tickets for the Sunday were sold out like last year , and so on to the Priory having missed the openers The Caffrey Brothers. So this is how it went:

• Rossi Noise : Loud Rage Against The Machine lite band and an excellent opener for me , would see them again.
• Yes Sir Boss : Bristol based ska band , who had driven up that morning , who had excellent rhythm but no memorable tunes until the last two numbers which got the crowd up and was a big tick as far as I was concerned displaying Klezmer influences as well as their Nu Ska sound.
• The South : or The Beautiful South sans Paul Heaton. Surprisingly excellent with an excellent Paul Heaton lookalike / sound alike . Every song was instantly recognisable , and they even included a cover of Cass Elliot's "Dream A Little Dream Of Me" , overall the best band of the afternoon.
• Heaven 17 : The problem with Heaven 17 is that most peopl eonly remember Temptation , and while there were odd songs I remembered such as "Fascist Groove Thing" and "Crushed By The Wheels of Industry" , the band were fighting against adverse weather and some dodgy material, and , as Bob said , a keyboard player (Martin Ware) who should have been working in a library!. Finally came a storming version of "Temptation" and if the set had consisted of songs this good it would have been brilliant , but it was still worth waiting for. They finished to rapturous applause and then dropped the bombshell ... "We're going to play another song!!" . "How?"  "You haven't got another song" .  What we were forgetting was that Martin Ware had a hand in writing the Human League's best ever song "Being Boiled" , and they topped "Temptation" with that. Those two songs were worth the entry fee but we got the rest as well.

So another brilliant final day for the Mouth Of Tyne Festival.