Before going into this I would like to point out that The Get Up Kids used to be one of my favourite bands in the world, but I had no intention of going to this since the last time I saw them, it just happened to be on the night we were in London. So please don’t take any comments to heart.

Anyway, saying that I did have a certain amount of fun, it’s been a while since I sat down and listened to any albums by them, so it was nice to hear the songs again. That and somehow I was more drunk than I’d been in a while and ended up screaming along to many songs.

The only problem I had with the gig was that they seemed to lack any energy, most of the songs sounded flat and half paced, the version of “Shorty” left me feeling a bit empty after hearing it as it’s one of my favourite Get Up Kids songs.

This was the 3rd time I’d seen them and to be honest the only time I really enjoyed them was the first (the second time was around the release of On a Wire so it was mainly material from that) which was in 2000 (shortly after Something to Write Home About).

Saying that though it was a fairly positive setlist with only a handful of tracks from the last 2 albums, even the opening number “Coming Clean” took me by surprise as I didn’t really anticipate any “Four Minute Mile” material, especially so soon in the set. There was a couple of odd choices though, both of which were covers, they did both the Cure’s “Close to Me” and the Replacements “Beer for Breakfast”. With both songs I felt like they could have been scrapped to fit in a couple more of their own songs.

They also debuted a new “song”, which to be frank wasn’t even worth the effort of writing, a bassy dirge that didn’t really sit anywhere on the Get Up Kids spectrum and could have easily been mistaken for a tuning break jam.

All in all it was an ok night, if you haven’t seen them before then it’d be worth it, but you wouldn’t be left with the same satisfaction as you would have seeing them on form.