I initially found it a bit terrifying that this was a ten year anniversary tour for Wheatus’s first album. Surely it can’t be that long since I was in second year of university? Apparently so. The curse of one hit wonder groups is that people will turn up to their gigs for that one song. They have a following but only for a singalong for a top ten song from the audience’s youth. Thankfully, Wheatus seem to have avoided that to a great extent.

They’re definitely a band without pretensions. At the tail end of MC Frontalot’s opening set they came on to help him with a few songs. After that was done, they simple stayed on to do their own set. No walk-off, no being fashionably late, just get on with it. Straight into banter, straight into having the crowd on their feet and jumping. From the first verse of Hump ‘em, Dump ‘em we sang like it was our last concert ever. And by “we”, I mean just about everyone.

And that’s what I was referring to when I wrote that they’ve avoided the curse of the hit single. Their other albums after the first didn’t perform well at all, but the people who turn up to the gigs know them as well as the first. Just as the last time, it was an all request show so we shouted, chanted and cheered for our favourite songs. No-one, not a soul, shouted for Teenage Dirtbag. Fair enough, we all know it’s coming, but not even those who were blind drunk destroyed the illusion.

When it did arrive as the last song of the set we belted it out like it was a decade ago and we were at the union with cheap, watered down lager, sticky floors and pool tables that weren’t level.

While looking for this video, I came across a version done by Girls Aloud. Somehow (gee, I wonder how), hearing the song being sung by a group of not unattractive women doesn’t quite have the same meaning of the nerdy original.

Guano Apes

I had never heard of the Guano Apes before this year but Pyro stuck a couple of tracks on my mp3 player when he was up for the Edinburgh Rat Race and they instantly became entrenched in my regular listening. Shame they’re not still around anymore but Sandra Nasic’s solo album is pretty good and the other members have a new band which I’ve been meaning to check out, once I negotiate amazon.de. I’ll be doing more of that in 2009 anyway to buy up spaghetti western DVDs from Koch Media.

But I digress.

Wheatus

Yes, the Teenage Dirtbag band. They’re great, shut up. Despite being a fan of the first album (and seeing them when they toured for it in 2002) I’d never bought any of their other stuff. I noticed they were on emusic so grabbed the remaining albums and indulged in the guilty pleasure of pop songs with swearing. Not only did I discover two new albums of theirs but I saw the band live as well. When I say “band”, I mean Brendan and a backing singer doing an acoustic tour. It was bloody brilliant. They came out, did one song, brought the house lights up a bit and then played requests for the next ninety minutes or so. I requested, and got, BMX Bandits and would have requested Anyway as well but couldn’t remember the title at the time. Epic fail.

Related to my listening habits of 2008 is my discovery of podcasts. Of course I’ve known about them for a long time but never really got into the habit of listening, but I’ve swallowed my disgust at the Apple-centric name and got stuck in. This all stemmed from Phill and Phil’s Perfect Ten which started in the autumn. From there I’ve gone on to Collings and Herrin, The Bugle, This American Life and Weasel Radio. All of these have long back catalogues that I’m slowly working my way through and they make perfect commute material if I’m not in the mood for reading.

TLA in particular deserves a post all to itself once I’ve discovered a few more episodes of note in their ten year back catalogue.