 | | The Aliens |
As the crowd warmed up to She’s The One For Me - arguably the Beta Band’s best track - its writers quietly slipped through the venue unnoticed. It’s a neat Jedi trick and one that highlights the underground nature of the musicians that were once described as the new Stone Roses (long before Kasabian). The Aliens, like it or not, will always be compared with their former incarnation and I’m not about to set a new trend. They are the Beta Band rebranded but that is, in no way, a bad thing. It was a madcap performance from the Scottish outfit, with singer and guitarist Gordon Anderson (aka Lone Pigeon) crowd-surfing, freaky dancing, rapping, regaling the audience with jokes in a deep south American drawl, doing his best maniacal back-to-the-crowd Jim Morrison impressions, and putting in some sterling axemanship. The songs, dubbed ‘Music in the Key of Fife’, were along similar lines to the Beta Band’s Three EPs, rather than their later stuff - more tuneful than warped, but nonetheless acid-tinged. The singles Happy Song and Robot Man went down a storm, the former raising a smile on even the most dour Mancunian, while the latter borrowed from the baggy beats of Madchester and even included a bit of audience participation, just in time for the panto season. Fittingly, the Aliens encores didn’t include predictable rehashes of Beta Band favourites. Instead, they finished to the notes of Close Encounters, confirming that the Aliens have well and truly landed. | 
