The Pigeon Detectives - Old Fire House, Bournemouth - 08/04/11
With a new album out and now appearing on a sold out tour, I caught up with front-man Matt Bowman to see how he was coping with the next step by The Pigeon Detectives. And by the looks of him he was coping extremely well away from stress, “We took our time with this new record, with it being released on our own label we didn’t have much pressure for things like a single. There was no one cracking the whip!”
Losing themselves after constant touring with the release of quite a quick sins session of their first two albums, nothing seemed to be lost tonight within their live show. Back to their energetic and straight up rock ‘n’ roll performance, his announcing ‘Hello Portsmouth’ didn’t go down too bad with the Bournemouth crowd. The cheeky northern lads kicked it all off with the crowd pleaser ‘I’m not going to take this.’, whereby Matt’s confidence was so much greater than expected after he had said “I get really nervous before I go on stage, even to the point where I am sick. I do everything to take my mind off it, sleep, anything. As soon as I’m up there all I think is that I only have an hour left to go.”
Not only conquering the UK with their impressive live show and fun catchy pop songs, these five lads have been trying it abroad and in the US as well. “We see it as a challenge and try to win new fans over. They could just be watching you on a whim so we have to win them over with our live shows. We’re a good live band!”
With the new album ‘Up, Guards and at ‘em’ out soon, the set was of course filled with a couple of them. These went down well with the majority of the crowd and you could only see the relief on the band member’s faces that the fans enjoyed them. “We wrote 40 songs for the new album and had to get them down to 10. We just wrote what we thought that was missing from our record collection, admittedly it is not as instant as our other records but we learnt with this record about other ways in making music. It will take a couple of listens to get into but it will definitely keep you coming back to it.”
“Our new single [Done in Secret] isn’t probably the best song to show what the new album entails. It’s a good song to show the transition from album 2 to 3 and it seemed the perfect song for the first single.” This seemed to be an apt quote to sum up the song’s performance tonight, a great 3 minutes to keep the old fans happy and gain new ones as well. With its edgy clean guitars, an intro riff that you certainly will not forget, and of course a chorus to match their library of their catchy delights. It would seem hard for any fan to resist picking up the new album.
Perhaps the main thing to focus on tonight is the energy of Bowman and his crowd participation, with this being the third time I have seen the band I cannot say that I have ever seen them unenthusiastic about what they and Matt himself are doing. Swinging the microphone about and getting involved with the crowd, he certainly is a front man above the rest. “I learnt a lot about how to deal with a crowd from one of our first tours with Kaiser Chiefs, Ricky is certainly a master at his art, he taught me a lot.”
Finishing the night with the crowd sing-a-long that is ‘I’m not Sorry’, it amazed me how quick the hour and bit went. With such an extraordinary live act, it seemed annoying that it had to end. This was only the start of it for the lads from Leeds, “We’re doing loads of small festivals this summer as well as the usual Reading and Leeds. We’re also going around Europe and USA and fingers crossed South America, we’ve never been but always wanted to go. We’re also writing new songs for a new album as we want to get it out sharp-ish, we’re tired of journalists saying about how much of a big gap it has been since the last album.” Oops, hope it wasn’t something I said Matt…