Good Friday with Hippy Van, Phish Tacko, and Captain Backfire at Bar Vida

Hippy Van open the evening with an extremely short set cut short due to technical difficulties (breaking their synth). The three songs they do play however sound fairly strong despite it being hard to tell weather the singer is singing or eating the microphone. Their only young and with a bit more experience (and luck) might turn out to be a decent listen.
Phish Tacko follow and the crowd starts to pick up as they cruse through a tight set made up of Indie covers and their own material, all of which is tight and well rehearsed. They know exactly where the other band members are going and move effortlessly through the songs whilst still giving enough to the crowd to get a reaction.
After a quick change around, not even enough time to buy a drink, Captain Backfire take to the stage. They kick off with the vocal intro to ‘Good Friday’, the crowd (mainly their friends) singing straight from the off, before launching into their ‘Aint No Sunshine/Jam’ intro and ‘Blue Room’. Its easy to see at this early stage the band are up for tonight and are feeding of the audience, the performance is at a level I haven’t seen from them for a long time. The John Mayor cover ‘Good Love’ followed with the audience joining in the choruses, and then straight into their latest song. This shows how far the band have come in the year they’ve been together, the music is tight and they play for the most part at least facing the audience, a massive achievement considering that this is the first time the whole band have played this together. Proceedings are then slowed briefly with ‘Adaptations’ which whilst slower doesn’t kill the atmosphere, whilst showing the writing skills of the band and lining them up for new cover (again unplayed as a whole band) J.K’s ‘Canned Heat’ this is again fairly tight and gets the crowd back to singing and dancing. Lead singer Joe then announces, ‘As it’s Good Friday… well go on then’, the band launch into the song of the same name and are rewarded with a small but highly energetic pit erupting in front of them. After prompting the first line they don’t need to or indeed bother to sing the choruses, they wouldn’t be heard for the audience singing back to them anyway. They end on ‘I’ll Be Waiting’ which again gets an excellent response singing and dancing from the audience. The last two songs being their best known gives the night ending it deserves. By the end of the song members of the audience are on stage congratulating the band.
The energy level kept up throughout the night is outstanding and its easy to see everyone has enjoyed themselves.
Well done to Joe and Ray who between them got an out standing sound from the skeleton of equipment available too them.
If you missed this you must be either deaf (in which case well let you off), or stupid.