Second week running to Club Academy in Manchester, last week Mugison, this week Frightened Rabbit. Mugison’s gig great on different levels – his music, his stories and humour and his rapport with the fairly small crowd.

Frightened Rabbit however had sold out the Club Academy and arriving at 9.15 it was pretty full in there. The crowd seemed much more mainstream than for Mugison, and I was slightly disconcerted to be surrounded by a quite straight looking uni crowd. Is this what my music taste had come to I wondered, or were Frightened Rabbit a bit different as I’d thought when I listened to them.

They came to my attention when I saw they were from Selkirk. Birthplace of one my relatives, Selkirk has a saying: ‘A day out of Selkirk is a day wasted’. It is a small self contained town on the Scottish Borders, which doesn’t seem at first glance to have much need for more glamourous activities that may be found in the cities to the North and the wider world.

Frightened Rabbit came on to what came close to a punk noise … quite unexpected and a little exciting … their singer seemed pretty uncomfortable with the rock star role, and there was quite a bit of ‘turn my instrument/mic up please’ from various members of the band – which is actually probably quite a good thing – they really cared about the music, and it wasn’t just an image thing for them. They had maybe 5 top tracks that really made them stand out, and were playing some new tracks from the album just released.

I had a couple of early qualms thinking of comparisons … U2 … Simple Minds … but these were unfounded – they were kind of different and in the end I couldn’t think of any bands that were closely like – the singers slightly disfunctional emotive approach – a little shy maybe and probably quite honest – his voice was pretty different and it was a good gig. One of the best for them they said too – they are a band that are on the verge of going huge … they just need the songs to match up to their last album – but maybe they’d be happier the way they are …