Are Midlake adult-oriented? A few minutes into their set and I’m still at the bar, still wearing my jacket and scarf, as M. and I are late arriving for the sold-out show. The bartenders have never heard of Midlake, and the youngish one serving us is surprised they’re so popular yet unknown to her. ‘I’ve got to look them up,’ she tells a co-worker, in an over-cheerful manner. Hunh. Having gotten our drinks, we can hear the chorus of ‘Winter Dies’, the second track off of Midlake’s third and latest album, kicking in as we hand over our tickets and enter the 800-capacity Academy 2.

 

Inside, there’s barely breathing room and easily more than 800 people. Standing near the only entrance is always a mistake at such a time as people shuffle in and out, but there’s nowhere else to move, so that we are jostled constantly and can’t see a damn thing for the first ten minutes of the show. Which wouldn’t be so much of a problem, really, if we hadn’t come to see Midlake. Instead, what we’re left with for the opening of the set is a volume of depth rather than any visual sensations, discovering, while watching the backs of people’s bobbing heads and shoulders, what four guitarists sound like: four guitarists and a flautist. And the sound is pretty good. Fulsome and harmonious, in a way recordings can’t express. The new album, The Courage of Others, is a more sombre affair than its predecessors, but live that doesn’t matter so much, as each song fills the room with new layers of sounds. For a band who began trying to replicate the Radiohead records they loved, and who never did sound very much like that group, this is an altogether other experience. More recent comparisons in the music press say Neil Young, but I don’t hear it, except maybe in the plaintive melodies sung by Tim Smith (with band members contributing harmonies).

 

About four songs in, when the bobbing heads tire maybe and the band settles in, we find we can see, and there on-stage are seven adult men working away, bearded and long-haired for the most part. And it’s then, too, that we can see the flautist – and that Smith pulls out his own flute and there are actually two flautists on-stage. We’re far away from any free-wheelin’ Jethro Tull experience – and to who else can I draw a comparison at such a moment? – and are hearing instead full-on arrangements for three guitars, two flutes, bass and drums. And it’s about here it occurs to me: maybe this isn’t for everybody, even in an overpacked, sold-out room of 800 people. Midlake is a big sound, grand and professional—not slick but solid (Smith blew some lyrics halfway through a song early in the set). So that a bit later when Smith joked about the band’s age, grey hair and growing potbellies, one of the guitarists returned with ‘No, Tim, we’re 22. You don’t get to be on the cover of the NME or Spin if you’re over 30’.

 

A band full of over 30s for the over 30s, then, and a night out for both at Academy 2 –while next door at Academy 3, poor Fionn Regan picked up the turned-away, and at Academy 1 the teenage girls queued early for something or someone called Chipmunk. Set highlights included two tracks from Midlake’s 2006 album, The Trials of Van Occupanther, ‘Bandits’ and near-set-closer ‘Head Home’, during which drummer McKenzie Smith chugged along steady as a steam train across the Texas plain.

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