The Blyth live music scene has been re vitalised in the last couple of years helped in a large amount by a certain Vince Race and his associates who have brought a good few now nationally recognised bands down to the quay and other venues when they were still up and coming bands.

The band I caught tonight was the brand new, just out of the box, GRANDFATHER BIRDS.
They are mostly local lads, and have recently formed as they drifted back to the area from college etc ( I am resisting the temptation to do jokes about flying south for the winter etc)
The band have the look of older students about them, a good collection of hand knitted jumpers and hoodys, tatty shirts and mad hats, and they sloped onto the stage and started to play in a sort of sideways slide, rather than full frontal attack.
‘up at cock dawn’ threw everybody sideways though, with a traditional rock/bluesy feel broken up with a vocal through a vocoder device that made it like a cool dalek singing for Steely Dan! sounds strange, and was, but also strangely hypnotic, and the band kept this blend of old style funky rock fusion mixed with a very new feel throughout their set, like the Eagles being ambushed by the Beta Band, with more tunes than the latter.

Vocoder switched off , Matt the singer demonstrated a proper in tune voice with real range.
Stu, the keyboards player, swopped to lead guitar and back again, with stops at a laptop, the bass player on a funky sounding 5 string held things all together with the aid of a traditional rhythm guitarist and jazz style drummer.
The excellent ‘columbia’ was probably the most ‘radio friendly’ song of the short set, and I am eager to hear it recorded, great lyrics, catchy chorus.

Yet another North East band doing original new music….Aah, I love bands me!

Grandfather Birds website

By Tony on December 5, 2009