Festival: The Gods 2003

Artist: Pride  

Venue: Penningtons, Bradford

Date:  24 May 2003 

The band took to the stage at 5.45 pm which was just about right for most people to get in the mood. We’d all been fed and watered and were ready to see what this years Gods festival had in store for us.

Pride are one of those bands who seem to burst onto the scene out of nowhere and cause such a flurry of excitement when they do. Although we hadn’t heard of them before tonight, there were plenty that had and they were frothing at the mouth to see the band perform. It comes as no surprise after watching their performance to find out they are being billed as the biggest thing to hit the British melodic rock scene in a long time.

Right from their opening song they seemed to gel with the crowd and gave us just what we needed to perk us up and put us in the mood. The song was upbeat and quite catchy without being too typically melodic. The lead singer’s voice sounded not a million miles away from early Danny Vaughn when he was riding high on the wings of his then band Tyketto.

Although still largely an unknown quantity to most of the people here today, the band certainly gave it there all and then some. Crackling with enthusiasm and charisma they roamed the stage with such ease and comfort that many higher up the list found hard to contend with.

They played like seasoned pro’s and they certainly looked like they were enjoying every minute of it. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a full band with so much well kept hair! Wow, talk about looking the part.

The general feeling amongst the punters after the set was that they were well impressed with what they had seen. Indeed we saw one or two quickly scribble down the dates of their tour the following month so they could check them out again. Such a highly polished and impressive performance for a band so low on the bill today. 

The only low point of the performance was something that was totally out of the bands hands, and that was the volume level. My goodness what were they trying to do to us all on Saturday? Deafen us for good? This seemed to be a problem with most of the bands on the bill on Saturday and although as rockers we usually like to hear our music loud, this was just way too loud all together. Please show a bit more moderation so we can enjoy the music without the blood squirting out our eardrums!

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