Monday night saw us heading down the road to "America's Longest Continually Running Rock Club", otherwise known as the Newport. Finally we were getting around to seeing Real Estate. Most recently, snow had meant a trip to Cleveland earlier in the year was abandoned. Prior to this, their two Bristol appearances coincided with us either being in Columbus, or being out of town at a festival. Tickets to this CD101 (102.5) show were a bargain $5. Now and again the radio station like to put on "Low Dough Shows" and luckily for us this was one. It was also an all ages show, which meant that those of us either in or close to our thirties were struggling to drag the average age up.
The hall is pretty large and has the ability to hold around 1700 people. It also holds a Mike's Late Night Slice pizza counter, which has to be a welcome addition to any gig venue. We made it pretty early and were able to spend a bit of time spotting the bits of the ceiling that weren't peeling off. Melbourne, Australia's Twerps opened the show and after Julia's mic had been turned on they sounded good with their slightly slacker, Go Betweens/ Feelies jangle pop. They seemed really made up to have had the chance to tour with Real Estate and they were pretty amazed by the size (about half full) of the crowd.
An hour or so later Real Estate came on to what seemed to be a pretty full crowd of maybe about 1500, judging by a few spaces here and there. They seemed pretty taken aback, having mostly played venues of 3-400 capacity on the tour so far. Throughout the set they played pretty much all of last year's "Days" Long player and kept me more than happy by playing both "Fake Blues" and "Beachcomber" from their Self-Titled 2009 album. After about an hour as the smell of pot and the 18 year old screams got a bit more enveloping, the set came to an end. There wasn't much chance of them getting away with not coming back and when they did they brought the Twerps with them. It was all pretty un-rehearsed but they managed to all plug in and have a good go at covering the Clean's "Anything Could Happen". It was a super fun end to a great show, good job to Promoswest and CD101 for getting so many people in at $5 each.
Without my $2 bus fare home, we missed any potential bus and took on the pouring rain. Just as it looked like it might be easing off, we took the opportunity, as you can living here, to buy ice cream at 10:45pm. Five minutes later, the rain got heavier and between the dickhead drivers of Columbus and a lack of drainage on High St, we were pretty soaked. I wasn't too bothered.
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