Down in the Dumps

I saw the long awaited Robert Plant tour on Saturday in Liverpool. Plant was, as ever, absolutely superb. Like a good wine he seems to improve with age and, as much as I enjoyed his latest album, it really doesn’t do justice to his astonishing vocal range. I just wish I could have said the same of the venue which he performed at.

Now I have seen Robert Plant perform four times now and all of the venues I have seen him play at could have charitably been described as “having seen better days”. I don’t necessarily regard that as a bad thing as it enables a major artist to play intimate venues at a reasonable cost rather than giant stadium tours with extortionate costs and giant screens to compensate for the fact that the artist cannot be seen due to the curvature of the Earth. I like the fact that Plant plays the sort of small venues that no other major artists will play. Maybe his next tour should be called the “Shitholes of Britain” tour.

The problem with the venue in Liverpool was much more down to the basic organisation. The Olympia is attached to an old ballroom called “The Grafton” and when explaining its location to local taxi drivers seems to be met with bemusement that it must have been demolished years ago. It’s still there and we made sure that we arrived in good time – particularly as there was a football match taking place just up the road. For some reason we were waiting for an hour outside in the cold before we managed to get in and, in the process, missed half of Seth Lakeman’s support act which I had been looking forward to as an added bonus. I had hoped that someone would show us to our seats but it was supposedly unreserved seating. At least it was until four songs into Plant’s set when we were asked to move as the seats we were in were reserved.

The problem with this is that we had bought seated tickets and looking around it quickly transpired that several of these seats were actually broken. After remonstrating with one of the staff we were moved to a table with seats whereby I could just see the stage but which my friend couldn’t. As he said, he may as well have gone home and put on an old Led Zeppelin album. The problem overall seems to be with the management of the venue – there were actually plenty of staff around and those that I spoke to were polite and as helpful as they could be but there is only so much that they can do to combat poor management.

What partially made up for the night is that the performance was truly breath-taking with a mix of songs from Plant’s last two albums with a smattering of others from recent years and a good dollop of the first four Led Zeppelin albums plus In The Light which I had never heard live before. It’s just a pity that the venue couldn’t live up to his high standards. Ironically, it was a toss-up between this venue or the Armadillo in Glasgow, the auditorium that vaguely resembles Sydney Opera House, which is a genuinely first class venue. Maybe I shouldn’t always go down to the dumps.