To kick things off I think it’s important to give a bit of an insight into the personal history of Prose frontman, Mike Murray. A young man from Stretford, Manchester, who should be seen as an inspiration and a young man who talks a great deal of sense.

For a time Murray was homeless, a situation occurring due to a number of linked events, those which eventually led to the repossession of his family’s home. An action which in turn introduced a difficult period on the streets. Though if this is just one good reason to take the opportunity to listen to this supremely positive and uplifting track, which I recommend you do, another is its enticing blend of sweet-as-honey acoustic guitar, intelligent spoken-word – the story Murray tells of his life and its more turbulent moments is very compelling – and its sugar-free, frank and arresting lyrics. On this note I was particularly taken with Murray’s barbed reference to his father in the lines:

“I think crackhead would be the thing to use, as a descriptive tool within a witness interview…”

As well as this the track builds throughout, evolving around a catchy chorus which immediately had me thinking of London rapper and spoken-word artist, Just Jack. So, I suggest you check ‘All Too Familiar’ out. It has a naturally addictive quality, one which makes the listener want to listen again and again. It’s also been released on the back of Prose recent single ‘Run With Faith’, a track with an accompanying video which saw the band collaborate with Big Issue and homeless individuals attempting to carve out a life for themselves within northern towns.

With a debut album expected later this year, you can, in the meantime, catch Prose on tour. On Sunday, August 28th, they perform at the Goose Green Festival, Cheshire. Prior to this they will be progressively working their way back up the country, playing dates in Brighton, Reading, Hull, Leicester and Birmingham from Saturday, 21st May.

‘All Too Familiar’ is available on iTunes and Spotify

The Ritz must be a bleak place for an opening band. When The 99 Degree come on there is virtually no-one in the vast space in front of the stage. This doesn’t seem to faze them that much as they launch into their opening song.

Their sound is hard to describe – my notes taken as they played show a certain amount of indecision on my part as to their sound. Initially I had them pegged as almost psycho-billy sounding – it was all chanted shouty vocals and tribal drumming. Later in their set I describe them as sounding like the Cramps but without the fuzz and finally sounding like they were influenced by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. This is no bad thing I don’t like bands to sound the same song after song and there’s a feel to their songs that makes it hang together.

As their set goes on the space starts to fill up and this seems to give them some confidence and for me they started to sound a whole lot better.

My highlights were two of the later songs. ‘Roll Roll Roll’ is the song that sounded like it had been influenced by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, the vocals had that same sound as SAHB’s cover of ‘Next’. And ‘Dead or Alive’ which at the time I described as sounding like ‘Kashmir’ as played by The Cramps.

I liked The 99 Degree a lot and I’d like to see them again in a packed venue – with a band like them I think you need it sweaty and heaving.

Cabbage, oh quite wonderful Cabbage. These guys put on a performance that is frankly awesome. Their sound is hard to place, their own website describes them as ‘neo post-punk’ – whatever that means – but to me it sounds like they’ve they’ve absorbed quite a lot of my record collection and mixed it into something brilliant. Yes there’s post-punk, but there’s also mutant surf, mutant psych garage and even something that sounds like a blues influenced 80s AOR track – not that they’d thank me for that. And joyfully for me there is one song that sounds like they’ve been listening to one of my favourite bands Cardiacs.

Visually what you’ve got is a wild haired bass player who does a lot of head banging, a guitar playing singer and a guy that sings (although later in the set he changes to playing guitar and singing and the guitarist who sings just sings – if you understand that). There are also another guitarist and a drummer but they don’t seem to be the visual focus of their stage performance, at least to me.

The guy who just sings is wearing what I can only describe as the finest example of a Christmas jumper I’ve seen in a long time and what appears to be a pair of leisure slacks. For a guy whose role is to sing and throw himself around the stage, on the stage and off the stage this seems a strange choice. It isn’t long before first the jumper and then his t-shirt comes off.

There’s lots of people who’ve clearly just come to see Cabbage (and probably are not interested in The Fall all that much), and there’s a crush down at the front.

The key things about the band is that they can actually play and the songs are really catchy. Not knowing any of the songs I just let it wash over me, really really enjoying the experience. The song highlight for me was the aforementioned 80s AOR sounding track ‘Tell Me Lies About Manchester’.

Cabbage are wonderful, I recommend catching them as soon as possible.

I last saw The Fall when Brix Smith (now Smith-Start) was in the band in the 80s, I’m guessing this was around 84, 85 or 86, although I can’t remember where I saw them. I just never got around to seeing them again. So it was with a fair amount of excitement that I had made this trip to see them.

A Fall gig is always an event and that was certainly how many of the audience were treating it. There was lots of taking of pictures of each other, I’m guessing so they could say “I was there”. You also just don’t know what is going to be played or how Mark E Smith is going to be on stage.

So we waited, we waited for just that bit too long, and then the band appeared. Not Mark initially just the musicians. They started to play something which was quite repetitious – to be honest all of the songs had repetitious music. At this point I have to say that the band are good, they sounded very good.

Mark came on and started ‘singing’ (we all know he doesn’t quite sing but I’m going to say sing for the purpose of the review). I’m not sure anyone could hear what he was singing or work out what song it was. I know there were songs as the music stopped and started again – sounding different – several times during the set. Somebody actually asked me if I knew what song they were playing about halfway through the set, I said I had no idea and nor did anyone else standing near us.

He used all of the microphones on stage to sing into during the songs, and frequently used two together – not that this made the words any clearer. At first I thought this was because there were problems with the sound and he was just trying to find a mic that worked properly but then I realised it was part of the performance. During the bits when he wasn’t singing he stalked the stage fiddling with amps and occasionally using a small keyboard to add random sounding sounds.

At least some of the audience seemed to be enjoying it, there was quite a scrum in front of the stage. However, for me, the level of enjoyment seemed to diminish the further away from the stage you got. Certainly the large group of Cabbage fans I was standing by during most of The Fall’s performance seemed somewhat slightly confused by the whole thing. Probably not Fall fans of the future I’d guess.

We know of course that Mark E Smith is never going to pander to the concept of ‘a band performance’ or ‘audience expectations’ but this is a performance. It’s a performance based on not performing. An anti-performance. Sadly, after a 30 year gap, it wasn’t a performance I enjoyed.

There’s no doubt about it, Money frontman and lyricist Jamie Lee is a genius. How good he is as a musician only time will tell.

“I see myself as a writer rather than a musician,” he said recently. “It’s frustrating to be judged on stuff I’m creating almost as an infant. That’s why I need to become a better musician, so I can incorporate the love I have for words into the music in a more transparent way.”

This doesn’t mean that the Manchester band’s first two albums aren’t good. In fact, in my opinion, ‘The Shadow of Heaven’, released in 2013, is an excellent record, while ‘Suicide Songs’, released last January, is a minor masterpiece, for all its flaws. Not bad for a band that formed just five years ago.

Lee’s songs belong in a ballpark that includes Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. They are, that is, the songs of a mystic.

Where these artists are concerned, mysticism is not some airy-fairy spiritual longing, steps on a hippy trail, but a philosophy that seeks reality by puncturing the illusions that make up the human condition. Bob Dylan, for instance, explained his vocation, quoting the writer Henry Miller, as “The role of an artist is to inoculate the world with disillusionment.”

This explains the title of Money’s new album, ‘Suicide Songs’, which amounts to one artist’s musical log on attempting to consign said-illusions to the grave. But deadly serious as the album’s intentions undoubtedly are, Jamie Lee in person could hardly try harder to be a bit of a lad, a tale in itself on the difference between perception and reality.

A recovering alcoholic who recently returned to his native London to escape the temptations of a rock star’s residence in his adopted city, he vowed to stay away. “If I decide that I want to drink myself to death then maybe I’ll go back,” he was quoted.

But come back he did, for this rearranged ‘Suicide Songs’ promotional gig, at any rate. And the first sight we have of Jamie is of a diminutive, dishevelled figure appearing like a ghost out of the darkness on stage clutching several bottles of beer. Never have I seen anyone who reminded me more of the genial alcoholic poet Dylan Thomas. “Are you smashed, Jamie?” someone shouts as our hero introduces a new song, ‘Lonely London Lady’, about a drug addict down on her luck.

Blimey, it takes some guts to make your comeback solo with nothing but an acoustic guitar and not even any stage lights! But Jamie Lee is some charismatic performer, a beacon in the darkness.

We were given credible proof of that star appeal with the next song, ‘You Look Like a Sad Painting on Both Sides of the Sky’. This was with the full band, Charlie Cocksedge on piano and guitar, Billy Byron on drums, new recruit Nick Delap on bass guitar, and a violinist and cellist to provide extra lyricism.

Now we knew what we were in for. Perhaps ‘Suicide Songs’ doesn’t always deliver on its ambitious aims, but not a little of that shortfall can be made up in live performance. Lee might play the fool sometimes, but he is serious about his music.

We were then offered an insight into how he saw his comeback when we were told that the next song up brought back memories of Manchester. This was ‘Hopeless World’: “Please don’t mistake me for someone I am not…”

One of the stand-out tracks from the new album followed. If human illusions or dreams are false lights in relation to the true light of reality, then disillusionment amounts to extinguishing those lights. “Someone take these dreams away/That point me to another day/A duel of personalities/That stretch all true realities,” wrote Ian Curtis in Joy Division’s Dead Souls. ‘I’ll Be the Night’ is a song that offers to do just that. Pretentious, perhaps, as Lee admits some of his work might be, but this tune is still almightily powerful in performance.

Crowd-favourite ‘Bluebell Fields’ from Money’s first album followed. This blissful song offers a child’s view of heaven.

‘Night Came’ and ‘Suicide Song’ from the new album came next, both benefitting from being rather more concise than Jamie’s wordier statements. “Night came/very fast/as if/it had fallen over/drunk” begins the first. “I know some of us need it/I know some of us need/to turn the light into dark” warns the second.

The outstanding tune from ‘Suicide Songs’, ‘All My Life’, also provided the highlight of the show. An ethereal echo of The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’, which also bears comparison with the soaring intensity of Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This’, the lyric is perhaps best compared to Van Morrison’s ‘Cleaning Windows’. This witty ditty about Van’s early days as a window cleaner in Belfast is the man’s take on poet William Blake’s endlessly-quoted line: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Van has: “What’s my line/I’m happy cleaning windows/Take my time/I’ll see you when my love grows.”

‘In All My Life’, Jamie Lee imagines a return to the Garden of Eden with all illusions wiped away: “I will meet you in the garden/that will grow when we are gone.”

Conscious of his return to Manchester, Jamie then came down into the audience to be mobbed while singing ‘Letter to Yesterday’ from Money’s first album.

Back on stage, ‘A Cocaine Christmas and an Alcoholic’s New Year’ bottomed out the gig: “bleary eyed and wasted/I wake up to an unlikely dawn.”

The main course over, a light encore of ‘Goodnight London’ from the first album, Jamie Lee on piano with strings accompaniment, brought the show to an end.

Money, who collaborate on much of the music, if not the lyrics, might sometimes be a little rough around the edges, but they are the real thing. I, for one, can hardly wait to see what happens next.

Moose Blood, Emo/Pop Punk band, from Kent showed just how far they’ve come in their musical career since they first formed in 2012. The sold out gig at Brudenell Social Club highlighted their enthusiasm for music and how far they’ve pushed themselves since just a year ago when they played to a room of little more than 50 fans at Temple of Boom, Leeds.

The crowd at Brudenell varied between 14 years up to mid-twenties with diehard fans that’d been there since the beginning along with new fans who had been listening to their new single ‘Honey’ nonstop since it aired on Radio one on the 17th April. With everyone looking to draw a different experience from the gig and growing impatient for Moose Blood’s arrival it seemed the momentum was going to be hard to gather from everyone in the venue.

The Winter Passing entered the stage as the second support act to take on the task of engaging the crowd and warming up their vocals ready for the main set. Four piece ‘indie pop whatever’ band, as they describe themselves, formed in 2012 in their hometown Dublin and have graced England with their presence several times over the years. They’ve performed with bands such as The Front Bottoms and Gnarwolves, which probably explains why their energy and ability to warm up this similar type of crowd came naturally to them.

Lead singer Kate stood strong amidst her three male band members with a unique style and strong vocals that carried effortlessly around the venue. It was a refreshing twist to hear female vocals over the usually overpowering instruments that accompany pop punk and indie bands. During the set however the vocals did get lost in the music at points. With the perfect hair to swish wildly around the stage and a talented group on the instrumentals it would have been nice if the vocals were louder to assert the bands talent fully.

Despite The Winter Passing’s efforts the crowd remained still and staring onwards, past the support, past the stage and into the distance, longing for Moose Blood.

After what seemed an eternity Moose Blood gathered on stage and the crowd’s excitement that had been building for the past two hours finally erupted in cheers and applause. As if the crowd wasn’t excited enough Moose Blood opened with one of their most popular singles ‘Swim Down’. Instantly every member of the audience; young or old, new fan or not were enjoying themselves and the confidence from the band radiated from the stage fuelling the enjoyment even more so.

Video © Alex Fisher 

Their new song ‘Honey’ made an appearance at a safe place near the start of the gig but if the band were worried about a quiet reception they had no reason to be. The single will feature on their new album ‘Blush’ which is due out in August 2016. If the rest of the album follows the style of Honey it will make for enjoyable and easy listening.

‘Honey’ has an old school pop punk feel to it with undertones of 21st century satire blended with the optimistic upbeat nature of 90’s pop. It’s the type of song that makes you want to mindlessly sing the lyrics and tap along in time whilst simultaneously making your brain find a way to relate every single lyric to an event in your life and sing it with all the emotion you can muster.

The gig ended in the way you’d want any small venue ‘emo’ gig to end; with numerous people jumping on stage and hurtling yourself backwards into a crowd of people hoping that someone will catch them. It’s bands like Moose Blood that keep the excitement of live music alive, catering to their whole crowd and enjoying the experience with you.