The Fun Lovin' Criminals
Friday 21st December 2001
The Point
Dublin
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Ian rang up on Tuesday with an offer of two free tickets to see the Fun Lovin' Criminals play The Point. The Fun Lovin' Criminals are a band of reasonable stature, so I accepted the tickets, rang Dr. J, and waited for Friday.
The Friday in question was the last working day of 2001, which meant that Dr. J and I were both completely knackered by showtime. We went to the Point, but agreed that we would only stay as long as our MTV attention span allowed us.
Support was once again atrocious. Pop has surely killed the decent support act. It was one guy singing (albeit quite professionally) along with a regular tape recorder. Somehow it would be nice to expect just a little bit more...
The FLC's then came on. Huey was accompanied by two half naked ladies (physique a la faux Baywatch) that had accompanied the MC just moments before. Huey, however, looked better sporting these girls, and his Santa Claus outfit made the sight nice and cooky. Needless to say the rest of the band (ie, the other two Criminals) were also dressed in the guise of Mr. Claus.
Musically we thought the Criminals sounded pretty good. In fact, Huey's guitar playing sounded quite excellent, and the drums and keyboards/bass did their thing quite satisfactorily. The Point sound people, however, decided it was best to run the rig as loud as possible, which was too loud (the bass was particularly annoying). We had to move out of the way of the main stack as it was biting a hole in my head (and this was with earplugs already in). Anybody who stayed there would have suffered some form of permanent damage - I'm not kidding.
We also noticed that there were more instruments playing that we could see. We figured that they were probably playing along to a tape, which was certainly alright by us. Either that or there were other musicians hidden off-stage.
In the end we only stayed for about half an hour of the main set, then decided to wander off. Overall they were a nice band, but we were a little bit too knackered to handle a full length gig.
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