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Somebody Loves You Sometimes Love Is A Dangerous Thing Libertine Before She Was Gone There Goes My Inspiration Cliché This Must Be Love Rain New (untitled )song Don't Hold Me Back Sacrifice
(Part of) Bully
The Night and Day Café reminded a bit of The Bitter End at least size-wise and the fact that there was a bar along the left hand wall. The stage here was at the far end and was badly lit. This venue mainly hosts heavy rock bands and I’m surprised that they can get 250 people in there as it was comfortable with the 50 or so there seated last night. Kasim just wandered onto the stage (unannounced) at just gone 11.00pm and his sound check consisted of basically just playing a few chords! I have a friend who always stands by the sound-desk at concerts so he can hear the best sound. I don’t know if it’s because I sat there tonight (my recording came out brilliantly!) but the one thing that struck me about the evening was how great Kasim’s voice sounded! It’s rare for him to have a bad night vocally but tonight was probably the best I’ve heard him sound in all the solo gigs of his I’ve seen! This was even more surprising considering he’d played Meat Loaf gigs on the previous two evenings. My only gripe about the gig (other than Manchester being so far away from London when you have work the next day!) is that I thought he played far too many covers and not enough songs from Quid Pro Quo. Really he only sang Before She Was Gone and Sacrifice from the album (plus I suppose you could include DHMB and the new song) but we had covers by Nik Kershaw, Todd Rundgren, Sugarbomb, Utopia and Jose Feliciano plus a couple of Kasim’s old songs instead of his new music. Kasim’s set started with Nik Kershaw’s Somebody Loves You which he’s only sung once before on stage (at Summerfest last year which was his last solo gig). Tonight I was struck by how clearly Kasim pronounces all his words - even if you didn’t know the song, you could understand every single word! After Somebody Loves You Kasim went straight into Sometimes Love Is A Dangerous Thing. The one good thing about this song is that it gave Kasim a chance to joke about not having a band playing with him at the instrumental part ("I left my band in London"!). One of the things that most fans say that they enjoy about Kasim’s solo gigs is his honesty on stage. Tonight he admitted about how nervous he was and said that he had played last night to about 16,000 or 17,000 people (with Meat Loaf) but that playing to the 50 or so people who were here tonight was much more nerve-racking! Kasim next gave a faultless performance of Utopia’s Libertine before he finally sang a song from Quid Pro Quo - Before She Was Gone. Kasim next played tribute to both Meat Loaf and Todd Rundgren as he mentioned his thanks to Meat Loaf for allowing him to open his previous tour by playing a solo set and said that it was rare for an artist to allow members of his band to do that. Kasim’s "homage" to Todd was Utopia’s There Goes My Inspiration and Kasim’s great version of Cliché. Before he sang Cliché Kasim said about what a great songwriter Todd is and after the song he again revelled in the fact that Todd wrote a song with the word vivisect in it! Next Kasim sang This Must Be Love (from his 1982 album Kasim) with that amazing part where he plays the notes going up the neck of his guitar. Cover song #5 was next which was the Jose Feliciano song Rain from his 1997 album Light My Fire. There has been quite a lot of rain in the last couple of days here (it lashed down most of the way on my journey up here) but Kasim changed the last few lines of the song (his changes are in italics):
Listen to the pouring rain
Let it rain all night long,
Listen to the falling rain,
It's raining,
Listen to the falling rain,
Listen to it fall Kasim next mentioned that Quid Pro Quo has been “picked up” by Sanctuary Records and that there will be two new tracks on it. He said about recording one of the new tracks in London and that he had been working on the other track for the past week or so. It isn’t finished yet ("it’s about 91.299% complete"!) but he decided to sing it anyway! He had the words written out on a sheet of paper which he balanced on his lap and had to put his glasses on to read them (which had been on top of his head)! Kasim said that he didn't even have a name for his new song yet! I won’t go into too much detail about the song (as I hope people buy the new version of Quid Pro Quo when it’s available in the stores) but it starts with the line "Could you be any more self-righteous?" and the chorus starts with "All you have is maybe, if and might and all you need remains just out of sight". The song received a massive round of applause and then Kasim went straight into Don’t Hold Me Back. Next we had Sacrifice with a longer intro than usual. Unfortunately though he didn’t play that muted guitar strings part at the end that I like so much (I even miss that on the album version now!). It was then supposed to be the end of Kasim’s set (he was only scheduled to play 40 minutes but he played for about 55) but there was no way the people were going to let him off without an encore! He was trying to decide whether to sing another Utopia song but someone shouted out for yet another cover - Sugarbomb’s Bully. Kasim said that he wasn’t too sure of that song as he hadn’t rehearsed it but (sportingly) decided that if he screwed it up that he would sing another song afterwards but that if he sang it perfectly that we wouldn’t get another song! Thankfully he did forget the words after the first chorus so he opted to sing Utopia’s One World too! The problem was that he couldn’t remember how that song started so he began by singing the chorus before going into the “I see faces I know” line! He then asked someone in the audience to shout out the first line "All I need is the first line and then I’m cool"! He then sang a perfect performance of the song which was only spoilt for me slightly by the fact that very few people in the audience knew when to clap in it! We also had the line "From London to Manchester" in the song! As it was almost midnight by then it was time for Kasim to leave the stage and make the time to talk and sign things for everybody that wanted to meet him! So now Kasim is a fully-fledged international solo artist with his first (of many I hope!) solo gig outside the US! And I can’t stress how brilliant his voice was tonight!
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