LIVE REVIEW: Bowling For Soup @ Rock City, Nottingham
This is the return of the UK Get Happy Tour, the first since 2007, and BOWLING FOR SOUP will be joined by ARMY OF FRESHMEN who were at the last Get Happy Tour over a decade ago. BOWLING FOR SOUP also announced they’d be performing the entirety of their breakthrough album Drunk Enough To Dance. We hit up the show at Rock City in Nottingham to see if ten years later, the party would still be raging strong.
The Get Happy Tour once again opens with ARMY OF FRESHMAN taking the stage, this time celebrating their 20th anniversary. Full of energy, they bounce and jump their way through the set, their enthusiasm is infectious, a fantastic first support band and their pop-punk vibe complements BOWLING FOR SOUP. Starting the evening as it means to go on, the party atmosphere is quickly established and the audience are singing and dancing along. Frontman Chris Jay clearly enjoys being on the stage, and interacting with the crowd, joking between songs, regularly jumping onto the front barrier to high-five fans, even offering them the microphone to sing along. A full power performance that, even if you’ve never heard of the ARMY OF FRESHMAN before, it would be hard not to enjoy or tap your foot along to the beat. In celebration of twenty years, they played their 2006 album, Under The Rader, in full.
Rating: 8/10
Where can you go from there? Well to the crime-fighting musical superheroes THE AQUABATS! who are complete with costumes and masks of course! LED screens on the back of the stage opened the set with a cartoon style introduction, including photos of each band member. If you’re unaware of the THE AQUABATS! they may be a bit of a surprise, but the humorous pop-punk group quickly win over the crowd with their scheme to entertain and amuse. Their weapons of choice are inflatables, of every variety, accompanying their set Shark fighter saw inflatable sharks thrown into the crowd and two sharks appear on stage to fight the band. THE AQUABATS! fought bravely and ultimately come out victorious. Pizza Day!, Burger Rain, and Pool Party all had accompanying inflatables.
They’ve clearly done their research on the local town’s rivalries, as they work some digs at the neighbouring town Derby, even bringing on a local heavyweight boxer to representing Derby comes on stage to fight and lose to our superheroes. It’s a nice touch to the show, and adds to the jokey nature of the evening. THE AQUABATS! have taken a standard gig and added conventions from society to create a comedy act, which even extended to “a word from our sponsor” and an advertisement for Little Brother Doll shown on the screen behind stage half way through the set. Great band to play alongside BOWLING FOR SOUP.
Rating: 8/10
With over twenty years under their belt, BOWLING FOR SOUP need little introduction. The crowded room is a clear indication of their popularity, and passionate sing-along’s which even included the reverb on Girls All The Bad Girls Want. The return of the Get Happy Tour also contained a full performance of Drunk Enough To Dance, including fan favourites Life After Lisa and Surf Colorado. The LED screen behind stage offered the crowd either music videos to the respective songs or close ups of fans singing and dancing. Also at the back of stage was a bar and bar tender who spent the show making and delivering drinks to the band, and also singing along. Frontman Jaret Reddick is not the most serious person, and is good at engaging with the crowd and joking around, specifically when the decision of whether to play the Phineas and Ferb theme tune, which is written by BOWLING FOR SOUP, he got the crowd booing and yaying. Unfortunately, bassist Erik Chandler had some technical difficulties, including his bass head failing and subsequently being replaced mid-show. Upon receiving the replacement, he played a bass solo to celebrate and, well, let’s say it needed some work. No BOWLING FOR SOUP show would be complete without High School Never Ends, although Jaret finds it “strange to be singing this song when I’m 45 because it’s about high school”
Jaret announced that they often get complaints from people missing 1985, and so to give people fair warning, they put an hour timer on the LED counting down. When it got down to the last fifteen seconds at the end of the show, the audience counted down, then sang along at the tops of their voices, ending the show on a high.
Rating: 8/10
Check out our photo gallery from the night’s action in Nottingham from Dean Martin here:
