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As much as Fly By Night is an institution for original music, it never has a crowd with much energy. It’s pleasant, chilled and comfortable, but not overly conducive to high exertions. The support acts generally play to an audience sprawled on the ground in front of the stage while the rest of them queue for drinks.

In front of such a crowd, Kelly Malone perched solo on stage singing song after song of acoustic guitar-a-little-bit-country love songs and folk loss songs. Her voice is stunning, as is her control. Her ability to create a beat to go with the guitar rhythm was quite impressive to watch, and enjoyable in its way, but as with all solo acoustic sets, it began to get difficult to differentiate between songs after the first four, and she needed something to break up the set a little and rouse the crowd from their stupor. She’ll do well playing wineries on balmy summer evenings where her music is free to wind around the crowd as they continue their conversations.

After 30 minutes or so of watching the roadies bring out beer, wine, water and tune and retune the guitars over and over, Gomez finally appeared to a steady, if not exuberant applause.

Gomez, please don’t be disheartened by your audience’s seeming nonchalance, truly, you were magnificent and truly the audience enchanted, it was just too old for childish jumping about and screaming. You’ll need to play all ages venues or festivals to get that sort of response. Your lack of bling, lycra and fluoro coupled with a dearth of the trite, repetitive mainstream lyrics are going to go against you with that audience. But be honest, is that the type of audience you really want? If you were standing in the crowd you would have noticed that the smiles were strainingly wide, every eye shone with pleasure and the majority of people were rocked forwards on the balls of their feet trying to get a bit closer and savour every moment. It’s just that this crowd is more used to civilised non-touching red-wine-sipping entertainment (with Gomez on the CD in the background of course). Standing within the personal space of strangers and hippies was just not comfortable for most of them.

They played an hour and a half worth of songs spanning their 11 year career, of course some personal favourites were missed, but as one Punter remarked, “I’m not complaining, it was still awesome”. A notable mention must go to the beautiful cover of Bill Withers’ Ain’t no Sunshine. They also seemed surprised and delighted when the crowd sang along to Silence.

Truly Paul – œBlackie’ Blackburn couldn’t have looked more bored, and the rest of the band looked like they too were falling into a second last night funk as they played some of their older tracks, but they got the spark back pretty quickly, and there really was more action than the punters had had in weeks when they belted out Ruff Stuff with a somwehat ironic twist of the mouth. The infectious urging of Tom Grey for us to give them some more love seemed to work a little, and some members of the crowd roused themselves enough sing along audibly. It must have been difficult to see it from the stage, but there was nothing but love for the band coming out of the crowd.

The good thing about the rest of the audience being immobile (man) is that the few who had the energy to bounce, nod and cheer at the front could do so with relative ease. Even the lady clearly off her chops that had to give Ian Ball some – œwatermelon flavoured candy’ in the middle of a song, and then when he didn’t immediately open it and eat it had to get to the front and pick it up again and push it closer to him, was able to do so.. till one of the guitar techs told her to push off… She did so, and he did respond to the gift, after he had finished singing and playing the song. She made an appearance again during Get Myself Arrested (what else?) when she jumped up on stage for a little dance till the security charged at her looking for all the world like he was going to hurl her back into the crowd. He realised at the last moment that doing so might break bones in more than a few of the people on the receiving end of the woman. So it was that she was placed more or less gently into personal spaces other than those of the band’s.

Dear Gomez, the fact that you filled the Fly By Night twice in a row with little or no publicity will have to stand as a testament of our love for you, and a promise that if you keep coming back to us, we will keep getting tickets and buying your merch and playing you in our playlists and introducing you to our friends, both washed and unwashed.

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