Face Of Cheam

We’re the Quire Boys and this is rockn’roll. A welcome way to start a series of gigs with a double header at the Borderline, with the Quire Boys sharing the bill with ex Georgia Satellite Dan Baird. Two nights, alternating headline spots on the Sunday and Monday of the May bank holiday. The Sunday was sold out and on our pre-gig crawl we saw most of the QBs band (without lead singer Spike) in the nearby Pillars of Hercules pub larging it up. Dan Baird started off proceedings opening up a set with ‘Good Times Bad Times’. The main highlights were ‘Younger Face’ and set closer ‘Sheila’ (my favourite Satellites song) preceded by a cover of ‘Do You Wanna Dance’. Great stuff. The Quire Boys came on 15 minutes later and started with their main hit ‘Seven O’Clock’. An excellent set aswell with the singer from the Diamond Dogs (the other act we did not see) guesting on ‘Sweet Mary Ann’ with other crowd pleasers ‘I Don’t Love You Anymore’ and ‘Hey You’ being left till the encore. Some new stuff was also played from their new album ‘Homewreckers and Heartbreakers’ the best of which was ‘I Love This Dirty Town’. All in all an excellent night with Spike saying ‘see you tomorrow’, which indeed we did!
Monday, our crawl started in The Intrepid Fox, Londons rock pub. Unsurprisingly the eight or so other punters in here we all saw later in the gig! The Pillars was sans band but still a good pub when in Soho. This time the Quire Boys were first on and played an almost exact set as the night before, with Spike saying before each new song that their album had sold out (it hadn’t). There was no encore as such although yesterdays encore songs were played at the end of the set.
At the interval we spotted journalist Dave Ling propping up at the sound desk as we got out Tuborgs in! (a good beer to have on draught). Dan Baird was last on and it was all change on the set list front opening with ‘Railroad Steel’ and ‘I Love You Period’ neither of which were played the night before. Indeed, I only think he duplicated two songs in his entire set, his best known ‘Keep Your Hands To Yourself’ and newie ‘Two For Tuesday’ name checking Creedence Clearwater’. Fantastically, the show ended with Spike joining Dan Baird on stage and taking vocals for ‘Battleship Chains’, a song I hadn’t live with vocals for many a year (Dan for some reason is embarrassed to sing it and very occasionally does an instrumental version).
All in all a great double header at a really good small central London venue.