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David Gedge of The Wedding Present and Cinerama fuseleeds09 at The West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

David Gedge

He is David Gedge - king of the room of indie kids, the leader of his tribe - and he is nervous.

Gedge - for twenty years the man behind The Wedding Present and Cinerama - must have sung My Favourite Dress hundreds of times but never like this and never having stopped a few lines in having fluffed his vocal.

The song - a standard of those who enjoy things on the thrashy side of twee - has been re-arranged by Tommy Laurence and is being pumped, blow, tinkled and blasted out by the BBC Big Band.

Gedge is more used to a sticky floored gig venue has put on a velvet jacket but still does not manage to look anything other than unkempt in the theatre surroundings of The West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. His right hand hung low during the opening pair of Cinerama songs Cat Girl Tights and And When She Was Bad and flicked for the comfort of a guitar that was not forthcoming. He is exposed and looks smaller, more nervous. No, not more nervous: Nervous for the first time.

Out of his element Gedge's eyes flick to Conductor Steve Sidwell who counts him in and prompts him. Delicately he stumbles into this twenty one year old song of young man's heartbreak a percussion section behind him to the left and a thirteen piece brass section to the right. He stumbles.

He stumbles and a curious feeling crosses the room. Gedge - his on stage persona and, being the sort of guy who will share a word or two at gigs, his personality off it - is characterised by a confidence that comes from his achievements. Of course his greatest hit only got to number ten - Come Play With Me gets an airing tonight and emerges from the guitarist fuzz of The Wedding Present in 1992 into a chirpy blast of Sax that borders on jazz - but who else in the room at a regular T' Weddeos gig can say that? Who else makes a living doing what they want to do in as grumpy a way as they want to do it. He is king of all he surveys on those nights but on this evening he in vulnerable and unsure.

His eyes flick around between songs checking for applause which is fulsome and supportive. Bands and fans are symbiotic in nature and while it might always but true it is not always obvious that Gedge needs his support tonight. He is humbled and humble.

And he is appreciated. Carolyn and Heather emerge from the masterpiece Seamonsters and one wonders if the durged guitar of that record makes the arrangement easier where as one would have assumed that a tune swallowed up in fuzz would be more difficult to remake. Certainly the distinctive riff of show closer Brassneck is not repeated in a Sax tooting D/A/D/A/D/A/G as many here have knocked out in imitation of Gedge.

Before brass tackles neck though is the show stopping Piano only accompaniment of TWP Cinerama cover (or it is a TWP cover done by Cinerama? Who can say?) Don't Touch That Dial which Gedge lilts though with a firm confidence restored. There is a beauty to much of the 2005 album Take Fountain and none more so than that recording.

Gedge does not do encores but returns to take another stab at My Favourite Dress because - he jokes to the brass section - "one of those guys messed up or something." He is impressed that the guy on Sax at the back has played n every James Bond soundtrack but as he finished off this evening which twenty years ago would have seemed teh height of the surreal Gedge's swagger is restored.

The fervour though, is in the slip, and the recovery.

Vessels fuseleeds09 at The West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

Vessels

Vessels are rather popular. Perhaps not overly with this crowd gathered here to see David Gedge later but if they're working on their second album and are touring Europe, they must be doing something right for someone.

I want to like Vessels. I should like Vessels and their fellow “post-rock” peers. I'm ideally placed in the centre of the Venn diagram where guitar led rock meets ambienty dance in my musical tastes. I was there and thoroughly into the “Chill Out” phase of music fashion of the turn of the millennium. I know my Mr Scruff from my Bent, my Groove Armada from my Kinobe. I am not afraid of ten minute instrumental epics, nay there was no finer way to soundtrack the musings on the intricacies of “cell signalling”... but that was then and a decade on, we have arrived at “post-rock”.

Now, I have tried with some effort to get into this genre, hoping it might pick up and move me on to somewhere a bit darker from where “Chill Out” left off. I've listened to four Animal Collective albums (most accessible I found was Sung Tongs), two by Deerhunter, one from Atlas Sounds and have seen local proponents Laboratory Noise perform too. But I just don't get it. And by gosh, I want to! Almost as much as I want to “get” British Sea Power (but that's another story...).

Sadly Vessels are not the act to provide me with the cipher to unlock the magic factor that enthralls so many others for this genre. This type of music is often described as “aural soundscapes” and I understand that. It lends itself to soundtracking certain sorts of movies and scenes. In fact Laboratory Noise have scored short film by Jon Yeo called ‘Beauty is the promise of happiness’. But this is not a review of Lab Noise.

So Vessels. Well they accomplished four discrete tracks within a forty minute set. There may have been more tracks merged but there seemed only to be four pauses for applause. This is fitting as when watching the Leeds based five piece, they really seem to be doing it for themselves rather than for the audience. All five exhibit the pained expressions of musicians lost in the (lengthy) moment of just them and their instruments, and like modern jazz, prog rock or porn, you do feel they are having so much more enjoyment playing then you could ever derive from watching.

Are they good? Well they certainly showed off their skills by playing “musical chairs” with the various guitars, keyboards and two drum kits. It became tiresome to see them swap about, retune their inherited guitar and kneel down twiddling knobs on the boards whilst the music seemed to carry on regardless, care of a laptop. Maybe this might have been entertaining if it was a solo act (like, for example, The Voluntary Butler Scheme) or if they bothered to engage with the audience at all.

However no eye contract or utterance (save some mumbled vocals) was made until end the end of the penultimate song by which time we'd seen the VT projection behind them (to keep us visually stimulated, one supposes) though several times and had become zoned out. The utterance was polite and informative when it arrived but it wouldn't have hurt to have it at the start (support bands not introducing themselves or acknowledging the audience is a pet irk of mine, admittedly).

Looking around the seated audience, and also hearing the accidental applause in silent bits within the tracks, indicated to me that I wasn't alone in restlessness during Vessels' performance but then such is the hardship of a support act – you're never going to thrill all the audience as it's not you they've primarily paid to see. I felt I needed more melody to ride me through it.

Some occasional clue and small satisfaction of feeling where a tune is heading would have mentally engaged me more and I think that's symptomatic of a lot of “post-rock” for me. I guess I've become more attached to a little structure in a tune than I've realised. I do wonder (in a simplistic way), how they know when to come in with different instruments when there is no obvious rhythm or structure to count in? I guess that's practise and psychic synchronisation or something!

So would I recommend Vessels? Yes, I really would if I knew you enjoyed Animal Collective et al. Unfortunately they are not the conduit for “post-rock” I was hoping for but if I do discover the key one day, I will pay Vessels another visit with my ears...

My First Tooth r[pm] Presents at The PM Bar, Shipley, Bradford

The problem with West Yorkshire's second City - Bradford - is that one can not hear the sound of anything happen for the volume of those who tell you that nothing is happening and the sight of Northampton folk-popsters My First Tooth playing to so few people so very well is as good an indication of this situation as any.

Augmented from the two of Russ Witt and Sophie Galpin - who is once more wearing the I Put The Rad In Bradford shirt - My First Tooth now number five having added a drummer, a bass and a second guitar to add to the lead acoustic. The sound is rich and textured shaped by Russ's deliberate delivery and Sophie's violin.

They start with Margaret Yen which is as catchy a slice of pop as one could hope to hear before a runaround that sees the band swap instruments and a second violin lilting through a set of songs that are both original and bright yet seem older and as familiar as something pulled off the better parts of your family vinyl collection.

Sleet and Snow is their signature tune - their White Winter Hymnal - and the encore is called for by the smattering of people and enjoyed.

The smattering of people. A problem with the City, a problem with the scene, a problem with a music industry that has bred a consumer of product rather than appreciators. Without the sensationalism of bands who become trumpeted as next big things (sometimes justifiably) wonderfully textured and real acts like My First Tooth have to survive on scraps when they should be feasting.