Soul SirkUS.

Myself, Rick, and james_screaton travelled to Wolverhampton last night to see Soul SirkUS perform at Wulfrun Hall. This time, I managed to drive straight to the venue and car park, thank goodness!!

We arrived in good time, but unfortunately this meant that we saw and heard the support band. Their name escaped me, as did the reason that they were allowed to grace the same stage as names like Soto, Schon, Medoza, and Donati. We reached the conclusion that they were a young, local band, and they had brought some fans with them from their school, as some people seemed to actually applauding. Hopefully, age and practice will improve them.

Then, the moment that we were there for, Soul SirkUS!! Good songs, great performances by all. It's the first time that I've seen Marco Mendoza live at all, I’ve not even seen him live on video, and I was VERY impressed. He played a 6-string fretless bass for a large part of the set, and he did it superbly, which made THIS bass player feel that familiar mixture of inspiration and inadequacy. Soto was a star, as always. He is THE consummate frontman, he has it all. The voice, stage presence, humour, musicianship and charm. If I were to form a band and be lucky enough to get to choose ANY vocalist, Jeff Scott Soto would be the first call. Virgil Donati is a drummer that I have seen/heard only on Steve Vai's 'Live at the Astoria' DVD, and I was most impressed. He didn't disappoint. He's a great drummer, and his solo was very entertaining, not often you hear that phrase. Then onto Neal Schon, who was solid enough all evening, played well, but somehow seemed to need to find another gear. This impression may have been given by reasons that I'll go into later.

The material was good. Obviously, this consisted of songs from the Soul SirkUS CD, with one or two other things thrown in from Jeff's, Marco's and Neal's past material. I was expecting to hear more Journey material than we did (1 and a bit songs), but overall it was a very good set.

Now, time to complain! We were stood about seven people back from the stage, and just to the right of centre, and at various points during the gig, we had our fingers in our ears, as the sound from the right (maybe also left) PA stack was BAD. The upper midrange was clipping really badly, and obviously this affected Jeff’s vocal and Neal's guitar sound. There was obviously either a fault with the PA somewhere, or the front-of-house engineer needed shooting, or was deaf. It made what could have been a great gig merely very good. I enjoyed it, but it didn't blow me away.

I wonder how many more bands I'm going to see that will be spoiled by dodgy sound.