A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
My record collection
#123: Dean & Britta live at The Metro
This is a recording of Dean & Britta’s first London show in 2007 as recorded to DAT by my pal Andy. The next night’s show has already put in an appearance in this series.
The Metro was a dingy room at the Tottemham Court Road end of Oxford Street that closed in 2009 and the building demolished during the Crossrail remodelling of the area over the last few years. There were three bands on the bill that night. The first band were Exit Calm but I missed most of their set of what I described at the time as “lively shoegazery noise” - they have an album on Bandcamp which on one listen probably supports that somewhat?
Next up were Asobi Seksu who were playing their first UK show. There was a critical buzz about them which notably contributed to a fair bit of the audience. I had bought their first two albums and had liked Citrus enough to put it in my fave albums of 2006 list. They played a short set of what I described at the time as “lively shoegazery noise”!
Asobi Seksu’s buzz meant that the audience thinned somehat after they had finished and gave me the opportunity to take a prime front row position for a set that was pulled from their two albums and was an absolute joy. The last four songs though - Tugboat, Strange, Bonnie & Clyde and Ceremony - was like being in a dream. Perfect and worth the too long wait for them to play the UK as Dean & Britta.
I chatted to Dean briefly after the set, mostly awkward silences and being photographer for other fans who wanted pics with Dean… something that I, for some reason, didn’t think to arrange for myself.
My camera misbehaved so all my pictures turned out very red - you can see a set on Flickr, but here are a couple that have been turned black and white, and tweaked to hide their crappiness!
Andy would usually record all the bands… “just in case” but I thought that this time he had only recorded Dean & Britta’s set for limited battery or tape reasons, but I’ve just popped the tape into my DAT machine and the Asobi Seksu set is on there too, although there are lots of sound drop-outs so not sure if Andy was experimenting. I’ve ripped what there is but it’s hardly worth sharing.
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 16/019
- Artist: Dean & Britta
- Title: 2007-06-19: The Metro, London, UK
- Format: DAT
Previously in my record collection: