I have to admit arriving at this gig with the primary intention of worshipping at the altar of the Frank & Walters. Being in your middle twenties at the turn of the century means that your late teens coincided with the apogee of this three piece from Cork. So lets wind back the tapes to 1993. Mark Goodier, not Steve Lemacq was hosting Radio 1's Evening Session and the venue for Sound City 93 was Sheffield. The Frank & Walters basking in their prime were serenading the Leadmill with their gentle Irish humour and indie pop jaunts which included Turning Japanese, Fashion Crisis Hits New York and And After All I Really Loved You. All Evening Session regulars in the days when the programme was dominated by genuinely independent guitar bands. Someone shouted something from the crowd, prompting the momentarily taken aback lead singer to strike a chord, and give an impromptu run through of the 'We Are the Frank Walters' anthem, an unforgettable moment, and how I wished at the time, that I was there rather than in Scunthorpe with my tape recorder spinning round and my finger caressing the dial for as good as a reception I could hope.

Eight years later and with a half empty Foundry accompanying my half empty pint, I find myself stuck somewhere between a sense of euphoria as I get the chance to finally live the dream and a sense of anti-climax as I look around at the half-baked attempt at an audience. I'm thinking to myself this wasn't how it was supposed to be. The Frank & Walters, a victim of shifting fads perhaps, seemed to have slipped into obscurity through no fault of their own. Nevertheless, the set they played, a mixture of the old hippy happy tunes of the early nineties and the more melodramatic melodies from the late nineties, justified my attendance. Great stuff. The Frank & Walters don't easily fit into musical common sense, occupying that strange musical lacunae defined by the walls of singer song writer pub tour stuff and indie pop. That's perhaps why they never did and never will make it big. Which is more or less my prognosis for the other three bands that played here tonight.

The first two bands were nondescript. Cinefilm, winners apparently, of the national student band competition, did the reputation of student bands no favours with a performance that evoked an image of Teenage Fan Club in a creative coma. The next band up Vegastones insisted on force feeding a kind of anodyne guitar punk funk of plywood quality through the audience's minds... which were evidently elsewhere. A few obliging claps could be heard at the end of each song. One girl attempted to clap but her languid hands were so uninspired that they missed each other and gently fell downwards, she hardly seemed to notice her failure in this respect, she was on number nine. Vegastone were that good.

My Vitriol (see right) last and arguably the most inspiring band of the night, were three young punks and an athletic looking drummer poll vaulting and doing rodeo all over the stage, bringing a breathtaking aura desperately needed to the threadbare venue. The lights went epileptic, the smoke poured out and the now silhouettes were in deep musical intercourse, expounding on a captivating and atmospheric guitar driven joint, before bursting into a raucous but mightily impressive rave up. The lead singer a tasty and slender looking Asian bloke with Nirvana hair was having to perform all kinds of contortions as his mic stand repeatedly lowered itself despite attempts by the crowd and the back-up crew to remedy the situation. He smiled and invited the swarm of ENTs people for whom this gig had been put on to hire his band for Union Balls. His young and well bread voice totally betrayed his image and gave him the air of one of those smarmy sabbaticals you often meet in Student Unions. Regardless,

My Vitriol played on and on, denaturing all our ears with a relentless storm of indie rock instrumentals. It seemed to last quite a long time, and it wasn't necessarily awe inspiring but it was alright like. The thing that sort of made me jump, was when the band suddenly trashed the stage at the end. It was by no means an all out assault on their instruments but it was undoubtedly an exhibition of healthy disrespect for the tools that might take them further on up the greasy musical pole one of these days. I couldn't tell whether this was retribution for a faulty mic stand or a play act. Either way I couldn't quite square these actions with the sabbatical like personality of the lead singer.

Mike Williams