Pascal Pinon played at 8:45, which feels like a very Pascal Pinon time of the evening. When I first saw them two years ago they seemed very young and very, very shy. Last night they were a much more assured, charming and funny presence on stage. The music has moved on too. Their latest record has a much fuller sound than the debut.
That did come across in their set last night, with added effects and the vocals a little lower in the mix than I remember from Airwaves 2011. They went down really well in the room, which was full and pleasingly quiet during the songs. I enjoyed that fact that they felt the need to explain to us what the song in Swedish was about, but not the ones in Icelandic. My Icelandic vocabulary about as good as my Swedish!
I worte on twitter before the show that if there has been a better record this year than Sin Fang's "Flowers" then I hadn't heard it. It's an exceptional set of crafted songs and it's fair to say that I was ecited to see Sindri and his band play their debut London show.
There was a three song encore with Sindri on keyboards swigging red wine (I think) from a bottle, probably to get over the stress of the earlier technical issues. It was a great London debut, and nobody shouted "Too depressing mate" (you had to be there), please come back soon…