The Seeds,
The Borderline,
Orange Yard, London
17th June 2003

Set List:

Lift Off!
Wind Blows Her Hair
I Can Satisfy
Let Her Sting
Try To Understand
Can't Seem To Make You Mine
No Escape
Rollin' Machine
Violet Ray
Just Let Go
Mr Farmer
100 Colorized Bottles
Nobody Spoil My Fun
Faded Picture
Evil Hoodoo
Out of the Question
Pushin Too Hard
Pictures & Designs
Trip Maker
Girl I Want You

Back Again Encore (?)
Feast Of All The Spiders
Rocking The World Today
Up In Her Room
Women Hurt So Bad

101 Colourised Bottles

Thanks to Gray Newell from the WestCoast Acid Rock......list for supplying this set list (taken from the bands set list).

When Pooterland passed the contact details for The Seeds to promoter Glenn Povey (Second Wave Promotions) in an attempt to get him to book them for this year's Canterbury Fayre the last thing we expected was for Glenn to set up a UK Tour for the legendary LA Garage Band.

Our Doctor Dark had been in conversation with Marianna Marsh and myself and the Doc had been idly talking about the possibility of a tour so I mentioned this to Glenn and to my surprise he was into the idea but had no idea how to contact the band, the rest as they say is history and here we are with a small UK tour as a result :-)

A variety of unrelated (but annoying) events such as ambiguously labelled car park ticket machines, Dr Sandoz losing his wallet and then us missing at least two trains saw us arriving later than expected at London's Borderline so we skipped a beer or three in The Pillars Of Hercules and dived straight into the venue.

While I was making a few calls outside on my cellphone up walked a bunch of people led by some cat with ginger hair, huge sideburns and a beautiful lady on his arm.

Mr Sideburns just had to be Sidwren from The Pooterland Lounge and the rest were most likely other Loungers too...

Walking downstairs we squeezed our way into a rapidly filling venue and waded across to the bar.

Sure enough, Mr Sideburns was in fact Sidwren and the beautiful lady was his wife Paula, they had come all the way from Manchester to see The Seeds!!.

We also met Gray, Pep and Mr Steal (more Loungers) as well as Doctor Dark, so with myself, Trog and Sandoz there was a respectable Pooterland contingent present.

8:30pm - First Set:

Sky Sunlight Saxon, or Sunlight as he prefers to be called these days, walks nervously onto the stage to cheers and whoops from the goggle eyed punters who simply cannot believe that one of the forefathers of 60's Punk/Garage Bands is actually here in England in this club and about to perform as The Seeds.

For the uninitiated The Seeds invented Two chord punk and made a career out of it, later progressing to Three Chord punk and managing to pull that off too :-)

The seminal and legendary Pushin' Too Hard (according to Sky the entire lyrics were written while waiting for his girlfriend to come out of the supermarket) is a cornerstone of 60's Garage Punk folklore and is surely in every self respecting psych gands record box, worn thin by overplaying, a song so simple that nobody would have believed it so successful, yet so catchy, raw and visceral that you just had to groove along with it.

This, coupled with Sky's distinctive nasal vocal whine carried The Seeds right through the Garage Punk scene and even as far as them being classed as one of the earlier Flower Power/Hippie bands of late 1966. An amount of this was due to their (for the time) exceptionally long hair and Sky's ability to rant on about otherworldy things and wrap songs up in nonsensical lyrics.

They have influenced hundreds of bands over the years (the true list runs from Billy Childish, Alex Chilton thru The Pretty Things, Ramones and Pere Ubu, The Tell-Tale Hearts, The Residents and Johnny Thunders amongst others) something which is evident tonight as I bumped (literally) into Bobby Gillspie (Primal Scream) and also spotted members of The Stone Roses amongst the audience paying homage to the man that has undeniably influenced both of these bands over the years.

Sadly, Sky is unable to deliver the vocals with his trademark nasal howl that he had 35 years ago but does an equally good job with the lyrical style he has adopted over the last 20 years (24 Hour Rocker/New Stars Seeds Band) and for someone that has lived for many years in the same hazy, mystical, acid casualty realm as Skip Spence, Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson and Peter Green he is amazingly lucid with no noticeable mistakes on lyrics.

Even as recently as the 90's Sky was living the life of a street bum in Seattle so recent times have seen an amazing turnaround and many have said that this recent 're-incarnation' of Richard Marsh has been the only time for years that he has done something so wonderful and full of energy.

Tonight is certainly no exception and as the current spate of 'resurrected 60's bands' go, this version of The Seeds is one of the best of the bunch.

Sadly Jan Savage was not present and Lounger Pep informed me that Jan had been on part of the European leg of the tour but had been taken ill in Spain and had to be flown back to the States for medical treatment, that said the rest of the band were in fact great with authentic sounding fuzz guitar and some VERY Seeds sounding keyboards.

The rest of the first set was made up from material from The Seeds debut album and also Web Of Sound, plus a brilliant new song '101 Colourised Bottles' which was easily as good as any original Seeds song. Sky was starting to loosen up and I fought my way around the venue to try and take some photo's.

Early on with a bass string broken, Sky launched into an ad-lib L.A Woman whilst the git-tar was restrung (the trainspotters among you will be aware of the irony that The Doors frequently played support to The Seeds at the Whisky A Go-Go back in '66!!!) as well as rapping about Queens and Fairies and how cool England is, oh and also how 'we could be playing Colosseum's but dig the vibe in these small clubs where we can reach out to the people....'

Just when I thought it could not get any better the unmistakeable intro of Evil Hoodoo fuzzed and Farfisa'd its's way out of the PA and the audience went crazy with rows of smiling faces and waving arms, spotted in the audience were Mani (Stone Roses/Primal Scream) and also the guitarist from Primal Scream (Andrew Innes???)

Suddenly the first of two 45-minute sets was over and the band dissapeared backstage as the crowd went crazy........!!!

I kind of got caught up talking to various people and only caught glimpses of the 2nd set (I must have been mad !!!) but they certainly opened set two with Pushin' Too Hard, much to the appreciation of the crowd, if anyone can help with the major gaps in the 2nd set-list we will love your forever....

Thanks to Sid & Paula for the pictures (they are better than ours......)

p.s Who is the dude at the front with massive ginger sideburns?