Pop punk has always been a guilty pleasure of mine, from older bands like Bowling for Soup and New Found Glory right upto the more modern Mayday Parade and Boys Like Girls, i've always loved listening to them, so when i saw All Time Low were coming into Leeds, I had to get a ticket. They were never my favourite band but if I were to make a soundtrack to my life, with songs that brought back certain memories, there'd definatly be a few All Time Low tracks on there.
Now maybe i should have abonadoned hope of a good gig when everytime someone asked me who I was going to see, they either didn't have a clue who i was talking about or made a pitying laugh after I told them, yet i still had high hopes. Walking past the venue earlier on in the day, a queue had already started forming. About twelve emo teenagers were sat on the steps waiting to be up close to their idols. I should have known then that the demographic for the gig was going to be young emo teens and not me, however I still walked through the venue doors excited.
The two support bands were your average pop punk band of the myspace generation, occasionally stopping between songs to tell the crowd how "fucking awesome" they were and asking them to shout random phrases like "fuck yeah" for no apparant reason. Looking around I could see me and my friends were some of the older ones at the gig, with only a few older people, mainly mums and dads who had brought their pre-teen kids to see their favourite band, which again proved I definatly wasn't their demographic.
It wasn't long after All Time Low took to the stage that we realised they were singing with a backing track, there were just too many "oh oh oh's" in their songs for them to handle so they had to have a bit of help. The band played most of their new album and a few older songs, breaking inbetween songs to again tell the crowd they were "fucking awesome" and at one point to tell us we were "more fucking nuts than Newcastle", to which the crowd started to boo and chant "Yorkshire" with the band mistaking it for "Your Shit", which after this gig, would have been a polite way of describing them. Now to write the gig off as completly awful would be wrong of me, it wasn't all bad, the standout song had to be "Remembering Sunday", I'm a sucker for acoustic songs, and this one is one of my favourites, and i'm not saying i didn't enjoy myself, singing along to every song brought back some of my youth, the problem i do have though is how every song sounded the same and was played in the same way with no variety. At least the support band "The Audition" managed a cover song. To me, it could have been any pop-punk band on stage that night, and the gig wouldn't have been any different apart from the lyrics being sung. I've been to plenty of these type of gigs now, and they're all the same as the last, few songs, a bit of swearing to excite the younger members of the audience, tell us we were better than the last gig and how you want to have sex with us all (which is often worrying as 95% of the audience are under 16) and then finish. A guy was stood in front of me wearing a tee-shirt that read "Pop-Punk Is Not Dead", now i think after that gig, it may not be dead but All Time Low definatly put it in a coma it might not wake up from.
