Highlights from a year of super sonic live excursions enthusiastically, excitably described, and photographed, by the ever erudite Adam Turner. 

I saw 16 gigs in 2025, starting with Mercury Rev at Manchester’s New Century Hall in March and ending with The Liminanas at Band On The Wall in December, same city, a short walk away. In between those two there were Red Snapper, Shack, Sabres Of Paradise, Iggy Pop, Working Men’s Club, The Charlatans, The Beta Band, Pye Corner Audio, Daniel Avery, Luke Haines and Peter Buck, Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew. All memorable nights out and occasionally, those moments really live long in the memory

There’s something that only live music can provide and it doesn’t happen all the time – sometimes you’re lucky enough to be part of a moment of communion between the people on stage and the people in the crowd, a kind of transcendence, where the music lifts the listener up and out of themselves. Maybe it only lasts for a few minutes, for one song, before the real world rushes back in and breaks the spell. Sometimes it lasts longer.

Sometimes people near you break the magic, talking during songs when they should be listening, bringing you back from the bubble the music has put around you. But for a few minutes, you’re somewhere else, transported by sound…

Mercury Rev, New Century Hall, March

I was a little in two minds about going to see Mercury Rev but needn’t have been – they were sensational. A 90 minute set where the songs segued from one into another without any gaps, including a diversion into Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer’s famous Tears In Rain monologue replicated by singer Jonathan Donahue, and the band floating off into a six person version of Vangelis’ score. Before and after that the band cherry picked the songs from their late 90s / early 2000s peaks – Deserter’s Songs and All Is Dream, also veering off into several extended Tangerine Dream-like sections – the ambient soundscapes of The Little Bird, the 40s Disney crossed with 90s psychedelia of Tonite It Shows, the explosive Goddess On A Highway, the frazzled Americana of Holes and existential baroque pop of Opus 40. They finished back in March with The Dark Is Rising, a huge symphonic psychedelic meditation on love and loss.

Red Snapper, Yes, March

Red Snapper were celebrating the 30^th anniversary of Reeled And Skinned and the release of their current/ latest album Barb And Feather. They hit the stage running, double bass and drums pounding and pushing from the off. Jazz, dub, rocking blues, sci fi instrumentals, surf, trip hop – Red Snapper can play it all. New track Ban-Di-To jumped, funky and infectious. Oldie Hot Flush – as remixed by The Sabres Of Paradise – moved the crowd, the rubber bassline and mid- 90s Sabres groove bouncing round the Pink Room at Yes.

Shack, The Ritz, May

Shack’s back catalogue is packed with lost classics and hidden gems, some of the best songs of the 1990s and 2000s, instilled with Mick Head’s hard won scouse wisdom and experience. 90s Liverpool crossed with 60s San Francisco. Little known but much loved. After a gap of sixteen years Mick and John Head re-united and played a few gigs. Every song was a highlight – Sgt. Major, Butterfly, Captain’s Table, Cup of Tea, Undecided, Comedy, Streets Of Kenny, a cover of Love’s A House Is Not A Motel… A celebration of renewal by a band who are resolutely out of time, who exist in a time and world of their own.

The Sabres Of Paradise, Fabric, London, May, & The White Hotel, Salford, November

Seeing The Sabres Of Paradise not once but twice was unexpected and a little surreal. The five man Sabres live band, Andrew Weatherall’s 90s gang – Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns with Phil Mossman, Nick Abnett and Rich Thair – took their sound out on the road and played tracks live that haven’t been done for three decades. At Fabric, their first re-union gig, they were met by a packed and emotional crowd. The Ballad Of Nicky Maguire, Theme, Wilmot, the beatless version of Smokebelch… all these and more met with applause, love, moist eyes. By the end of November they’d bent the songs into new, dubbier shapes. At both gigs they finished with an epic fifteen minute live version of the David Holmes remix of Smokebelch, with those rattling snares, acid squiggles and piano runs sending shivers up and down my spine and ever so slightly blowing my mind.

Iggy Pop, Victoria Warehouse, May

Iggy Pop is 76. He was shirtless within seconds of arriving on stage, throwing the mic around and bouncing round the stage, roaring into it and conducting the all ages crowd in a high energy, punk rock spectacle. He ripped into opener TV Eye and then followed with Raw Power, I Got A Right and Gimme Danger – one after the other, firing off generational anthems into the packed Victoria Warehouse. The band were very good, very sympathetic to what Iggy needs – they play the songs as they should be played and the three man horn section gave it a Funhouse feel. Their atonal brass riffs and free-jazz making Loose sound, well, loose, but also vibrant and alive. Iggy casually tossed Lust For Life and The Passenger in early on, song 5 and song 6. Beer flew around, there was crowd surfing, a young couple in front of me shouted the words into each other’s faces, pausing occasionally to lock tonsils. Down On The Street, Some Weird Sin, a singalong I Wanna Be Your Dog, full on freak outs, the drum machine lurch of Nightclubbing, I’m Bored, Real Wild Child… It’s a raw blast of feral proto- punk and rock, played in a big brick room to a crowd, young and old, who want it. It feels a little out of control, a little anarchic. It’s hot and sweaty and when he left the stage, with no encore, we staggered out into the Old Trafford drizzle wrung out, exhilarated, done by Iggy.

Working Men’s Club, Todmorden, June

Working Men’s Club warmed up for a week of support gigs with LCD Soundsystem with a gig at The Golden Lion, Todmorden, the band’s hometown. The pub was jammed – actually seeing the band was close to impossible – from where I’m standing by the DJ booth I can see Syd’s head bobbing up and down, the top of a speaker stack and occasionally a glimpse of bass guitar. It didn’t matter. WMC played their boots off, an hour long set, with no gaps or silence between songs, a seamless flow of machine rhythms, synths and keys, like a tougher, harder early 80s New Order crossed with the anti-establishment spirit of rave. Syd’s existential dread and paranoias spat out in intoned one liners – ‘When we talk of the good times / we talk in the past tense’, and, ‘We laugh and we cry / we live and we die.’

The Charlatans, Castlefield Bowl, July

Tim Burgess sometimes cuts an unlikely figure onstage – at Castlefield Bowl in the summer he took to the stage with dyed black bowl cut, shiny black leather trousers, colourful striped jumper and a black overcoat. His band, more conventionally dressed in jeans and trainers, locked in and began to kick up a groove, and the sounds of seven minute long single Forever drifted in. Once he’s at the mic Tim is the 90s frontman everyone loves, no cliched rock star pretensions or behaviour. Singing songs that span three and a half decades, the front man with the Cheshire cat grin leading a band that’s been through the mill. Early 90s single Weirdo is 60s psyche-pop twisted into 90s indie dance shapes. North Country Boy, for personal reasons, reduces me to tears even before Tim has sung the first line. Just When You’re Thinkin’ Things Over is massive, emotive homeward bound Stones-y country-rock. One To Another and How High sound like the defining songs of 1995. Set closer Sproston Green is a psychedelic dance epic, tales of teenage innocence in smalltown Cheshire set to a swirling tune. On the whole stadium gigs don’t really do it for me – too much distance, big stages that require big gestures and grand sets – but The Charlatans have earned these size shows and the love they give and receive felt absolutely real enough.

You can find more proper, on point, prose from Adam Turner over at his own brilliant blog, The Bagging Area. Adam is also part of the admin now DJ tag team at the mighty Flightpath Estate.