I was there. Or was I? NiluccioLive proves its infallibility

First impressions are notoriously unreliable, but they're what we - foolishly - rely on for almost every judgement we make. At least that's pretty much always been the way with how I've made up my mind about music: liking or disliking something almost instantaneously. What an idiot, eh? (Yeah, I am.) Anyway, though the jumping-in-with-both-feet habit can be good in some ways (eg I often like a new band/song straight away) it's obviously not a very sensible habit if you want to actually make good decisions. Whatever. Last week I listened back to a 35-minute recording I'd done at the Good Flying Birds gig at Delicious Clam in Sheffield on 28 June. Blow me down, it sounded much better than I'd expected. On the night, GFB hadn't really done it for me. They were OK - decent, lively indie-rock, but somehow missing something. Nope. On playback they really worked, especially the main singer's nasally camp-drawl vocals, the springy bass and an overall infectiousness to their Byrdsian sound. Why would this be? Why would a recording of the show be better than the actual thing? Surely it should the opposite, no? A show working or not working based on the raw excitement, the buzz, the noise of the event itself? Seemingly not. Or not always. I reckon this is sometimes down to the million-and-one distractions you get at a gig which can impair the experience - a bloke behind you standing too close, someone spilling their drink nearby, long gaps between songs, you name it. At this show the singer-guitarist broke a string about two songs in and there was a lengthy break as he rather too casually sorted out a replacement guitar. Plus the same band member told a dubious story about how the band had supposedly visited the "worst" pub in Sheffield before the show, a place where assorted "crackheads" went. (Er, right). So, while I was digesting this little nugget the band were halfway through their next song and I was probably ... losing the thread. No, listening back to a live recording, especially one with all the between-songs guff removed, can be a bit transformative. I've already listened back to this 35 minutes of music about six times in two days. It's now possibly one of my favourite recordings out of the hundreds (thousands?) of MiniDisc'd gig recordings that are weighing down the sagging shelves in the corridor of my flat. I might not be in the same league as the super-prolific Chicago tape guy Aadam Jacobs (OK, I'm definitely not), but I like to think that at least a few of the recordings I've done have burnt their way into my brain and added to my appreciation of the bands in question. It happened with the very first of my super-amateur recordings (Schneider TM in 2000) and it's happened with quite a few since then - a specific Neils Children show at the Old Blue Last in Shoreditch in about 2006 comes to mind. As I say, this isn't a matter of the recording reaffirming that a particular gig had been good; it's about the recording adding something, even revealing that a show had been good and er, you hadn't even noticed. Anyway, live music fans, this is a very longwinded way of cueing up this: a new NiluccioLive Mixcloud to showcase a few decent gigs, especially the ones for which I had to do a second-take to appreciate what actually happened. So check out the Good Flying Birds in Sheffield. It was a good show. I can assure you of that. After all, I was there.   

Back in the air: a second chance for Good Flying Birds