Two Vegan Options – Fucked Up live

Fucked Up / Big Cheese / Polly – Room 2, Glasgow – Tuesday 14^th March 2023

Any show was going to be a come down after five Dream Syndicate shows but I thought a Fucked Up show had a good chance of being different enough to be great in its own right.

Sadly, this show was pretty much ruined for myself and MPK2 by a dreadful sound mix.

It was my first time at Room 2 and it’s another odd-shaped Glasgow basement. The area in front of the stage isn’t huge but there’s a short flight of steps to the bar area which also provides a viewing area to the side of the stage. There’s also two wide pillars framing the stage which really restrict the view unless you’re pretty much straight in front of the stage.

We were positioned fairly centrally in front of the stage and right in front of the sound desk, so you’d imagine that would be a reasonable place to hear the show. But unfortunately it wasn’t, as the mix was just a blizzard of noise and the songs struggled to be heard.

If Damian could (usually) make himself heard in (if not above) the din the others struggled as the mic set-up for the other vocalists wasn’t great. Additional guitarist Maeghan Brooks (from support Big Cheese) was given two lead vocals on songs from ‘Dose Your Dreams’ and her mic didn’t even sound like it was switched on at the start of ’I Don’t Wanna Live …’.

Finishing with ‘Joy Stops Time’ should have been a triumph but Maeghan’s vocals were buried (even Damian struggled on this one) and the song simply got lost.

Occasionally it seemed like a song would break free from the general cacophony but in the end nothing ever really managed. Most disappointingly, the sense of Fucked Up as a fluid juggernaut, so obvious at the 2019 show , was almost completely absent.

All in all a very frustrating night.