SOME of my greatest life experiences have happened by accident rather than design.

On Monday night I was due to review another band, who shall remain nameless, wandered into the wrong venue and discovered The Bluetones.

Despite having been around for nigh on a couple of decades, and though they are my brother’s favourite band, he even has the cover to the album Expecting to Fly tattooed on his back, I had not heard a single note of one of their songs.

So it was that, having ensured the real object of my being there had not yet taken to the stage, I anticipated the arrival of Hounslow’s finest on what was to be their last visit to the North-East.

What I discovered made me wonder where they had been all my life.

The crowd was slow to warm-up, a fact acknowleged by frontman Mark Morriss(CORR), who said it felt like a Monday night - which it was, but we knew what he meant.

But once into a set that must have run the whole gamut of their career their mood soon lifted.

It was almost like those gathered had come to mourn the band’s passing, but pleasantries observed, they then fully partook in a celebration of their lives.

This was not quite a ‘you had to be there moment’, but it was one heck of a wake.

Songs sung with meaning, songs with great guitar licks courtesy of Adam Devlin, songs I could, and now will, listen to over and over again.

Five guys, the kind of which you’d have no concerns introducing to your mother, who seemed genuinely happy with their lot and were not calling it a day, not due to that old chestnut ‘musical differences’, but just because ‘the time has come’.

Addressing the throng as if they were his children, Morriss signed off by saying: “Look after yourselves because we are not going to be around to look after you.”

A sad day indeed.

Matt Westcott