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November 2006 to ...
The end-of-year
tour started shakily. Although venues were
well attended, the audiences seemed a little
subdued. A few dates into the tour though
and things picked up with excellent reviews and
two encores at many venues.
That changed
dramatically at their Glasgow date however.
A stormy Miles sulked his way through the
performance, calling their time in Scotland
"loathsome" and playing much of the performance
with his back to the audience. Partway
through the set he stormed offstage leaving the rest of the band
onstage bewildered.
The atmosphere in
the camp turned sour and, being the first time
the current line-up would have witnessed a
full-blown Miles Hunt strop in a long time, the
other members were unsurprisingly shocked.
The group received high levels of abuse and
complaints from the audience both on the Room
512 messageboard and also in calls to the XFM
Scotland radio station the following Monday.
Members were heard
to be uncertain whether the tour was going to
continue to not, with some wanting to cancel the
remaining dates and return to their individual
homes. The following days performance at
Newcastle looked shaky with everyone uncertain
about whether it would go ahead or not. In
the end, it did and, unexpectedly, the group
played one of their best performances of the
tour.
No explanation has
yet been given, and maybe never will, for the
Scotland incident but their popularity was
seriously damaged and will take a while to
recover. Whether the will be a further
backlash as a result of the outburst is now
unlikely to be seen until after the tour
finishes but for so many people to be thinking
this could be the end of the group, at least in
it's current line-up, fans are still uncertain
about plans for 2007.
The group's
hometown performance in Birmingham was viewed by
many as one of their best to date though sadly even an
appearance by Vic Reeves for 'Dizzy' couldn't
bring the same level of enjoyment for the London
audience and many (both in the audience and
within the group) felt the tour ended below
expectations.
As 2007 began,
fans were unsure of the group's future.
Miles announced on this MySpace pages that the
emphasis for 2007 would be on his own solo work,
though he did hint at possible festival
appearances during the Summer months. It
was anticipated that the group would return to
the studio towards the end of the year with an
eventual new studio album mid-2008 but all this
was purely speculation at this stage.
However, it was
largely unlikely that the group would be doing
anything of a musical nature for the first half
of the year at the very least as Malc became a father
at the end of January so it was expected he would
take some time off to concentrate on his home life.
Mark McCarthy was also putting plans into place
for a new project which he intended to begin
work on during 2007.
There was still
sadly no news
about the much-publicised live
and rarities albums though. Having gone
from a split IRL/Universal release to a
combined Universal release, it was now looking
likely that they had gone back to being separate
releases. This looked more likely in early
February when the Q music magazine announced
they were reviewing a new compilation album from
the group entitled Hits and Reissues on the
Universal label in their March issue but neither
the group nor Universal knew anything of this so
it just appears that the were using old schedule
information.
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