I have to say, I found Colin James' performance to be rather disappointing. Not that he wasn't good, as he was but in a mellow, bluesy sort of way, rather than a rocking good time. It was just him and another guitar player doing mostly acoustical performances. Excellent guitar playing, no question about that, but I was looking forward to seeing him perform "Chicks 'N Cars (and the Third World War)" and "Voodoo Thing" and he didn't do either. As an opening act, he wasn't bad but he certainly left us hoping the main attraction would be more exciting. And they were!
The Steve Miller Band was better than I could have expected. They were totally awesome.
As you can see from this first photo, the stage backdrop was this totally cool swirl of guitars, Steve called it the "Space Galaxy of Guitars".
After they'd sung the first few songs (they opened with "Jet Airplane", followed by "Take the Money and Run", to everyone's delight), Steve told us he had invited Colin James to come back out and play with them for a little while. They did several songs together and you could tell Colin was absolutely thrilled to be playing with one of his idols. He had no problem holding his own but you could see it on his face, how excited he was.
After that, they played several selections from their new album, "Bingo", a few of which featured the new backup singer names Sonny Charles on lead vocals - he has a fabulous voice and was a lot of fun to watch, as he doesn't play an instrument so he danced his way through every song all night and man, he had some moves! There was also a section of songs that featured just Steve on stage by himself, which was a neat idea, to have him play and talk to the crowd on his own.
But the crowd favourites were definitely their older classics. If you own their Greatest Hits 1974-1978 album, you know which songs I'm talking about (and if you don't, you should get it!). Those songs had everyone in the crowd singing along, word for word, every time and for the last several songs of the show, on their feet for the entire time, dancing at their seats and in the aisles. In this photo, you can see everyone in the audience standing and the band holding out their microphones for them to sing - I think this was "The Joker":
You can read a review of the concert from The Toronto Sun newspaper here:
http://www.torontosun.com/entertainment/columnists/jane_stevenson/2010/07/01/14574216.html
The funny thing is, you can tell the author left the concert before the end because, yes, it did seem sad when Steve sang "The Joker" by himself during his solo session but the good news was, they played the full out rockin' version during the encore and it was fabulous!!
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