The Frames – McGonagles, Dublin, 1991

When Noreen opens her mouth to sing, a million silver fish with jewels on their backs and pearls in their mouths swim out. The drummer is the best I've ever seen. Glen has nice hair and sings like a choir of boys. The guitarist looks like Stan Cullimore of The Housemartins (from a different book that one). The songs are swans in a skyful of sparrows. Noreen goes "woh ooh woh ooh woh" and everybody, I mean everybody, looks at everybody else and says, "Am I on fire here or what?". Yes, yes my children!!! You are!! You were!!
This was my second encounter with The Frames. A couple of weeks earlier I'd been dragged out to Dun Laoghaire and took in their gig at The Purty Loft. They were astounding. I left with my ears ringing and my little heart going boom boom boom. The DART back to town was late, I missed the last bus home and a guy I know saw and ignored me on O'Connell Street but none of this mattered, I didn't care. In love with life itself, that was me that night.
The love affair deepens today. Long hair and fiddles and acoustic guitars and happy, manic upful tunes mean raggle taggle with bollocks, every song a giddy, glorious, frantic frenzied melee of surging noise from people in love, not alone with music, but with the very idea of being in a band. They live for this, we'll die for them. In our thousands and soon.
The Frames are brilliant, magical, incredible, all the usual adjectives and they have effortlessly and irretrievably changed the course of my life forever. It's impossible to dislike them and they're going to be massive.
I don't think I've ever been more convinced of anything.