Leaf @ The Dublin Castle 28 June 2001

What is it with Leaf gigs that people obviously need to sit down all the way through, no matter what venue they're in? It's like a virus, this sitting down thing. Someone just starts it and everyone else follows. What does that tell you about group pressure? Well, it exists.

Anyways, sit-in or not, people at least got their asses down to the Dublin Castle tonight, which has to be a good thing. Considering Camden audiences have a habit of spending the first two bands either at the bar or somewhere completely else. Talking about audiences, Leaf's was 80 per cent female that night No further comment about that (ha ha).

Despite singer Boaz having been literallly electrocuted at the last show, Leaf pulled off the Dublin Castle show without major injuries, although, by the looks of it, there was the obligatory broken guitar string once again.

Leaf started off with the quite very brillant "Numbness" , of The Attack of Generation Toyracer fame. This was then followed by attempts to the get the crowd to move a little bit forwards, a strategy that's proven to never work...duh! But hey, it's better to have a sitting audience than no audience at all.

Unfortunately it seems to be the law that first bands on always get a very short set. Not fair. But then Leaf managed to squeeze in quite a few tracks, making sure to play tracks from their debut EP (A Taste of What's To Come which is out now on You and Whose Army Records). So the likes of the extremely catchy Tom Says and the, erm, neverending Tonight For You were brought to light. The latter inspiring some of the ladies on the floor to wave lighters. Not for very long though, they probably realized within splitseconds that this whole lighter-waving business is just so Whitesnake 1986.

Overall, a good gig, and it's nice to see that the number of Leaf-gig-goers apears to be constantly rising.