Clutch - O2 City Hall, Newcastle 12.11.2022

At first TIGERCUB seemed like an odd choice for this bill but their blend of QOTSA, Royal Blood and Muse type vibe won over the city hall crowd.

I first saw GREEN LUNG opening for Puppy and was blown away with the Sabbathesque riffs and grooves so seeing them again tonight on a bigger stage and hearing new material was a must and they certainly delivered!

Hitting the stage with ;The House That Peterbilt; Clutch were not messing about, they smashed through the first part of the set with such gusto I thought they must have had a cab waiting outside with the meter running! 'X Ray Visions' and 'Firebirds' followed in such a swift succession we weren’t sure at first if that had been our three songs allocated in the pit or two.

The band are like a well oiled machine Tim Sult solid as a rock firing out the riffs and Jean-Paul Gaster and Dan Maines making those awesome grooves on drums and bass look so easy. And then there’s Neil Fallon totally in control of the procedings prowling the stage twisting and crouching delivering each line in that unmistakeable style of his and donning a guitar to add even more weight to a number of songs in the set.

The set was culled from 8 of their past albums with the majority being from the latest release 'Sunrise On Slaughter Beach' but for me the highlights were 'A Shotgun Named Marcus', 'Big News 1', 'Immortal', 'Promoter Of Earthbound Causes', 'El Jefe Speaks' and 'The Face' from some of their earlier albums. When a band has such a back catalogue and changes the majority of their set every night it can (and does) divide opinions especially in this day and age when you can look online and see what other cities got compared to what you just saw. However you couldn’t fault the performance which was just perfect despite a lot of expected big songs missing.

Clutch - https://www.facebook.com/Clutchband

GREEN LUNG - https://www.facebook.com/greenlungband

TIGERCUB - https://www.facebook.com/tigercubtigercub

Photos - G's Gig Shots