Pop
Roland Gift
Becks Spiegeltent

No, you haven't picked up an archive copy of The Guardian, it really is Roland Gift, playing his first gig in 10 years. In 1989, Fine Young Cannibals' The Raw and the Cooked was the soundtrack to the English summer along with the Stone Roses. Gift's retort to Thatcherism was a more pained affair than Ian Brown's militant hedonism, but that didn't stop lines like, "What is wrong in my life?/Why must I get drunk every night?" touching a chord with an entire generation.
Now he's back, having got the bug again after a sporadic film career, and, as an initially uncertain audience builds towards hysteria, his decade of vocal inactivity seems an utter travesty. Nobody has sung soul like this since the first Dexy's album or Otis Redding. FYC's hits are all there - Good Thing, She Drives Me Crazy, Funny How Love Is. But new, deep, curiously lonely soul wonders like Looking for a Friend ring as true as any of them. When Gift leaves the stage calling everybody "friends", his rehabilitation is complete. Something very magical restarts here.
Dave Simpson