At lunchtime today I managed to persuade Air France to change my unchangeable ticket so that I could stay the additional day to see my 53rd ever Todd gig!

When I originally booked my flight this gig was to have been played the next Sunday but I kept thinking that it seemed such a shame when I was the left side of the Atlantic to fly home on a day that Kasim was actually playing a gig! I’m really glad that I did attend this one as I thought that the Philly gig was flat compared to NYC so I wanted to end on a high and I certainly did at this gig!

For some unexplainable reason the tickets for this gig went off sale from TicketMaster the day before the concert and I heard afterwards that the gig had hardly been promoted until 4 days before it! Sadly this showed in the audience attendance at this 1,500 person venue! I actually had to keep moving backwards so that I didn’t end up at the front!

Tonight Kasim played the whole show without his sunglasses and it was very obvious that he could see the audience far better without them (which is the opposite to what I expected) as he often threw guitar pics both to fans on the floor and up in the balconies. Kasim didn’t wear his priest hat at all and his “pimp” suit tonight was again his bright red (WAT) suit that he wore with a black shirt and a white tie.

I spent most of Sweet watching Kasim VERY closely! He is obviously totally under-utilised in this song as he only sings a few lines and then plays a few notes on his keyboard but it wasn’t until this concert that I saw exactly how little he has to play in this song! He probably only plays about a quarter of the song and for most of the bars that he was playing, he just played it with his right hand and used his left hand for balance on the keyboard! Right at the end of the song, he played maybe 8 notes with his left hand and near the end he was definitely “fiddling” with a control on the keyboards…he even commented to Jesse about it!

A few random observations:

• Not that I’m personally complaining but Todd is actually on stage less time than the band! Considering that it is a Todd gig, I’m surprised that fans haven’t complained about that! He plays his two solo songs but then he goes off to get changed while the band play Green Onions. They then all play a couple more songs before Todd goes off for the 20-30 minutes that Born To Synthesise lasts!
• Thankfully Kasim played a bass solo during Born To Synthesise tonight!! (It was too short for my liking though!) He ended it by shouting that he didn’t know any more which was hilarious! The number of songs that he must know the bass part to could fill up a tour on it’s own! Tonight when Kasim “woke” Todd he made a joke having a dream that he (Todd) was one of the last two finalists on American Idol and that Kasim had just voted him off! Todd then left rip a bit about Simon Cowell!
• To me Kasim is an amazingly talented rock musician (I know he likes to be labelled as a “singer / songwriter” but I’ve seen him on stage more playing rock songs) so to see him standing on stage in a double-breasted suit playing an instrumental like Green Onions just makes him look like a player in a second-rate hotel bar band to me!
• The largest roar of the evening was definitely when Kasim and Jesse made their way to the front of the stage for JOV!
• Todd broke a string during Lunatic Fringe but managed to keep playing with hardly missing a note!

For more photos of this concert, click here.

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