Black Dawn Live Review 21st March at The Masons Arms

By Mark Foster

On Friday night I had planned to go to Static in Swansea to watch 21 Against but after seeing the rain and imagining the walk to the train station and then from Swansea train station to the Kingsway, I decided to go somewhere closer and went to the Masons Arms to watch Black Dawn.

I went with some trepidation as usually, a Friday night band in the Masons with Black in their name means thrash metal. I was encouraged by the number of people in the crowd wearing top hats and when the band opened with Pink Floyd’s In The Flesh, sung with plenty of gusto, I realised that this could be an interesting night.

BLACK DAWN

The band started their set playing psychedelic wig-out jams which made me think of them as a teenage Hawkwind, although the band are apparently in their early twenties. As the support acts had both pulled out, Black Dawn played for nearly two hours. This type of music could get self-indulgent and tedious in that time but the charisma of the lead singer and the musicianship of the band kept me interested far longer than I would have expected. I found out what the top hats were about when the band played ZZ Top’s sharp dressed man with their singer wearing a top hat, tails, red sun glasses and sporting a cane. My interested did eventually start to wane and I’m not a big fan of Metallica so I wasn’t as excited and some other members of the crowd when the keyboard player and singer swapped roles for a cover of For Whom The Bell Tolls but that was over an hour into their set and I was impressed with the keyboard players’ cane skills when he took to the front of the stage.

When the Masons crowd is getting restless, the way to always get them back on your side is to cover Iron Maiden and Black Dawn’s cover of Fear of the Dark gave the gig a new lease of life. In fact, even after a two hour set the crowd still called for an encore and although the guitarist seemed keen for some Slayer, the band finished with 21 Against’s usual encore/party song, Neil Young’s Keep on Rocking in the Free World.

You would have thought that after playing for that long that the band needed a rest but they all spoke with me at length after the gig about the bass player’s blistered fingers and the guitarist’s home made pedal board amongst other things. You could tell they were enthusiastic about their music and we were still chatting even after everyone else had gone home and with Kris the landlord standing behind me tapping his watch.

Check out Black Dawn on facebook

Photo of Black Dawn by Trudi G  check out more photos of the band on the  Llanelli Music Scene facebook page