"A Prayer For Wings" / Garbage

Last week, I paid a rare visit to Swansea, to see West End/Broadway director Sean Mathias’ production of the play which kick-started his career in the mid-1980s, “A PrayerFor Wings”, performed in his home town for the first time, at the Volcano Theatre. The play itself was beautifully performed, and stood up very well, but one was inevitably distracted by the presence of Sir Ian McKellen and Frances Barber supporting their old friend in that intimate, rough-and-ready space; Kevin Allen who played the male role in the original Edinburgh production was also in attendance.

"A Prayer For Wings" production team (photo: Swansea Grand Theatre)

Sunday night saw a long-awaited event – the visit of Garbage to Cardiff, several years after a previous date was cancelled when the band went on hiatus. In support, in the Great Hall at the Students’ Union, was DuBlonde, featuring guitar heroine Beth Jeans Houghton leading a classic rock trio with a stripped-down, sensitively punky set, mostly comprising new material; and she even manned the merch stall during the interval.

The headliners were in imperious form, singer Shirley Manson in chatty mood as she admitted being more at ease playing in a relatively intimate space than during other recent shows. With the augmented classic line-up missing only drummer and super-producer Butch Vig (rotator cuff injury), the set focussed on the  second album “Version 2.0”, the current tour marking the 20^th anniversary re-release; but newer songs such as “Blood For Poppies” got an airing, as well as classic early singles “Vow”, “Only Happy When It Rains” and “Stupid Girl”. One forgets how massive Garbage were in the 1990s, with the world ready for a female-oriented, electronica-inflected take on grunge, and Manson is certainly an authoritative but somehow relatable frontwoman. This was a propulsive, 80-minute set, and I felt the absence of some of their more poignant songs (“Cup Of Coffee” excepted), but it was rounded off with an ironic encore of “When I Grow Up”, delighting a crowd many of whom were not in the first flush of youth.

The show provided a fittingly feverish end to a day of remarkable televised sport (England’s men winning the Cricket World Cup; Djokovic beating Federer in the longest ever Wimbledon final).