Venue:
The Empire, Belfast
Date: 10/01/2026
The audience:
Lots of blokes with cropped grey hair and their partners, but also a fair number of younger women dancing around, who couldn’t have been ‘there’ back in the days.
It made me think..
About that link to the 1960s. Also about mortality – I lost a great pal from the Belfast music scene recently, and he was only in his 60s, one of those people seemingly indestructible and around forever. The Adventures make a still young sound, yet they’re pensioners. But let us be joyful and celebrate them while they’re still rocking (once in a while)! And if any GB festival promoters are reading this, trust me – book them and they’ll wow your crowd.
‘Raining All Over the World’, 1992.
Oh blimey! That’s Frank Sidebottom. You know it is, it really is. Thank you!
Do you have a set list @colin-h?
Big fan of the first two albums
I’ve asked Pat for it. Opening song was ‘Feel the Raindrops’. ‘Walk Away Renée’ was the encore, followed by a repeat of ‘Raindrops’ (they hadn’t rehearsed any more than the 80-90 odd mins they played).
Thanks! I love “Feel the raindrops!”
Here you go Fred…
Adventures Empire set list:
1. Feel the Raindrops
2.Lovetalk
3.Scarlet
4.Drowniing in the Sea of Love (something in the air)
5. Your Greatest shade of blue
6. Down by the water
7.Monday Monday
8.My Imaginary Girlfriend
9. Send my Heart
10. Hold me now
11. Love in Chains
12. The Hanging Tree
13. With the Cats
14. Broken Land
15. Washington Deceased
——————
16. Walk away Renee
17. Raindrops (reprise)
Thank you! Plenty there to investigate but also some belters!
I have their first two albums. I always thought they were ruined by clanking Fairlights, the obvious dependence on ringers, and production nightmares. Which is a tragedy because they have great songs. Despite my reservations on the technical aspects, I think Broken Land is monumentally perfect, and it slays me every time I hear it.
Agreed.
Broken Land is as close to perfection as I think you can be. An absolute monster of a song.
I have the first two LPs and fairly recently picked up the third, which was produced by Clanger & Winstanley, for a couple of quid. I still haven’t played it yet.
I must also give last year’s one a go.
Just realised that my original text didn’t post – just the two ‘extra bits’ that the review template asks for. Here it is…
The Adventures at the Empire last night – amazing… With Terry and Pat it’s always been about quality.
What struck me last night was two things: (1) the huge, expansive, shining sound of the Adventures – Pat (guitar/bv), Terry (voval/ac gtr), Eileen Gribben (bv), Nick Scott (bass), Iggy Ward (guitar), Conor McHugh (keys) and Mark Toman (drums) – which would be a sensation in any arena or festival setting, if only they had the opportunity to play such events; (2) how deeply connected Pat and Terry are to the 1960s.
They released their first single as the Adventures in 1984 – Terry having previously enjoyed one-off chart success fronting the Starjets in 1978, and both Tel and Pat trying to repeat that with the short-lived Tango Boys in 1980. But for most people, the Adventures were associated with the late 80s – when ‘Broken Land’ was a No. 20 hit and widely played on radio.
Cinematic, expansive, with huge chorus and a frisson of melancholy – that sums up a fair number of Adventures songs. On the surface they seem pretty simple – lots of basic G, C, D, Em chords – but Pat builds in little motifs (like that five-note piano thing at the start of ‘Broken Land’) and layers of fabulously arranged harmony vocals and suddenly a song that might seem not far removed from a skiffle number or a calypso becomes a stadium epic with, often, a feeling of profundity… even if it’s about getting caught in a shower or whatever! (Lots of Pat’s songs are about water – rain, seas, rivers…)
Although Pat, a fellow Mahavishnu Orchestra fan, can most certainly play complex chord sequences and jazz fusion solos… he chooses not to! At least not when he’s writing pop songs. He once told me ‘It’s almost two different things’, referring to pop music and, well, ‘music’. 😃 He also tells a funny story about meeting Narada Michael Walden (in his pop/soul phase) on ‘Top of the Pops’ in the 80s, and Narada being complimentary about whatever pop song the Adventures were promoting. ‘Look, never mind that,’ says Pat, before asking Narada about playing drums with the Mark 2 Mahavishnu Orchestra in the 70s.
That’s the thing about a lot of 80s pop people – even though, when watching re-runs of ‘Top of the Pops’ and even back then, at the time, all of these acts with shoulder pads, bouffant whacky hairdos and wildly colourful clothes seem to inhabit a place many miles distant from the 1970s, it was still incredibly close chronologically to a whole different world. All of those ghastly, clattery Stock/ Aitken/ Waterman hits of the late 80s were only 10 years on from Sham 69, Dave Edmunds, Eddie & the Hot Rods and the like – an already almost quaint world of four blokes in t-shirts playing guitar, bass and drums. (As an aside, loads of those 70s acts quietly ploughed on or reunited after the 80s… and the SAW people are by and large forgotten, or certainly no longer active in music.)
The ‘New Romantic’ acts of the early 80s were generally happy to cite David Bowie and Roxy Music as their influences – happy to have 1972 as their Year Zero. The Adventures came along after those people, but they were older – in their 30s when they started having hits under that name. Pat and Terry’s youth was in the late 60s, and that’s the era they still go back to – that magic time of hearing and responding to music in your teens. And the 60s was and remains the golden age for pop music.
The DNA of the late 60s was there in plain sight at the Empire last night – covers of the Four Tops’ 1966 hit ‘Walk Away Renée’ and the Mamas & Papas’ hit from the same year ‘Monday, Monday’ (transformed into something that felt epic and profound, miles away from the campfire singalong of the original, with Pat even playing a fusion solo under the layers of cascading harmonies and synth washes at the end. (I might have been the only person who noticed that solo! 😃 The scripted ‘Broken Land’ solo was the only time he turned the volume up solo-wise.)
There were also passing nods to the Beatles’ ‘Daytripper’ (1965), Arthur Brown’s ‘Fire’ (1968) and, most thrillingly, a few lines of Thunderclap Newman’s ‘Something in the Air’ tagged on as a coda to something. I’d suggest they work up a full cover of this one – like Pat’s arrangements of ‘Renée’ and ‘Monday Monday’ and so many of his own songs, it has that rare combination of joyful epicness and plangent yearning. I noticed a fun reference to mid-70s novelty act Cats UK (‘Luton Airport’) last night too, when it suddenly struck me that the ‘ooo-ee-ooo’ backing vocal motif in ‘With the Cats’ (from the Adventures’ recent comeback album) was a hiding-in-plain-sight doff of the cap to the Cats (UK). Nice one, Pat!
Enough about Pat – Terry Sharpe… What can one say? As a pop/rock vocalist he’s brilliant and instantly recogniseable when you hear him. But as a stage performer he’s also a complete wild card – he brings a thrilling air of danger, jeopardy, theatricality and off-centre fun, like the late (Sensational) Alex Harvey, I would suggest.
Pat is in the background on stage – with Eileen, Terry and Iggy up front – to the extent that anyone unfamiliar with the band would think he was a hired hand. But he is the source of the music. Terry, though, controls the performance completely – responding to the moment. If he changed the set list around, everyone else would go with it. If he sings some punter ‘Happy birthday’, everyone on stage plays along (and last night he did).
Amazingly, Terry is at least 70 this year – that’s what Wikipedia tells us, though that may well derive from an old PR handout (such things routinely reducing the age of dues-paid artists when they signed to a major label back in the day). A crony of Tel’s last night told me he’s 73 this year. Whatever the truth, the point is that Terry is an artist whose passion for music was forged in the 1960s and early 70s. Pat might be a year or two younger, but he’s the same – his formative musical experiences being Taste at the Whitla Hall 1970 and the Mahavishnu Orchestra somewhere in 1975.
I can’t think of any other pop people who came to prominence in the mid/late 80s who have such a deep formative connection to the 60s. Being perpetually fascinated with (guitar-based) pop as a writer, Pat never sought to create ersatz 60s pop – he was all about creating pop music of the moment during the Adventures first hurrah. That style of pop/rock writing went out of fashion during the 90s/00s – ironically, the sneery sub-Beatles sounds of Britpop took over, being threadbare homages to the mid 60s sound from a generation of people who (unlike Tel and Pat) *weren’t* there!
But these days, anything goes – the pop charts don’t really matter any more, and the Adventures are clearly enjoying playing every once in a while for their old fans in Belfast. In a way, it’s a bit like, say, Gerry & the Pacemakers in the 1980s/90s playing for their old fans from the early 60s. The difference with the Adventures is that while the Merseybeat acts were very firmly locked into purveying nostalgia, with a sound that had passed, the show I saw from the Adventures last night could hold its own in any current pop/rock context – and knowledge of the band and its repertoire beforehand would be completely unnecessary.
Pat has conjured up a repertoire of pop/rock songs and arrangements, with Terry as the charismatic magician holding court at the front, that are iron-clad – impervious to the ravages of time, immediately accessible on first hearing. And the band is great.
In a fair world, they would be continuing this periodic comeback malarkey with guest spots on arena bills with Simple Minds, Texas, Tears for Fears – those sorts of acts – or the GB festival circuit.
Pat once told me that he didn’t know a single bar owner – a determined separating of himself from getting too involved in the Del Boy world of hustling for gigs (when he and Terry do covers things under the Dead Hadsomes name). I can understand this – he remains the creator, chipping away at songwriting, hoping an opportunity for those new songs to be heard comes around. With the Adventures’ recent album ‘Once More With Feeling’ (2025), they’re getting a new moment.
I don’t think the Adventures have anybody trying to break into the festivals scene on their behalf. But maybe they’re not bothered. Maybe it’s enough to play for your friends every once in a while.
Here they are [above!] in 1992 with another of Pat’s songs about getting drenched – ‘Raining All Over the World’. They have so many classics they didn’t even have time to play this one last night!
They did Walk Away Renée around the time of the first album, on this Record Mirror cover-mount 7″ EP. I know, ‘cos I have a copy.
https://www.discogs.com/release/198311-Various-4-Track-Solid-EP
And I believe ‘Monday Monday’ was on their last ‘original era’ album.
…indeed, and it was a single. Decent version but releasing a cover killed their momentum.
It was colossal last night – a huge, soaring, multi-layered sound. Even if phone clips appear they likely wouldn’t do it justice. And anyway, I noticed that people with phones all seemed to wait for ‘Broken Land’.
I’ll definitely go back to the old ones, and will spin the new one. I’d see them if they played over here.
Where is your ‘here’?
Birmingham uk at the moment
I remember Starjets. War Stories was a top tune iirc
Edith. Should have been a reply waasy up there⬆️
Sea Of Love is an absolutely brilliant album. Not a weak song on it and two or three absolute classics. My copy got worn out before the decade finished.
I didn’t realise they released a new album last year but I’ve downloaded a copy and will give it some time this week.
If they tour in England, I’d be there like a shot.
Is that Iggy from Katmandu ?
Yes – as was. Versions of Katmandu seemed to go on forever and I guess Ignatius was in most of them.
Returning to the Empire on 20th June.
…and the word on the street is that the mighty Shock Treatment will be supporting – featuring original members Dave ‘The Beard’ McLarnon (gtr/lead vocal) and Johnny Dental (drums) plus Billy Shovel (lead guitar/BV, ex Ghost of a US Airman), John Rossi (bass/BV) and Gordie ‘Shuffle’ Walker (drums – yes, two drummers).
Here they are last year with a new recording of their legendary 1980 45 ‘BelfastTelegraph’, with the late Bazza McIlheney on guest vocals (their original vocalist).