Kino Live
Tivoli, Utrecht, Holland, 2 December 2004

On Thursday the 2nd of December I travelled to Utrecht (Holland), where Arena-guitarist John Mitchell was going to play his first ever gig with the newly formed band Kino. This gig was a warming up for the gig on the 9th of December in Cologne, which would be filmed for TV broadcast by the German channel WDR.

Kino are John Mitchell on guitars and vocals, Pete Trewavas (Marillion) on bass, John Beck (It Bites) on keyboards and Chris Maitland (ex-Porcupine Tree) on drums. However, Chris wasn’t able to do the gig, so Steve Hughes (Big Big Train) replaced him. About the line up John says: ‘It’s a bit of a dream come true for me really. John Beck is my childhood hero (I used to worship It Bites) and Pete is what we all call Bass God. It doesn’t get much better than this!!’

The support act was Ricocher, which of course we know from the Cage fanmeeting back in 2001. They played for 45 minutes. To be honest I haven’t seen much of them, because I was protecting my ears from the very loud sound! Because of this, the music sounded like one big mess. A pity, because in general I like their music! 

About half an hour after Ricocher, Kino started their very first gig. You could clearly see when they walked on stage that they were a bit nervous. 

It is almost impossible to write a proper review about music you have only heard once, and especially in a live setting, so I cannot say very much about the music itself, except that you can’t place it in a specific genre. They switch easily from pop, to rock, to prog, from very heavy to very melodic. 

It is amazing how well the band members were tuned in on each other, considering this was their very first show. They must have rehearsed the songs a thousand times! After the nerves had gone, you could clearly see that the band had a good time playing all these new songs. A point worth mentioning is that John’s singing was really good! His guitar playing was good as well, but hey, that’s nothing new :-). Interesting to mention is that Marillion frontman Steve Hogarth was in the audience! In between two songs John thanked him for all his jokes in the tour bus. 

The highlight for me was the title track of their forthcoming album, Picture, which is a piano/vocal ballad. Really beautiful. All in all it was a good performance. The only real disappointment was that the sound was, again, way too loud. Still, I enjoyed every minute of the show.

Setlist:
1. Leave A Light On
2. People
3. Letting Go
4. Perfect Tense
5. Swimming In Women
6. Holding On
7. Room For Two
8. All You See
9. Picture
10. Losers Day Parade

If you want to know what Kino is like, then I suggest you to go to the band’s website (www.kinomusic.com) and download the 4-minute sampler featuring clips from the album, which is due for release in February/March 2005.

By: Tom Klijnsmit