We've been here before, many times.

But the last time was more years ago than we care to remember.

The Tivoli hasn't changed much in the years that it dwindled from being the most important venue in North Wales, hosting formative gigs by the likes of Radiohead and Oasis, to a gladitorial arena for happy hardcore-loving scallies. Its resurrection is evidenced by a lick of paint and a neon sign, but it'll take more than cosmetics to draw the crowds back. That will require good bands that people have heard of.

We're here to see Wrexham's Mother Of Six but much as we love the plutonium riffs that they’ve borrowed off Sabbath, we're cynical that they'll pull enough people to form anything more than a huddle in a venue that can hold 500 people.

And so it proves.

There's enough room for those of us who have heard about the gig to swing a tiger reared on growth hormones.

We arrive hoping that we haven't missed the start of Mother Of Six's set, but -- as it happens -- the first support are still on stage. This gives us the chance to check out the second band, Sinner Men. They're Wrexham-based, too, and have a long history of name changes that makes us imagine they might be lacklustre and desperate. Instead, they sparkle with possibilities. The opening track, an instrumental, is a bit clever-clever, like someone with attention deficit disorder skipping through a speeded-up Slint album, but they grow as the set progresses.

One song in particular, which they introduce as "a new one" in the way that unsigned bands do in front of audiences who have never heard them, has us very impressed as the three singing instrumentalists line up at the front of the stage and do something that sounds like Vampire Weekend covering Primus.

It's original, oblique and inventive.

We love them.

Then, after an interminable delay, Mother Of Six's frontman, looking very smart and intense in a black suit, is standing centre stage pointing at his microphone. It's obvious to us that it's not working. It doesn't appear to be obvious to the sound engineers. After the band has circled through their intro a dozen times someone with a Maglite walks up on stage and looks at stuff for a while without fixing anything.

Still Mother Of Six attempt to grind through their opening song, but the God Of Clueless Sound Engineers is very much against them.

When the vocals do, eventually, emerge they sound like they're being sung down a well stuffed with duvets.

It's awful.

And none of it is Mother Of Six's fault.

The drum monitor breaks down during the next song.

The band are trying to plough on professionally, but when your drummer can't hear anything and when unintentional feedback is running amok on stage, for song-after-song, it makes the task insurmountable.

Idiots in the audience start heckling. The band look murderous. We leave because we're angry.

If we’d paid to witness this farrago we’d be asking for a refund. In our younger days, we might even have lobbed something at that neon sign.

Adam Walton Back to the top of the page...