Fishbone has been around for nearly forty-five years, playing its unique stew of ska, punk, funk, rock and reggae. For their first Paris date in nearly ten years, and with an excellent new self-titled EP released just last month, you'd expect a sizable turnout. However the crowd is disappointingly small: a lot of rock fans are away attending summer festivals. But it doesn't matter! Fishbone is going to rock the house, whether there are a hundred or, like their set at Hellfest the previous day, over a hundred thousand.
Like a P-Funk show, things start out a little shaky and shambolic, and the band finds its balance after three songs. By the time they get to Everyday Sunshine and Ma and Pa, the groove machine is revved up and ready to roar. And roar it does. Frontman Angelo Moore is an absolute lunatic, dancing like a madman and singing like a man possessed, playing the tuba, keyboards or saxophone. Bassist Norwood Fisher lays down some thick grooves, his pedalboards looking like something NASA invented.
Song after song, they keep building up and up, with the small crowd getting progressively rowdier. After 55 minutes, the audience is on fire, dancing and moshing like crazy, waiting for the band to turn up the intensity...
And this is when Fishbone decides to leave the stage. "Thank you, good night!" The audience just stands there puzzled for a minute, then starts chanting. OK, it's a little short, but with a few encores, this'll do. Except that after another minute, the house lights come on and the PA starts playing music from a CD. There will be no encore. This was it. Donzo.
The Bataclan has a strict curfew, as it is located in a residential area, and any attempt to bring the band back on stage proved fruitless. Now, I realize Fishbone was the last band on the bill. Perhaps the running order should have been altered slightly, the previous bands bands each could have shortened their set by five to ten minutes... or maybe the concert should have started even earlier (which I understand is hard on a week day...), maybe we could have dispensed with the first act altogether... I don't know what the best solution might have been, but I know that this was NOT an appropriate running time for a headlining set.
The audience left disappointed, and even angry for some. This is just not how anyone in the building wanted to end the night. Too bad, as the gig was excellent... it just deserved to be little longer.
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