It’s starting to become de rigueur, to shoot for a racing jaunt into Manchester.  Manchester's live scene is so far ahead of my own city’s, it is depressing.  The Frenchman is in good spirits with a bit of long overdue good news in a what has been a fairly awful year for both of us.  The car seems in good shape despite a quick check under the hood. Neither of us have been to the Albert Hall before and as ever, we are absurdly early. It sits in a row of upmarket bars on the north side of Deansgate. They have completely overlooked the plus one request and just confirmed the photographer.  After some negotiation I get in on a press pass. The venue is upstairs. The Hall lies somewhere between a hollowed out church and a unused court.  It has high sided balconies and is all dark wood.  Bars line either side of the theatre and are slightly overpriced even in the live music realm.

As ever my temple require attention at the worst possible time and I thus miss the opening of Chelsea Wolfe's set. After a not so quick trip to the basement, I clamber the stairs to an ominous drone of long held E chords and slow purposeful drums.  Like the march of an army made up entirely of miserable teenagers, the singer, Wolfe begins to howl.  The high ceilings of the auditorium turns the high pitched Gothic queen's vocals to mush.  No words are discernible and in many ways it adds to the eeriness of her set. I’m sure this music is best suited to a windowless auditorium where the lighting and posturing have the most dramatic effect. The Albert Hall has tall stained glass windows running the length of the venue and here in the hottest northern summer for a long time the sun doesn’t set until after ten.  So Chelsea’s dramatic gloomy meanderings are somewhat lost on the daytime.  Her set, with little or no tempo change becomes one long hum, with some vague operatic ambitions add little to the overall gig.  In the interests of fairness this wan’t the best venue to judge the American but when your photographer is mimicking high pitched vocals for his own amusement it likely isn’t a great sign of future success.  The final line of the set, Chelsea Wolfe, the girl who cried.

I’ve never been a Ministry fan, I’ll just put that on the table from the outset.  I am indifferent to their music and have never sough it out. I usually don’t like to review bands that have been going for ages as so much as been written that I feel no burden to add to the ole.  However, I was intrigued at the chance to see an older band who I have absolutely no opinion of.  It is fair to say that after the opening act desperate dreariness, Ministry would struggle to fall down flat on their dreadlocked heads. The night had started to draw in a little, so the permanent backdrop of eighties style video mashups of politics and religion was effective.  The songs where punchy and the lead singer was lively and entertaining.  There was a relentless pace about them which was the needed remedy. 

The most unusual aspect of the hall is the incredibly tall stage for such a small venue, it has no real bearing on the review, but Johann was unusually challenged to get a set of acceptable photographs. He was forced to sweat his way from stage front to the back of the room and then to either balcony.  It did however make for an unhindered view of the whole event.  If you are as much lilliputian as I am then you realise it was goof to not have to leer over taller men’s shoulders. Ministry are a political beast, pro antifa, anti mainstream and hyper aggressive, they embody the teenage politico, angry passion.  With songs like "Punch In The Face" and "Antifa" they could easily find a new audience given the right direction.  Sadly having 30 year old untargeted rhetoric delivered by a fifty year old in dreads probably isn’t helping their cause, and did I mention the chickens, the inflatable anti nazi, trump faced chickens. Ministry left us as we left them early and unsatisfied, the message as permanent as the air in the chickens. Yet somehow a handful of the songs have stuck with me, punchy, dances rock songs with a vague anti mainstream message still resonating with the teenager in me. The journey home, no mention of the gig really just personal things and talk of the future because despite the failings of the music, hope is all we have.