Despite all the festivals going on in England over the month of August, there seems to be an absolute lack of decent gigs. The only one I can remember was Sleigh Bells at The Lexington on the 9th but only heard about it after tickets sold out completely.

On August 2, I did get the chance to start the month with Best Coast at Cargo in Shoreditch with Sky Larkin as support. One of the main reasons I booked a ticket for this show was that Sky Larkin was supporting. Minor reasons involved the ticket price being £10 and the gig being on a Monday.

I never even heard of Best Coast prior to finding this gig listed online and this proved to be a very bad thing.

The venue was at Cargo which is in Shoreditch and by now, you should know that it’s a favourite place of mine.

Not listening to the Twitter message from @weareskylarkin that the stage time will be 21:00 for Sky Larkin and 22:00 for Best Coast, I arrived early and had to sit down in their cozy bar area and nice sofa seats for at least an hour. When doors to the stage area opened, I decided to go in despite hardly anyone being there yet and sat on the stage, waiting.

This place proved to be the perfect spot since when Sky Larkin came up on stage, the lovely Katie Harkin was to play right in front of me.

At 9 in the evening, Sky Larkin marched back on stage and performed songs from their two albums starting with Still Windmills. Since it has now been 3 weeks since I saw them, I can’t remember their complete setlist but it was a mix of songs from their two albums.

This marked the first time I’ve seen Sky Larkin on stage excluding the bandstand busk since it wasn’t really a live gig and more of an acoustic set.

The band was simply amazing and I can’t wait to see them for the first time headlining their own show which is at The Lexington on September 20.

Did I mention that I was right in front of Katie? She was just incredible.

As for Best Coast, well, I was disappointed to say the least. In all fairness, I went to the gig halfheartedly, not really knowing who they were, not having listened to their songs, and mainly being their for Sky Larkin.

It was their album launch, Crazy For You, and they played tremendously fast. In 20 minutes, they already played around 10 songs and were wondering if they’ve been on stage that long. Granted, their songs are really short even on the record but when they played them onstage, it felt rushed. This would explaine why they started so late.

In short, I didn’t enjoy this gig too much mainly because I didn’t get to know Best Coast as much as I should have. They are a good band though and I would definitely need to listen to them quite a bit more.

Also, I had way too high expectations since this was the only gig in August which I’ve been to and am going to.

It’s incredible how a big festival month (V Festival and Reading/Leeds) have such few one-off shows in London during the week.

Oh well, September looks to be so much more promising. Wake me up when August ends.