Arriving in a damp and dark Sunderland after battling the inclement weather, we arrive for our first taste of the new Independent. You can see where it once stood just across the road, home to so many great evenings but we’re sure the new incarnation will yield as many awesome evenings.

Unfortunately, we miss first band Cohesion, but we’re in time for Moon Gangs. Will Young’s diminutive figure hides behind a variety electronic trickery, his beautiful loops and drones with sporadic synth stabs that pierce the air throughout his set. Whilst this is fine for the first ten minutes the drones remain fairly stagnant and there needs to be at least a small amount of variation.

Taking nothing away from the set, the drones are beautiful yet lacking in imagination. Something, which cannot be said for Cheatahs; their well-crafted indie rock is perfectly balanced and they hit the stage with the intention of transporting us all to a much sunnier place than Sunderland. Tracks like ‘Geographic’ filling the new iteration of the Independent; their rocky guitars leading the way throughout the set entire. Much like ‘Kneworth’, it seems to be a slightly darker track, the guitars taking control as the vocals take a backseat. The band really let go here, somewhat heavier than the rest, it maintains, and embodies, the balance of the evening. Cheatahs seem to have a bit of everything, whether it is vast expansive or something intense and dark, both facets are on show this evening.

Tracks like ‘Fall’ see the band becoming freer, opening up, in turn this sees the sound relax, becoming a little less harsh as the vocals take precedence. They close out their main set with a rather lively rendition of ‘The Swan’ which has everyone in the crowd nodding along.

Overall it’s an excellent evening, despite the weather, and the smaller than anticipated crowd. Cheatahs made up for it with their huge presence, they were truly excellent this evening and its not difficult to see why they’re firmly on the up.

Zola Jesus played London's KOKO on November 18th in support of her new album TAIGA. Richie Soans went along on the night to capture the action.

TAIGA is available from amazon & iTunes.

Le Guess Who? 2014 initially finds us in the newly built-upon (& so massively expanded) Tivoli-Vredenburg venue, slap bang in the centre of the city and now housing nine performance spaces over 13 floors - surely the envy of any similar sized city (or indeed many larger ones) with pretensions of being a shining light of the live music scene.

German industrial heavyweights EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN are performing their new work Lament in the venue's Grote Zaal so that seems the ideal way to start off this year's event. Originally commissioned by the Belgian city of Diksmuide as part of its WWI commemoration events the live environment is undoubtedly the best way in which to experience such an involving and intense document of man's capacity for inhumanity and the portrayal of war as a beast that feeds on social ills and religious zeal. As a result plans to see other acts elsewhere in the venue are quickly shelved, such is the hold exerted by messrs Bargeld, Arbeit, Unruh, Moser and Hacke.

Taking to the stage amidst great adulation from the capacity crowd the quintet are initially suitably grim faced and soon hard at work pounding away on the many instruments they've constructed specifically for the performance of Lament. Boiler-like sculptures of metal are pushed over, dragged, whipped with chains, added to and subtracted from to create a noise that, as it builds to its climax, manages to achieve the aimed for disturbing effect of the sounds of bombardment and other horrendous aural images from the first European mechanised war.

The sight of a purple dildo being used to gain a particular sound from the guitar and Blixa Bargeld's good humoured, though enlightening, extrapolations on the origins of songs in the work (not to mention his farm yard animal impersonations during the rendition of 'Der Beginn Des Weltkrieges 1914 (Dargestellt Unter Zuhilfenahme Eines Tierstimmenimitators)') and latterly N. U. Unruh's Casey Jonesesque plastic hat and the sight of 3 grown men squirting high pressure air through a number of plastic drainpipes to great musical effect all instil elements of lightheartedness into the performance without in anyway diminishing the weight of the subject matter.

There's no greater example of how seriously the band have approached the work than to see them pounding out 'Der 1. Weltkrieg' on the first use of those previously mentioned drainpipes. Lasting, as it does, over 13 minutes it's a furious workout for the upper body whilst also being a fascinating take on musically representing the main 1914 - 1918 period of the war. 'Let's Do It A Dada' from the 2007 album Alles Weider Offen gets a look-in during the first encore and the group prove once again that they're as up to date (if not ahead of the pack) as ever by having recordings of the show available to buy at the merch stall within minutes of the stage being vacated. A band at the peak of their powers and a performance worthy of the cost of the weekend's ticket alone.

Friday night sees us head to start on the outer fringe of the festival's circuit at the Moira venue, where Ryley Walker's doing his thing. Whether he's under the weather or otherwise phased by something the tracks from debut album All Kinds Of You just don't feel as effective live as on record. A broken string and the need to replace it, rather than swap for another guitar, after only a couple of numbers doesn't help matters and the misunderstood joke he makes to the sound engineer about putting on some trip hop leave a mildly embarrassing air in the room as we head off to Ekko for Dracula Legs.

Aware of the band only through their Too Pure single 'Heartburn Destination / Cold Licks' from earlier this year they were for the most part an unknown quantity. They rocked out pretty hard though & the venue's coal black interior was a good setting for their energetic mix of Seventies rock and Lungfishesque vocal digressions. The crowd was as dense upon leaving as it was when we arrived so clearly they were doing something right in terms of keeping folk from wandering off in search of a new thrill.

From Ekko it was a ten minute walk back to the (still amazing) Tivoli-Vredenburg for another bit of box ticking in terms of seeing an older and venerable performer, in the shape of Dr. John & The Nite Trippers. The slate was blank in terms of expectations so to say we were disappointed by the part of the show we witnessed would not be strictly true. Given the great man's need of two sticks to enable him to walk out to the piano and a total lack of chat with the crowd he's clearly not in the best shape of his life, but the pedestrian pace of the songs we took in (including a very mediocre 'St. James Infirmary') failed to raise our pulse rates. Things maybe improved after we left and the bulk of the crowd seemed to be getting what they wanted but Iceage were on in the Pandora hall so excitement was now sought there.

And thankfully it was found. Whilst having doubts myself about new album Plowing Into The Fields Of Love the intensity of previous works Iceage and You're Nothing was fully on display as Elias Rønnenfelt flung himself about the stage above the seething crowd. Sardines have more space in a tin than the sea of bodies we were viewing from the balcony appeared to have yet, like all of the rooms in the venue we were to experience over the course of the weekend, discomfort seemed to have been successfully designed out of the structure and ease of movement for those leaving at any point during a performance appeared to be a more straightforward process than the packed mass of bodies would have had you believe. Having regained some of the adrenalin rush of the night before we called it a night at this point.  

Ablaze in a stage of white, dressed in his usual 1940’s gangster attire, strapped firmly to a guitar, Jack White enters. The first thing he plays is straight off his new album Lazaretto, ‘High Ball Stepper’ tumbles straight into ‘Lazaretto’ before calmly speaking “Leeds, hello” to the crowd. A small white TV sits centre stage showing a static picture throughout.

Strangely for an arena venue, there were no large screens to aid the viewing potential for the people sitting in the far back row. Maybe they weren’t working? Maybe the black curtain forgot to fall down? Or maybe White chose not to have a camera in his face showing the sweat drip from every pore to the thousands that fill the Leeds arena. The latter, would be more interesting. The seats shake as White bursts into ‘Blunderbuss’ and ‘Just One Drink’, his voice curds and cracks as he sings through his gritted teeth, “You drink water, I drink gasoline”.

Like an enormous thunderclap White rattles through songs taken from The White Stripes, The Raconteurs and his own back catalogue. It is a shame that no tracks from The Dead Weathers' past two albums featured, although the newly built Leeds arena roof may have shattered due to noise produced by ‘Hang you from the Heavens’.

Jack White speaks very little, only to engage the crowd in further erratic behaviour. Various pits open up on the floor. Bodies and flailing arms make the standing crowd look like a box of fishing worms, squirming along to the vibrations built by White's electrifying aptitude. 

The lights flash over the crowd in a Spanish fan like pattern, revealing their bobbing heads and applauding hands. The two hour long set explodes into a dramatic encore. A White Stripe favourite ‘Icky Thump’ soars out of White’s guitar and into the faces of the hospitable audience. Another wounding blow hits them as ‘Steady, As She Goes’ is played back to back with ‘The Black Bat Licorice’. Trailing the outro into a deeper grown, Jack White stretches his guitar over his head and wails into the mic, teasing the anticipating crowd.

When it comes to big, successful artists such as Jack White, everyone knows that popular song will appear at some point. It would be like the Rolling Stones not playing ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, or Arctic Monkeys not playing that one about dancing. The Leeds crowd know what is coming next; they know what track is going to end this spectacle. The lights go dark and a rumble of “dur dur dur dur dur dur” rises from the raucous audience, even before Jack White plays that familiar note. ‘Seven Nation Army’ forces the seated to their feet; the chants continued to build which sounds like a rowdy football match. Jack White’s hypnotic demeanour and rock and roll stance brings the arena to its knees. Leaving the audience with ringing in their ears, his guitar left slumped and a whole load of static behind him, he exits stage left.