There’s always a sense of excitement that comes with the start of a new year; music fans across the country eagerly await the line-ups for summer festivals.  Rumours abound for weeks on who might be making an appearance at the plethora of events which will be taking place up and down the UK (and abroad, if you’re adventurous) - and as the announcements are made, the excitement is heightened by the fact that you can almost reach and and grab the summer season in front of you.

Live at Leeds, held over the first May bank holiday, is always one such event for us.  Perhaps the giddiness is aided by the fact there are not one, but two days off in May; but it’s one festival that guarantees a great day out with a really good mix of music to keep you going.  

In a similar vein to Tramlines and Dot to Dot, Live at Leeds embraces the venues across its city; from tiny underground bars to larger venues like the University of Leeds - and everything in between.  There’s something for every taste and there’s a well-curated list of artists to entertain you through the day, be it an up and coming unsigned act or your favourite Top 40 band.  You can plan your day out to suit your own schedule - hey, you can even stop for a pub lunch and/or kebab on the way round.  

This year is no exception.  Highlights for us include the return of Get Inuit, who we discovered at LAL 2015.  Their infectious guitar pop comes in quick, rather noisy, bursts - in a good way, of course.  Alongside them, Let’s Eat Grandma; we reviewed their debut album last year and would love to see them recreate their mad, whimsical music in a live environment, particularly because so many instruments are involved in each track.  Bigger acts include Jagwar Ma, Gabrielle Aplin and Temples, whilst Slaves, White Lies, Wild Beasts, Nothing But Thieves, and the rather well booked ahead-of-time Rag’n’Bone Man complete the eclectic line-up.

With the last acts on the line-up being announced this week - Frightened Rabbit and  amongst them - you’re now in prime position to make the shortlist of bands you want to see.  Venues and times are still to come, the hardest part now will be working out how many bands you can squeeze into your day.

If the prospect of the main event leaves you wanting more, the festival is sandwiched with two gigs - the Live at Leeds Welcome with Future Islands on Friday 28th April, and Maximo Park close the weekend on Sunday 30th.  You’d be hard pushed to find something you don’t like.

Live at Leeds takes place on Saturday, April 29th. Tickets cost £32.50 and are available at various outlets - check www.liveatleeds.com for more information.

In his book, This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music, Adam Smith-Houghton details the various hormones released by the hypothalamus when the brain processes sad music. Chief of these is prolactin. In a delicious pleasure/pain symmetry, prolactin is released both when the brain tries to cope with emotional trauma and also, tellingly, post-orgasm. Tonight at St Johns Church in Hackney, Scott Hutchinson and Frightened Rabbit are here to make sure we get a good dose of the emo boohoos, and A WHOLE FUCK TON OF PROLACTIN. The teenage boys crying along to The Midnight Organ Fight back in 2008 are now adult boys. They have beards. They have plaid. They want that prolactin.

A church is a fittingly sombre venue for a band so intent on laying their (albeit secular) feelings bare, and one feels Scott Hutchinson, self-excoriating misrerabilist extraordinaire might just feel as at home on a cross as he does on a stage. Frightened Rabbit walk on to a rapturous scream from the crowd, and begin a set of old songs and new. Hutchinson begins with a reflection on his audience “keeping up with the times”, looking forwards and looking backwards. After musing on the subject for a while, he settles on the latter: “Fuck what all your friends from Hoxton are listening to… come and see Frightened Rabbit in a church.”

The band begin with the barnstorming emo-opener from their latest album - ‘Get Out’, and after a characteristically polite “thank you, thanks, cheers”, launch into Pedestrian Verse’s ‘Holy’ and Midnight Organ Fight’s ‘Modern Leper’. At that point the people standing up in the pews next to the sign that says ‘no standing’, stick their fingers in the air. “I used to fucking hate Winter of mixed drinks” Hutchinson confesses of the band’s slightly overdubbed, much maligned, quite brilliant third album, before beginning the first of five songs from that album - ‘Living In Colour’, ‘Things’, ‘Footshooter’ and ‘Nothing Like You’. We then get the hey-nonny barn dance of ‘Old, Old Fashioned’ from Midnight Organ Fight, and a rendition of the astonishingly awkward ‘Keep yourself warm’ sung from the church pulpit.

It’s nice to see that the black dog of melancholy still stalks Scott Hutchinson despite his move to the sunny climes of LA, and that Frightened Rabbit continue to function on the ‘if it ain’t broke…’ mantra is probably the main reason they have kept their dogged and obsessively loyal fanbase over the last decade. The band return for an encore to end on ‘The Loneliness And The Scream’, a fist-pumping Winter of Mixed Drinks standout full of ‘woahs’ and seemingly constructed entirely in order to make a crowd sing along. Needless to say, it has the desired effect.