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Today is the day of misery!

English melancholia is the natural state of our musical heritage. From the Pink Floyd prog rockers of the early seventies, through to the post punk gloom of The Cure / Joy Division / Bunnymen to the Coldplay / Radiohead axis of today, art school rockers have thrived on the doom and gloom that seeps out of every pore of this septic isle.

Keane are the epic piano-led songwriters of the current crop. They have got the knack of writing melodic anthems that will become student bedsit classics for years, their rapid ascent has seen them become one of the biggest bands in the country in the past few months, and they hook the crowd in with their moody missives. Shame.

Elbow are local heroes made good, the Bury based band have been around for the best part of  a decade and their multi-layered epics are at total odds to their nicest guys on the Manchester scene demeanour. Guy Garvey's personability becames a godsend when he engages the crowd with a best things about Manchester chat when the bass guitar packs in. Elbow's songs get under the skin and the grey sky backdrop is perfect for their own unique brand of northern melancholy - a distinctly different branch of the form than the posher boys from the south.

The Cure have been kings of this scene for decades now. They were part of the early eighties spike in popularity of the genre and went on to become one of biggest bands in the world, before lying low for a few years. Their recent comeback album, produced by nu-metal uber producer Ross Robinson, has seen them hassle their way back to the front of the picture, that and the constant name drops of being a big influence on the most unlikely of bands has seen the Cure come back into fashion.

The first band today to actually look like rock starts, albeit in Gothic kinda way, the band look unscathed and unchanged from their time out. Robert Smith still looks like a scraggy doll, hair all miss-shaped and that glorious smudged make up, Simon Gallup still does his Stranglers  moves on his bass guitar and the rest of the band still build those crescendos of dark sound that dominate the best Cure moments.

They run though plenty of tracks from their killer comeback album and the darker side of their sound - not so much of the pop stuff - but the climax is the mid-set 'Hundred Years' from their early 'Pornography' album. A dark, piledriving, apocalyptic tune, its English melancholia at its very best; dark and intense with a rousing apocolyptic rush as it drives towards climax. 

Post-gig a clearly elated Smith promised to return north for gigs more often. Not that hard a task for someone who has not played up here since 1992, and as someone who was born in Blackpool he should know how much us rainswept northeners love our melancholia.

Photos by Stuart Antrobus