Written and Photographed By Lukas Markou
There's no style to the audience. A couple tye dye shirts, a lot of forward facing baseball caps, some flannels, a pizza shirt. The closest thing to seeing band merch is a shirt saying "big dogs" - but I think thats for a motorcycle gang.
It feels like an early afternoon concert at a music festival, where most of the crowd is waiting for a later act. No one's waiting for another band though. On this hot Wednesday night, its all about Dr. Dog.
Not quite indie, not quite rock, this is exactly their audience; The inbetweeners.
As frontmen Scott McMicken and Toby Leaman ran out with the band, there was more clapping than screaming from the audience. There's the feeling that a lot of people in the audience have seen Dr. Dog before, and this is a welcome back. It has been a long time since I've seen a show without everyone's phone out recording the whole thing for social media, but I swear I did not see a single phone out during the show.
Just as I was thinking this felt like a backyard barbecue where the uncles are all in a band, the woman next to me introduced herself as the drummer's girlfriend and pointed me to the balcony above the stage where Scott's seven nephews all watched from. She said he brings the batch of Dr. Puppies to every show he can.
All sense of this being a Wednesday night in the middle of a work week disappeared. It felt more like a lazy Sunday and I half expected the House of Blues roof to pull back at any moment. As the show ended, no one moved a muscle. The golden glow on the instruments left a drop of hope that the band would return for an encore. The cheering of the audience willed the lights back up and the band strutted back out for one final song. Scott rewarded the audience with a harmonica solo in the final song. It felt like the perfect sendoff into Summer.
