Swing Commanders

Swing When Your Swinging

Mellor Brook welcomed Lancashire's finest exponents of Western Swing with a full house on Easter Sunday evening. Many of the audience had been present 12 months before when The Swing Commanders made their first visit to the Centre as part of a tour to promote the release of their second album "Play It Again".

As they did then, the band certainly gave good value: two one-hour sets of high-energy country, jazz and western swing incorporating retro-pop classics like Sixteen Tons, There's an Awful Lota Coffee in Brazil, The King of the Swingers, It's Now or Never and culminating in the Cab Calloway classic, Minnie The Moocher.

The audience howled back each line at singer Pete Riley: "Hody hody ho!" and greeted the close of the show with a tumultuous standing ovation. By this time, worries about the multiplicity of interpretations of the off-side law (Rovers 0 - Liverpool 1) had dissipated and so Sham thanked the venue staff, the audience and the band for each doing their bit towards another night of top class entertainment.