MOVE 2002 - day 1

For those of you who don't know, MOVE is an urban music event that is set in Manchester. The idea is that it offers the audience both new and legendary bands/artistes.

Judging by today's line-up, it certainly has got both new bands (The Real People) and legendary artistes (David Bowie). However, I'm having some difficulty in deciding which category Suede and Divine Comedy should be in. No disrespect to them, but they are definitely not legendary, talented yes, but not legendary. They have also been around for some time and therefore they can be categorised as being a 'new' band.

On arrival to the cricket ground, the first major shock was the price of car parking, £10 to park my car in a dodgy unlit car park that was miles away from the arena. As you can imagine this gave a bad impression straight away.

The organisation of the event was superb, the security stewards were very helpful at telling people where things like toilets and stalls had been placed. The arena itself was well planned out, and no matter where you stood or sat, you could get a decent view from anywhere in the arena.

It was only when Divine Comedy appeared on stage that the catatonic audience showed some signs of life, starting to sing and dance along to the classic tracks such as 'Generation Sex', and `National Express'.

The audience eagerly awaited the arrival of Suede, who arrived on stage to a warm round of applause. One of the most noticeable things about Suede is that Brett Anderson has aged quite a lot since suede first hit the music scene. Half way through their performance, the skies above opened up and thoroughly soaked everyone, but even the bad weather wasn't able to deter the audience from watching, the set list including most of their nostalgic songs such as `Animal Nitrate` and 'The Beautiful Ones'.

Fortunately the rain stopped in time for the legendary David Bowie.

Bowie arrived on stage to a thunderous round of applause. He was dressed in what I can only describe as an absolutely fantastic three-piece suit, with a white shirt and a silver chain draping from his suit jacket - he'd certainly made a lot of effort to look smart, unlike in his earlier Ziggy Stardust days.

He walked calmly to the microphone and said "Hello". Just his mere presence in the same venue was enough to make the audience go weak at the knees. The songs played included his golden oldies 'Ashes to Ashes' and 'Starman' as well as a few new tracks from his current album 'Heathen'.