By Allan Jones

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds were in town tonight as part of their spring tour before they hit the festival circuit so this was my second night in a row at a sold out BIC and it’s turning into a belter of a long weekend of music for me.

A pretty impressive stage set up backed by a massive video screen was a good indication of the excellent show that was to follow (unless you were one of the people who pays £50 for a ticket and then spends the night in the bar drinking and chatting to your mates and misses the whole thing).

The night was a pretty even split between solo material and Oasis favourites with about twenty songs on the set list that was about ten each with the solo material again split 50/50 between songs from the most recent album Chasing Yesterday and his previous work.

Starting with Everybody’s on the Run and then Lock All the Doors, In the Heat of the Moment and Riverman from Chasing Yesterday it was then straight into Fade Away and the first indication of the huge number Oasis fans that have followed him into the High Flying Birds era.

I often wonder that if Noel plays an Oasis song that he wrote is it a Noel Gallagher song or is he playing a cover of an Oasis song and then I realise that it doesn’t really matter as the mainly male crowd were having the time of their lives.

The last few years there also seems to be a media fascination with what Noel says about other people and who he has made funny comments about rather than his music so it was great to see Noel doing what it is he does best, and make no mistake he is still one of the best around when it comes to writing and performing music.

The main set ended with two more Oasis tunes, Digsy’s Diner and The Master Plan, before the band returned and delivered one of the strongest encores I have seen for a long time.

This included Wonderwall, Record machine, AKA What a Life and Don’t Look Back in Anger providing a storming end to what was described as The Best Gig Ever by some of the crowd as they were leaving.

I would probably not go that far but it was certainly pretty close.