First up tonight on this evening's four band bill are Swiss rockers Those Furious Flames whose Hives with a seventies rock twist goes down pretty well on a freezing cold Monday night in Bristol. Second up are Italian Rammstein-esque industrial rockers Naughty Whisper. The band keep the crowd happy with an okay bunch of toons but tonight due to a late start they neglect to play their rather splendid version of Cutting Crew's '(I Just) Died In Your Arms'. Oh dear.....

I really wanted to like tonight's main support band JuiceheaD and sure they are better live than on their latest album 'How to Sail a Sinking Ship' but front man Rob Vannice's smug game show host delivery grates on me like so many other generic American punker acts. They were okay but sometimes okay just isn't okay. Right?

I've always found it a bit strange when bands open with a brand new track from their latest opus rather than drawing the assembled throng in with an old classic. Tonight the Misfits don't just break that well trusted rule, in fact New Jersey's finest chose to rip Bristol a new ass by opening with the first eleven tracks from 'Devil's Rain' right off the bat...... and the Fiends go mental for it!

Crammed onto the Fleece's tiny stage, the Misfits dispense with the Aztec stage set they've been hauling around the world for the last few months and settle for a simple back drop featuring the Arthur Suydam art work from the 'Devil's Rain' album cover.

While 'Black Hole' and 'Twilight of the Dead' are all new Misfits classics we have to wait until twelve songs in of the forty plus song set to break into the archives for the first time with the mighty 'Static Age'. Followed by a high energy trip into a bygone age with 'Bullet', 'Children In Heat', 'Nike-A-Go-Go' and 'She', the band are in fine form. Jerry seems to have finally grown into his own voice, adopting a Danzig-esque croon rather than just simply screaming out the lyrics as on previous tours. He can handle the vocals challenges of both the new and the vintage stuff with ease but it's when the band breaks into the 'Resurrection' era stuff that Michale Graves is really (really, really) missed. Sure the band pull off 'American Psycho', 'The Shining', 'Dig Up Her Bones', 'Scream' and, later in the set, 'Helena', 'Descending Angel' and 'Saturday Night' (and probably a couple more I missed off my list) but hearing how much the band lean on this era and how mental the crowd go on hearing these songs, you've just got to ask yourself why the Only, Frankenstein, Chudd and Graves line up of the band isn't still raising hell on planet earth?

Twenty one tracks in and the band briefly take a trip back to 'Devil's Rain', before finishing the main set with a slew of Danzig era classics including the mighty 'Skulls', 'Where Eagles Dare' and the obligatory 'We Are 138'.

There's not too many bands out there who can pull off a set of thirty three classics even before they break into an encore but tonight there's no curfew so the band are just getting going. Newly installed drummer Eric "Chupacabra" Arce brings a youthful energy that the now departed Robo perhaps may have lacked this far into a set, but the loss of the veteran 'Fits drummer does take a bit more of the authenticity of the Doyle-less line up of the band away.

By now I'm getting a bit tired so my note writing skills have drifted away but as the band finally draw a close to the marathon set with the mighty 'Die, Die My Darling' the only niggle I have on tonight's entertainment is the lack of 'Science Fiction Double Feature' from 'The Rocky Horror Show' which the band gave a surprising airing at the Reading show the previous week.

Brilliant!!!!

Photos courtesy of Jamie Delerict and Fraser Munro