Haven + Gloss / The Rocket, Leeds

Living at home, as the Beastie Boys had warned me, was such a drag. With no job and no flat, I had to move back to Morley when my final year of university came to an end the previous month. My parents were lovely, but I was used to my freedom and I was used to living in the city. I took every chance to return to Leeds, even if it was only for the night. A Haven gig at the Rocket fit the bill.

Haven were yet another band I'd discovered thanks to Steve Lamacq's Radio 1 Evening Session. At their best, Haven sounded like an upbeat Elbow and "Til The End", which was the title track of their debut E.P., was the band at their best. I'd bought the E.P. from Virgin on Albion Street when it came out and listened repeatedly during the dark days of revision for my final exams. My tastes were becoming a bit more progressive, but I was still a sucker for a bit of well-written indie rock. Haven weren't pushing back musical boundaries, they weren't particularly cool and they sounded a bit too much like lots of other post-Britpop guitar bands, but they had catchy melodies and some nice widescreen guitar parts.

Eager to spend as much time in town as possible, I persuaded my friend Spenner that we needed to get to the Cockpit as soon as the doors opened to catch the first band on. Unfortunately there were only two bands, which meant we did an awful lot of waiting around until support act, Gloss, finally took to the stage.

Never the biggest venue anyway, the Rocket was dead during Gloss's set, with barely 25 people there to watch their icy Scandinavian guitar pop. I was infatuated with their beautiful blonde vocalist Heidrun Anna, who sang in English with a glorious Norwegian accent that made me want to cry into my plastic pint glass. Sadly the band's music was a bit anonymous and slight sounding and didn't really provide an adequate platform for Anna's obvious talents. Gloss split the following year after their record label, Nude, went into voluntary liquidation.

A few late comers swelled the crowd to all of 40 for Haven's headline performance. The band's set largely showcased tracks from their forthcoming debut album and I only knew two songs as a result: "Til The End" and "Beautiful Thing", the latter played in an electric arrangement very different from the stark acoustic version that appeared on the "Til The End" E.P. I wasn't blown away by the evening but Spenner liked Haven and we ended up seeing them several more times before the end of the year.