The songs are still as fresh and appetising as a hot loaf: The Lightning Seeds livestream reviewed

One thing about a streamed festival is that the toilets are better than at the real thing. The other thing, though, is that it’s not really a festival. That’s not to knock the North Will Rise Again (TNWRA), which took place over Saturday and Sunday nights a few weeks back, the first featuring Liverpudlian bands and filmed in that city, the second coming from Manchester, with Mancunian groups.

The simple fact is, you can’t replicate a festival online: what the best festivals offer is chance, when one stumbles across something wholly unexpectedly on some outlying stage at an unpromising time of day. Simple economics make that impossible for an event charging a tenner: unless you were to get Woodstock levels of attendance, there would be no way to pay the bands. Hence TNWRA was just three bands per night, and only one each night familiar to a wider audience — the Lightning Seeds representing Liverpool and the Charlatans for Manchester.

The Liverpudlian supports — a young woman going by the name of Zuzu, with a three-piece backing group, and a band called Red Rum Club — served the purpose of reminding one that a band can be wholly capable and perfectly entertaining without really prompting much more than idle curiosity. At a real festival they might make you look up from your chat for a couple of minutes, nod appreciatively, but you’d be unlikely to bother with the 50-yard walk to the front of the stage.

Their shortcomings were highlighted by the main event because the Lightning Seeds — the name under which Ian Broudie operates, with an excellent young band behind him — were a marvel. I suspect Broudie’s ubiquity in the 1990s — ‘Three Lions’, the Goal of the Month music on Match of the Day, hit singles every three weeks — made us all take him for granted.