Both Jacob Banks and Meg Mac are singers you know if you’re in England or Australia but if you’re in the US you might have to be a little more in the know to know. And if you were in San Francisco at the Fillmore on Wednesday night and you were coming out to see Jacob Banks but you were like “I’m going to grab some dinner and pop over after the opening band” then you missed a lot by not seeing Meg Mac. PS. if you do this, skip opening bands, don’t do it man. Bands open for other bands for good reasons. And it usually has to do with them being very talented but not quite discovered yet. Think if you hadn’t gone to the Rose Bowl in 1988 before Depeche Mode came on? No Nitzer Ebb. Or Marilyn Manson and the Jim Rose Side Circus before Nine Inch Nails in the 90s. Or Lady Gaga opening for NKOTB in 2008. It's real, I saw it, it happened. Meg Mac has a voice that sings. When I hear a voice like that I want to run outside the venue and gather everyone inside so they don’t miss out. She has a new album, with a really great backstory to it, and you can listen to a great track from it here. Alexandra Patsavas and Nora Felder: please discover Meg Mac and put her on a soundtrack ASAP.
Jacob Banks has a voice and a presence that feel unmatched by other artists while he’s singing. His genre is listed as R&B on Apple Music, and it’s not that easy, it’s so much more than that. There are electronic parts that are groundbreaking, there are gospel bits, there are simpler slower folksy duets/trio-ets like "Coolin" which I’m glad he didn’t play live because I would have cried, cried, cried there in the pit right in front of him. And this isn’t to say that his style is all over the place because it’s not at all, it’s just rich. My solo regret from this show is I want to go back in time and not be taking photos while he opened with “Just When I Thought” so I could soak it all up because that song is a 100% work of art. At the end of the evening, after humbly thanking the audience for spending its valuable time coming out to see him live when it could have been doing other things, he finished the set with Chainsmoking, another brilliant banger that had the crowd of San Franciscans nodding heads and stand-still dancing in unison. Here’s a cut from his latest Lies About The War album. We’re so lucky he came to our town.