Alabama 3 – Live in Leeds 2025 – “Shiny suits, spangly dresses and some cowpoke glamour”

The Warehouse, Leeds 16^th March 2025

Larry Love says “we are a legacy band but we are a futuristic band too – we invented country-acid-jazz-techno”. Tonight is retro, focusing on the first two albums, from nearly thirty years ago – thankfully spared the pure run-through and mixed up to please instead. It’s an immersive experience, with the crowd loose and up for a party. Everyone is moving – some raving, some shuffling, but all ego free and having fun. We suspend disbelief and embrace the fusion of preaching, country sentiments, electronic dance music and whatever passed through the sparking brains of the Brixton collective back in the day.

So we shuffle to ‘Mao Tse Tung Said’, and affirm that “change must come down the barrel of a gun” before chanting “shoot me up” to the Reverend Love’s ‘Hypo Full Of Love’. JJ Cale is mashed up with deep club beats and a John Prine song. The sound is blessedly simple for a happy crowd and the ideas as stylish as they always were. Old favourites get tweaked and the heart-warming tale of swapping heroin for a can of Tennant’s Super in ‘The Old Purple Tin’ turns into Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ after Larry has lamented the replacement of the street drinker with the street crack head. Ah, the old days, when the choice was Special Brew or Super. Happy days.

Shiny suits, spangly dresses and some cowpoke glamour keep things looking good up front of the seven-piece band. With a full sound and a club of three catching the eye, it feels like a crowded stage and a deeply compelling sound. Harpo Strangelove plays plenty of mouth organ and together with Larry and Devlin Love he makes the small stage look like a crowded groovy place. It’s missing founder member, The Very Reverend D.Wayne Love, who died in 2019 but the feel is the same, that special fusion of druggy dance music, euphoria and Hank Williams and the feel is still a mobile party, travelling from venue to venue.

Someone stops me in the street after and asks if the last hour and a half flashed by in no time at all. It did, that happens when you’re in the zone and having fun. Larry Love says that in twenty years the band will be “eight AI girls” (copies of Devlin Love) “with gold Stratocasters and one old bloke with a mouth organ”. I’ll be there – and so will this same crowd, waving their arms and stepping big.