Brudenell Social Club, Leeds 26th May 2024
Confidently playing to a sold-out house at the Brudenell, David Blackwell and Holly Ross feel at home, exchanging commiserations after Leeds’ 1-0 loss to Southampton in the afternoon. They lift spirits with an hour that just flashes by in no time at all, leaving fourteen songs burnt and blasted behind. So confident in their audience that half the set-list is made of the new album and those are some of the strongest songs. From the opening blast of ‘Death Grip Kids’ (“stuff your funding up your arse”) to the powerful meditation on life of ‘Nothing / Everything’ and pan-psych of ‘I Am Gaia’ but not forgetting the straight punky stuff of ‘I Don’t Fucking Know What I’m Gunna Do’.
Holly shakes, leaps, high-kicks, headbangs and whacks that guitar, while still managing to manoeuvre the complex set of pedals and gates, letting her trigger those organ sounds and otherwise, that make the sound rich as well as frantic. Dave pounds and kicks but the focus is on the acerbic whirlwind that is Holly, switching from deep to shallow effortlessly. “We spent a large part of our fee on MDMA”, she tells us, “and Nathan is going to release it in the vents as soon as Dave hits the party gong”. And, true or not, the party does happen and grins spread, helped along by some banter and some silliness. Holly does us the honour of singing Ottawan’s ancient party banger ‘D.I.S.C.O.’ as a challenge, replacing the letters with ‘B.A.B.O.O.N.’, which attentive readers will have noticed, has a different number of letters…. confusion and wonder ensues.
The evening just cements the band’s reputation with me as a perfectly ethically pure but down to earth, punky but psychedelic, profound but preschool-rude, effort of love. Despite them being from the second-best-to-Yorkshire county of Lancashire, there is everything to love and only the question – if they were from Yorkshire, is there any way they could find to be better? I can’t think of one change that would add a dot to this special band. Massively energetic, deep of thought and profane as all get out – tonight was fun.
A couple of album reviews here:
THE LOVELY EGGS – ‘EGGSISTENTIALISM’ – “life-affirming, vitalising, packed with attitude”