Live at Beckett University, Leeds 14th November 2024
Quirky quirky quirky. John Flansburgh seems to hate the term at the same time celebrating it as summarising the band. I’ll add another adjective tonight – punchy.
Quirky and punchy – the addition of horns gives even more bounce to this ridiculously hooky set of choruses.
They Might Be Giants are very generous – they’ve hired on three horn players and given the drummer a riser.
They Might Be Giants are very mean – instead of paying a support band, they play their own support slot.
They Might Be Giants are very popular – a queue stretched the whole length of Portland Way.
They Might Be Giants love all their songs but they have favourites. Tonight sees the whole of Flood, their breakthrough 1990 album but also samples from nearly every other assemblage.
To a packed and happy crowd, John Linnell and John Flansburgh go full quirk. Yes, they are going to play the whole of Flood but are they going to play it through? Of course not. It’s all jumbled about and ‘Sapphire Bullets’ is actually played and sung phonetically backwards. They’re so pleased with themselves that they video it and play it back, backwards. Or, rather, forwards. And, you know what, backwards was better….. John and John celebrate the quirk and want to play with ideas, through surrealist shapes, have a joke, tweak things. But, if you heard even one of their songs, you knew that.
Leaving that quirk aside, their golden gift is nailing strangely catchy or affecting concepts to bouncy pop that goes earworm. Who could resist a song about being reincarnated as a packet in a grocery, removed before its sell-by date. Or one about wearing prosthetic foreheads. Or weaving a narrative about Neil Sedaka having his songs stolen by the sun into a song. And so on.
The bounce and swing is double tonight. Most of the time there are eight people on a small stage (remember the drum riser is there to add mobility hazards). They’ve had to build a little extension to the stage front. A prosthetic forehead of sorts. And John Linnell is right up front in the middle with his keyboards and favoured fairground organ sound. It’s very very crowded. But out front, I feel the fun as the trumpet, trombone and sax double down on the emphasis. Never mind quirky lyrics, this band lets the trombone take an extended solo in the encore. And everyone laps it up.
From John Flansburgh describing the evening as a tribute to MC Hammer’s ‘Too Much Shit To Fit’ (don’t look it up – John imagined it) to the two Johns describing themselves as major label sellouts to discussing bamboo utensils to surveying the audience to see who wins – beards or glasses; the pair are enjoying a sideways view of the evening. Playing with images, thoughts and each other, the bants are both more cerebal than your average gig and more playful. When John F initiates some ‘empty banter’ because they’ve supposedly played the songs too fast, they begin to reminisce about places they’ve played in Leeds and ending up with a tale about a soiled nappy and nocturnally siphoned diesel at the Irish Centre. There’s a joy in watching these aging rock geezers enjoying each other’s company and basking in the indulgence of their audience.
It’s a great band. There’s the horns, there’s John Linnell’s accordion (his ‘main squeeze’), the perfectly energetic drums, the bass that fits everywhere, the lead guitar that only shows off at the right time. The drive and punch make two hours pass very fast and, of course, the biggies are saved to the end (Birdhouse, Istanbul, Dr Worm) but subverted through giving each of the horns a lengthy solo.
This was just the sort of evening I expected. I expected the unexpected. But I couldn’t predict what would be unexpected in what I expected. The jokes, the ideas, the playfulness were what I hoped for from the sort of band that sets up its own dial-a-disc and I left the venue satiated and invigorated.
Do go and buy their new live album – ‘Beast Of Horns’ – all with the horn section and quite ridiculously energising and catchy.
We reviewed the ‘current’ studio album in 2021