In many ways fragile February is the calm after January’s New To 2024 gigging storm, when the tipster hipsters live their dreams. But there are still new pop thrills stolen on the Blue Mondays and Grey Tuesdays.
To Brighton, where the Hidden Herd crew host a regal bill at the Prince Albert which is very much headlined by Leeds interlopers ADULT DVD. Crammed in on the stage they are as well, six blokes hunkered down over synths and keys and such techno-like, with the happiest bassist alive loving live squeezed in at the back. They make a suitably big sound as well, fluid and funky and sneery, perhaps a tiny little bit like the missing link between New Order and Sleaford Mods. Great fun by the seaside.
To Dalston, where LONNIE GUNN is middle on at an excellently shadowy Victoria bill. It’s another sextet in live action, but Lonnie is definitely centre stage here amidst the megaphones and keyboards, rolling with an utterly lovely soulful sad vibe with a gently psychotic undercurrent like the songs had come from some deranged writing session with Richard Hawley and Courtney Love. Very epic, very charming, very much extra bonus points for having an utterly lovely song called ‘Looney Tunes’.
To Stowmarket John Peel Centre, where OTHER HALF deliver a bruising take on post-hardcore slamming fun with fruitily frenzied time changes and some glimmers of melody glowering in the raucous shadows. Mathy come home! Etcetera! “This one’s about having two wet dreams in one night on New Year’s Eve!” announces singer Cal. Bassist Sophie has the good grace to look suitably aghast at this interlude. One man in the crowd headbangs briefly. Another launches into an air guitar frenzy.
It fits, too – Other Half are in support of the two Johns known collectively and somewhat crescendonically as JOHN. Vigorous of rhythm and fervent of vocals the dynamic duo have been adhering to DIY principles over four albums, and this JOHN Peel Centre show shows these super fury animals in top taut form. There are moments of melodramatic drama here as well, with thunderous drummings and shards of sonic exuberance on the guitar like The Walkmen had just walked by. Brutally compelling.
Sticking now with the local Stowmarket JPC vibe, where not but a week earlier PETE WYLIE rolled into town looking very much like a frankly insane Napeleon. Younger more sensitive readers may care to know that as part of the uber-legendary Crucial Three, alongside Julian Cope and Ian McCullough, his status as a Liverpool alt. pop legend has only been undermined, and indeed underlined, by pitfalls, terrible luck and a heroic ability to haul defeat from the jaws of victory.
This Teach Y’Self Wah! tour is a trip through the Wah! catalogue from hither to thither, complete with anecdotes and asides about buying a pair of blue suede shoes in a charity shop around the corner. We lose track of the times he introduces a top 43 near-hit by saying “The record company thought this was gonna be massive!” We also lose all track of time as he bowls through a two-hour set covering 45 years or so of bolshy, melodic balls out the wall of soundscapes with names like ‘Sinful’, ‘Story Of The Blues’ and an especially spiky ‘Hope (I Wish You’d Believe Me)’.
He’s also happily buying into the historical venue vibes, giving a shout to John’s widow Sheila at the back and remembering the good times spent with Peelie in session on Radio One or showing up on Top Of The Pops, back when Pete Wylie was a proper pop star, the wily old foxhound. More recently he released an album called ‘Pete Sounds’. We buy a Teach Y’self Wah! tour mug on the way out. It seems like the most unreasonable and reasonable thing to do.
We end where we began, with more new music, vaguely speaking, although it seems absurd to count Canadian MOTHER MOTHER as in any way fresh after eight albums over nineteen years. Yet somehow they are still sailing under the mainstream radar despite eight squillion monthly potty Spotify listeners tuning in and turning up. We saw them a while back at the Forum in Kentish Town, and were mightily baffled by the gigging combination of the band’s commercial cleanliness and the alternative bent of the audience, and a Thursday night at The Troxy does nothing to assuage our concerns.
If anything, this time around the Limehouse crowd is even more cool – think Camden market 1991 – and Mother Mother are even more shiny and fizzy and showbizzy with the main man Ryan Guldemond delivering cornball lines of love and friendship flanked by Molly and Jasmin giving it their best ABBA jump-suiting poses. True, squint hard enough and you can hear a flash of fellow countrypeople Arcade Fire’s bombast, and one song segues very tidily into Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind’, but the outbursts of furiously screaming neo-goth kids seem so at odds with the Eurovisioning pop vibes on display it starts to become mentally radical.
Either that or maybe all those Camden Marketeers just want a great big Mother Motherly cuddle.
PANDAMAN’S 2024 TOTAL: 82