Sometimes, as a sports fan, a promoter or a gig goer, it’s mighty tough to get the showbiz balance right – as mentioned last month, many small venues didn’t even bother putting on shows to compete against the Euros televisual onslaught. Fair play then to the Summer Sundays shows, which have been ambling across the country with an array of old school bloke-popping bands such as Ocean Colour Scene, Cast and our very own Ash. Colchester Castle Park is the nearest edition to the Pandaman’s top secret pandacave, and darned good fun it is, too.
With admirable prescience the organisers have set two stagetimes for the entire day: a standard one for if England got dumped out by the Netherlands, the other with the entire bill shunted forward by two hours so they can get the bands done with by 8.00pm and show the soccerball final against Spain on the big screen. Tom Hingley is on the merch stall, Alan McGee is backstage and Embrace are onstage in the middle of the afternoon playing to an impressively-sized crowd decked out predominately in bucket hats and retro Gazza and Gerrard shirts.
Lest we forget, for some of these bands (and indeed the punters) their heyday was 1996, a time of vibrant English expectation, and even though Embrace swerve playing their actual World Cup song (“We can never get the timing right”) theirs is still a suitably celebratory muscular spin through some stadium-sized melodies, with an evergreen ‘All You Good Good People’ sealing the communal Summer Sunday afternoon deal.
Shame the end result on the big screen mimicked the Southgate trauma of ‘96, but all told, possibly more fun than the previous day’s Sausage & Cider Festival, held in the same park and headlined by The Feeling. Although fair play to any punters who toddled along expecting to see the actual ABBA, Arctic Monkeys, The Killers, Sam Fender and Oasis – as listed on the posters – in the actual flesh in support. Tribute bands all, quite obviously, but where are the comic naming twists guys? Whither the Antarctic Monkeys, Scam Fender, The Fillers, Noasis or Oasish, the Ramones-style GABBA, real fakes and top pop punnings one and all? Must try Varder.
Still, it reminds us that the very, very bestest tribute act concept ever is Joanne Joanne, who are five girls called Jo who cover Duran Duran hits hits. By some curious twist of fate, they are approached to play a midsummer Saturday night wedding bash we’re invited to at Norwich Arts Centre, but JJ decline the offer. This is fatefully twisted because the following night the actual Duran Duran headline Latitude festival, and mightily weird it is too.
If the bucket hatters in Colchester are mostly of an age to feel a genuine affinity with the live Britpoppers then Duran Duran have brought out the middle class masses and their missuses in their millions. But Duran were such an extraordinary pop sensation in the early ‘80s, a time which itself always felt like a million lifetimes before the ‘90s indierrock bookings – they scarcely seemed real, existing only in Smash Hits, on MTV and a nation’s weeping bedroom walls.
Yet forty years on here they are gallivanting around a Suffolk stage, and they look pretty good for a bunch of now-Old Romantics. A barrage of onstage retro visuals help sustain the sartorial elegance, and a blowback of giant tracks tick the audience’s fevered boxes. ‘Wild Boys’, ‘The Reflex’ and ‘Planet Earth’ rocket on by, all synth swooshes, guitar heroics and an endearing degree of clattering clunkiness – excepting the chilled elegance of ‘The Chauffeur’ and the ageless ‘Save A Prayer’, DD always had a taste for beefy histrionics, and it suits them well here as oddly un-ludicrous festival closers.
Shame we never got the chance to see Joanne Joanne’s take on ‘Rio’ in the East Angularian sunshine, but proving that variety is the baby spice of life one of July’s highest highlights occurs faraway from the flashbacking grasslands of the East of Englandshire and in an East London dungeon. Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes is the venue, shortstraw. (one word, all lower case with a full stop – these things are important) is the act, and supercharged is the vibe.
The crowd – a packed basement crew bouncing en masse – undoubtedly helps, but shortstraw., aka Erin West, a pint-sized self-proclaimed “female punk / rapper artist from Coventry” pulls all the strings, backed by live drums and terrific tapes. As an act who proudly namechecks The Streets and Amyl & The Sniffers it will come as little surprise to find that shortstraw. comes with an edge and an attitude. What is excellently alarming is the way she blends that attitudinal edginess with some handsome melodies and empathetic but emphatically hard-hitting lyrics about modern life being a little bit rubbish.
In a nutshell, and bringing this gigging round-up full circle in a faintly excruciatingly sporting way, after all the retro festival dabblings Shortstraw comes over like a skateboarding kid breaking into the Olympic village and merrily flipping off the horse dancers. Girl done good.
PANDAMAN’S 2024 GIGGING TOTAL: 281
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