The Wildhearts
Brighton Concorde 2
In the charts, on the radio... the
renaissance continues.
“First nights are normally for us, the rest of the
tour is for the audiences... This is the best first
night we’ve ever played!”
Ginger is a proud man tonight. Despite an untried
set-list and two songs The Wildhearts have never
played live before – My Kinda Movie, and The Fine Art
Of Deception from 2019’s hit Renaissance Men – the
whole band’s performance is colossal.
Earlier, The Professionals had jack-hammered their
way through a show primed to overlook the fact that
only drummer Paul Cook and the songs remain from
40 years ago, but Chris McCormack does a decent
Steve Jones on guitar, Toshi plays bass, and London
’erbert frontman Tom Spencer is well handy, promising
to convert all merch spending to beer before leaving
the venue.
Thirty minutes later, there’s no place in the world
more thrilling than right in front of The Wildhearts as
they kick into first song Diagnosis. It was a beast on the
May tour. Five months later, as the title-track of
a charting EP, it’s gone Godzilla. Later, following
Mindslide (an old B-side you’d forgotten you loved)
with a Caffeine Bomb thrash proves archetypal
Wildhearts. Crazily, they close the set with another
B-side – Action Panzer – yet it works. Come the encore’s
fourth and final number 29 X The Pain the night ends in
glorious, uplifting triumph.
Neil JeffriesKing Gizzard And
The Lizard Wizard
London Alexandra Palace
Aussie psych-rock juggernaut’s biggest
ever gig.
Of course there’s a man in a wizard’s hat roaming
the halls of the Alexandra Palace before schizoid
Aussie psych-nuts King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard
appear. But there’s also a kid in an Iron Maiden T-shirt,
a couple of Libertines refugees and at least a dozen
hippies who look like they came for the original 14-Hour
Technicolor Dream in 1967 and never left.
They say you can’t please all the people all the time,
but King Gizz are going to die trying. The 15 albums
from their manic seven-years of creativity range from
biscuit-tin psychedelia to T-Rexian choogle-glam.
Tonight is a 90-minute tasting menu of everything
they have to offer, where every course comes
microdosed with LSD and accompanied by retina-
scarring big-screen visuals and two drummers
bashing away centre-stage. It’s wilfully unfocused –
few other bands could manage to shoehorn the spot-
on 80s thrash homage of Planet B, and terrace-
psychedelia epic Rattlesnakes into the same career, let
alone the same set.
But that’s King Gizzard all over – whatever crazed
brain-twitching has brought them this far isn’t about to
let up tonight. As concluding track Float Away – Fill Your
Lungs echoes to a close and reality reasserts itself,
you’re left with the after-image of a band gleefully out
there on their own.
Dave EverleyWilco
London Hammersmith Apollo
From alt.country to experimental rock,
the veterans triumph in the capital.
Admiring Wilco’s chutzpah for opening with the
languid country of Bright Leaves and Before Us
a week before their release on the band’s eleventh
album, Ode To Joy, pales into insignificance when
applauding the stunning musicianship tonight. And
with a 28-song set spread a shade over two hours,
Wilco sound more vital and urgent than ever.
Indeed, such is the display that it beggars belief that
the band took a two-year hiatus. For all of singer/
guitarist Jeff Tweedy’s reputed prickly relationship with
London audiences, this is a warm-spirited performance
that welcomes, beguiles and delights. Taking in the
delicate Jesus Etc and a delightfully pretty California,
Stars via the incrementally intense Handshake Drugs,
Wilco deploy a wide spread of ideas and styles that
serve to remind that you dismiss them at your peril.
Nels Cline’s guitar mastery is brought into sharp
focus during Impossible Germany’s stunning four-
minute guitar solo which draws spontaneous whoops
and hollers from the audience while elevating it high
above its studio counterpart, and Glenn Kotche’s
drums take centre stage during Via Chicago’s periodic
explosions of controlled anarchy.
Wilco’s true skill is in weaving experimental
workouts with songwriting nous to the point where
the join is invisible. Based on tonight’s evidence, their
dexterity shows absolutely no signs of abating.
Julian MarszalekThe Psychedelic Furs
London Roundhouse
Revitalised post-punk legends
light fires again.‘The set (^) is
a well-
gauged (^) mix
(^) of
restraint a
nd intensi
ty.’
They’ve still got it. The band
perversely chose the word
‘psychedelic’ to set themselves apart from punk’s
antipathy towards 60s sounds. Their unique fusion of
smooth and shrill, which shouldn’t work on paper but
does resoundingly on stage, remains exhilarating four
decades on.
Tonight’s sold-out show, preceded by openers Wendy
James’s robust new band, is a beautiful blast, as much
febrile energy as nostalgia, right from the first bars of
Dumb Waiters, its guitar and sax lines interacting with
Richard Butler’s cool, cryptic lyrics to spiral upwards like
plumes of sexy iridescent smoke. From here on in, the set
is a well-gauged mix of restraint and intensity.
Butler gives plenty, posing and bowing with illustrative
hands, an ageless charisma behind those shades. As The
Furs fly from early forays such as Sister Europe to hits like
Pretty In Pink, Love My Way and The Ghost In You, their
mastery of both melancholy and thrash proves absurdly
thrilling. One wonders why peers The Cure are so
universally fêted, when this smart, arty yet vivacious
alternative remains relatively cult. (Next year’s first new
album since ’91 might rejig things.) We lose our voices
chanting along to President Gas, the ironic slogans of
which seem more rather than less prescient each year,
then cavort to the animal stomp of encore India. Party
time is here again.
Chris Roberts
The Furs’ Richard Butler:
an ageless charisma
behind the shades.
CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 113
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