Live review: Backyard Babies – Concorde 2, 6th April 2009

It’s surely one of the oddest tour rosters I’ve seen so far this year: gruff hard-drinking Swedish rock’n'rollers Backyard Babies co-headlining with… The Rasmus. Yes, The Rasmus. You know, Scandinavian goth-pop band, momentarily huge for six months around six years ago; singer with the funny hair/hat/feathers thing. You remember, they had that single called, er… how did that go again?

Aesthetically incongruous it may be, but it makes a certain logistical and financial sense in these tough times. With the best will (and publicity) in the world, neither band is going to sell out a venue the size of Brighton’s Concorde 2 on their own, and by putting on two different sounding acts you can draw on two separate demographics for your ticket sales. Unluckily for Backyard Babies, the lion’s share of this evening’s demographic spread appears to have favoured The Rasmus, as an exodus of fresh-faced trainee goth-teens (and their harried-looking parental units) has left them with a venue at perhaps a quarter of its full capacity.

But the show must go on, and credit goes to Backyard Babies for working hard with what they have to hand. A decade and a half on the tour circuit has given them a lot of experience in revving up an audience, and they deploy all the tricks tonight – the “we always love playing Brighton” gambit, the “I can’t hear you – are you having a good time?” call-response combo, and many more. And further to their credit, it works – the remaining audience are about as whipped up as you could hope to make a few hundred people in an over-large room.

It’s clearly a struggle at times, though, with the audience split between veteran Backyard Babies fans and younger folk familiar only with the most recent material form their eponymous album. The end result is a set that flip-flops between the band’s established anthems and their recent singles; as the old saying goes, you can’t please all the people all the time, but if you can get a good balance on aggregate you’ll be OK.

Once they’re up to speed, standing close to the stage would make it easy enough to imagine they were in fact playing a smaller venue to a sell-out crowd. Backyard Babies pretty much define the sleazy and high-octane rebel-rock’n'roll sound and style, and clearly still love what they do enough to take the thin nights for as much fun as they can wring from them. Bassman Blomqvist alternates between mugging for (and giving the finger to) the more vocal older fans and graciously accepting gifts of glow-stick bangles from the young-uns at the barrier; meanwhile rake-thin rakehell guitarist Dregen leaps and gurns his way through his trademark wah-drenched solos, and frontman Borg’s gravelly voice and dead-pan demeanour play the foil to his more flamboyant bandmate’s antics. The set-list ranges widely and evenly through the back-catalogue, and there’s never a moment’s let-up; Backyard Babies may not be massive, but their professionalism is impeccable.

And they’re great at what they do, as well. Punk-powered rhythm and blues isn’t big and it isn’t clever, but the old formulas wear well nonetheless – it’s all about energy, rebellion and a little bit of seedy glamour, and that’ll never go entirely out of fashion. And played by a band like Backyard Babies – who’ve been doing it for long enough to be long stripped of any illusions of grandeur or impending megastardom – it comes packed with the brash sense of fuck-’em-all fun that only a band who truly love their work can muster in the face of a small audience; the grins on the faces of the remaining crowd are all the evidence you need.