Brigade are caught in the classic double-bind of the prestigious support slot. On the upside, they’re playing on the same bill as perennially popular cartoon goth-punks Aiden, putting them in front of a prime slice of music-hungry teen demographic. On the downside, the audience don’t know who Brigade are and show little interest in finding out.
Credit where it’s due, though – Brigade are unfazed, and take on their twenty-five minute set with the sort of gusto that only a hungry young band on the first night of a national tour can muster. Having done their own level checks, the band bound back out onto the stage; guitarists Will Simpson and James Plant are looking sharp with sensible haircuts and black shirts’n'ties, while bass player Naoto Hori is wearing a bright orange face-scarf that makes him look like a jihadist for Tango. After a brief hello to the audience, Brigade launch into their first song.
It sounds awful.
Not the song itself, but the reproduction of it; from my point of vantage at the rear of the venue, I can see a lot of scrabbling at the sound desk as the engineer works hard to rescue Brigade’s guitars from a shrill sludgy morass – The Pyramids is notorious for making the best bands sound dreadful due to its weird shape and lumpen acoustics. Brigade improve drastically after a few minutes, but that first tune is mangled beyond comprehension – which is a shame, because it isn’t a bad number if the ending is anything to go by.
And now we can hear them, it’s easier to tell that Brigade have some decent tunes in their arsenal. They’ve a knack of writing pop-rock without the cheese; having an ear for melody and an instinct for memorable chord changes means they make songs that are predictable enough to be comfortingly familiar while retaining enough elements of surprise to keep boredom at bay.
It’s a commonly said that Kerrang is the new Smash Hits, and looking at tonight’s audience - a number of whom are grudgingly accompanied by a rather stern looking parental figure – it’s hard to refute. If that’s the case, Brigade are one of those rare things; a pop band with some sincerity, a pop band who don’t talk down to their audience. They’re not trying to project some attitude or image, they’re not trying to be anything they can’t be. Brigade remind me of an early-career Feeder fronted by Simon Le Bon - they’re writing catchy tunes on loud guitars, and that’s just fine.
But Brigade aren’t a household name like Aiden, and the curse of the Kerrang market is that, unless they know your name before they see you play, the kids can’t see a reason to pay attention. Maybe a quarter of the crowd are enjoying Brigade’s set, but the rest are saving themselves for the main event. It’s telling (and rather sad) that when they do the obligatory “hey, are you guys looking forward to seeing …?” question, the mere mention of Aiden produces a room-filling shriek far in excess of the response to any of Brigade’s material.
But Brigade don’t let it get to them, and rattle through their compact set as if they were the headliners. The venue sound doesn’t allow for a lot of the detail to come through, but the basic framework of their songs is clear enough to suggest that, if they can keep up the momentum, they might indeed be the headliners some day soon.
Brigade close their set with “Slow Dives and Alibis”, and it’s a great choice – boasting the catchy air of their other material with a bit of Muse-esque bombast thrown in for good measure, it’s an infectious tune with “daytime playlist single” written all over it. It deserves to be heard – as do Brigade themselves, even if only for showing unflappable commitment in the face of utter indifference.
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