“Hi,” I say. “I should be on the guestlist.”
“Sure - what’s the name?”
“Paul Raven.”
“Oh yeah, there you go - plus one.”
“Sweet. Cheers.”
Tonight, readers, I’m undercover, unconvincingly playing the role of your host. He’s stuck in Pompey, ill, and I’m here to bear the torch for online music journalism. It also helps that Fucked Up are a band I’ve got a lot of time for.
With me is my friend Sam, wearing the moniker Plus One. She’d not heard Fucked Up until an hour before the gig, but this is a good chance to continue my efforts to turn all of my friends onto punk and hardcore. The stakes are high, and we prove our commitment by showing up too late to see the first support, London’s Betty & the Werewolves. By the sounds of what’s on MySpace, they play cute, toe-tapping and poppy indie rock.
Fortunately we’re just in time for the next band: main support is provided by London’s Let’s Wrestle, who offer up consistently entertaining indie power-pop tunes, equal parts light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek. Their stage banter is flippant and blasé, perhaps to hide the fact that they’re not entirely sure how they’ll go down in front of a room of Fucked Up fans.
The answer is ‘well enough’: sure, people aren’t dancing, and more than one pair of arms is crossed, but the jokes get laughs and the tunes get cheers and applause, and what more can you hope for? Besides, this is Brighton. Dancing doesn’t happen in Brighton. Go figure: it’s just a local phenomenon. Let’s Wrestle win scene points for the first-ever (apparently) live play of “Our Drummer is a Punk” and for finishing their final song, the shout-along theme tune “Let’s Wrestle”, by shifting into an aggressive, pulsing Fucked Up riff that’s straight from 2006’s Hidden World.
And there’s plenty more from Hidden World tonight - whilst material from The Chemistry of Modern Life isn’t lacking from tonight’s set, Fucked Up seem leery of relying too heavily on just recent material. At one point vocalist Pink Eyes flings a question to the crowd - “what do you guys wanna hear? “Crusades” or “Police”?” - as though they’re not quite sure what people are here to, well, hear.
Sadly my cry of “play both” goes unheeded and we’re treated to the incendiary “Crusades” (complete with a pile-on of sweaty men, hilariously hemmed between the Freebutt’s intrusive central pillar and the foot of the stage). Not that “Crusades” is a bad tune, but when you’re given the choice between an almost seven-minute epic and a two and a half minute slice of thrashy hardcore, playing both doesn’t seem too unreasonable.
It’s a night of contrasts in a lot of ways. To some it might seem odd for a Canadian hardcore punk band like Fucked Up to take a London power-pop band on tour with them, but they’ve had plenty more unusual collaborators and clearly the band don’t give a fuck about what people might expect in terms of stage-mates. Then there’s how damn friendly the band are, cracking jokes, telling stories, chatting with the audience. It’s a far cry from the confrontational attitude that you’d be forgiven for expecting at a Fucked Up gig.
None of this is ultimately relevant. The Freebutt has once again played host to a great band and a roomful of fans; I’m not the only one singing along with the choruses. And Sam’s slow indoctrination to the ways of punk rock and hardcore continues; she likes what she’s seen, and will be borrowing a few Fucked Up records from me. Good times for fans old and new - roll on the rest of the tour.
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Posted in Live reviews |
Tags: Fucked Up, hardcore, Let's Wrestle, psychedelic, punk
