Tag: live review

Categories
Live Reviews Music

Alison Goldfrapp makes a fresh start

Alison Goldfrapp’s The Love Invention is stuffed with chic electro dance anthems. So it makes perfect sense for her first solo album to make its live debut at HERE.

Part of London’s new Outernet development, it’s a high-tech venue four floors beneath those massive audio-visual “immersive experiences” that have popped up outside Tottenham Court Road tube station. The sound system is astonishing. A huge high-definition video screen covers the entire wall behind the stage. The bar is more like something out of a Mayfair hotel than the usual £7-Carlsberg-pints-or-bust situation at most live music venues. The floors aren’t even sticky. Essentially, it’s the kind of place where you could imagine 2000 sweaty bodies writhing on a Friday night while a DJ spins high-energy bangers from that booth one storey above the dance floor.

Continue reading “Alison Goldfrapp makes a fresh start”
Categories
Live Reviews Music

Yungblud combines spectacle and intimacy

Inclusion is important to Yungblud. His songs, which touch on everything from gender identity and prescription pharmaceuticals to mental health and family dysfunction, preach self-acceptance and resisting society’s pressures to conform. His fanbase, the Black Hearts Club, is built on what’s described as a shared sense of unconditional love and communal support.

His live shows are about connecting with everyone in the venue. Early in tonight’s sold-out Wembley Arena show, he urges we treat everyone with respect. Later, while introducing Anarchist, he declares: “Never be afraid to be yourself. If people don’t like you for it, they’ve got no fucking imagination. You’re fucking brilliant just the way you are. “People still misunderstand me. They’ll never fucking get it. But it doesn’t matter because we’ve got each other.” 

Continue reading “Yungblud combines spectacle and intimacy”
Categories
Live Reviews Music

Working Men’s Club are fiercely independent and uncompromising

The lazy comparisons with New Order are inevitable. Their sound (post-punk guitars and attitude meet dance rhythms, electronica, and early ’80s synthpop) isn’t dissimilar. Their roots (the North) are shared. Even their make-up (three men, one woman) is the same.

But Working Men’s Club, who arrived with debut single Bad Blood in early 2019, are no nostalgic knock-offs. Clearly fiercely independent and uncompromising, they ditch convention. That’s certainly the case at a sold-out Electric Brixton on the final night of a national headlining tour.

Continue reading “Working Men’s Club are fiercely independent and uncompromising”