They know it starts at 8.15. They know it finishes at 10. Normally people attending a weekend gig at the Concorde – if it’s not one of those interminable concerts that’s also a club night – will get annoyed by the earliness of both the birth and death of their night out. That whole turfing the dirty gig folk out to give the place a spray before letting the clubbers in thing. Not so tonight.
The fans of Half Man Half Biscuit we bump into, checking their watches in the Hand In Hand brewpub up the road around half seven, seem pretty happy with the whole arrangement. “We can still get a pint after it’s finished,” says one gentleman in a vomit-stained Czech football top. “Don’t want to be out much after ten at our age anyway,” says a Yorkshire lass in an Iron Maiden themed real ale shirt.
This is not a night for the young. Liverpudlian support act Roja are mariachi-infused and doing their best against a tide of quiet indifference; Bond theme-esque closer ‘The Evil Stands High’ is a particular highlight. This support act might well be the youngest people here, but even they won’t have been asked for ID in a bar any time this Millennium. The audience duly arrives as they finish at 8.06, the venue going from 80% empty to sardiney in just a few minutes. They’re nothing if not prompt, these old folk.
Should you think we’re patronising the audience, we’re not and nor are the band. HMHB haven’t played Sussex in over 15 years, and you can add a few onto that for the last time they played Brighton, their most recent (1997 and ’99) outings having been down the road in Southwick. The group have continued to gig sporadically every year, but it’s proven almost impossible to drag them south of the Wensum let alone the Thames. So, given the timeslip, they know to make this an ‘old school’ set for the long-time fans.
That much is clear from an opening salvo of ‘Fuckin’ ‘Ell It’s Fred Titmus’ and ‘99% Of Gargoyles Look Like Bob Todd’. Not only will this concert draw more heavily on material from the band’s late 80s heyday that most HMHB gigs, but it’ll largely be ‘those’ songs; the ones with cultural references so dated and obtuse that any youngsters who have, somehow, managed to infiltrate this congress of flatulent, balding 43 year-old men will be left utterly bewildered. Gok Wan gets a name check in a newer song, but his is a rare modern reference buoy in a sea of Bob Wilsons and Dean Friedmans. “Dad, who’s Lesley Judd?”
Nigel Blackwell and his bandmates, their line-up surprisingly unchanged since 1996, continue to put out albums when they can be arsed, but these are not so much released as sneaked out. Indeed, even the promoter’s blurb for this gig on the Concorde’s website overlooks 2011’s ’90 Bisodol (Crimond)’ citing its 2008 predecessor ‘CSI: Ambleside’ as the group’s “latest album”.
Tracks from the comparatively recent releases pepper the set. There’s a rollicking version of ‘Joy In Leeuwarden’, an anthem to the obscure Dutch sport korfball; the Gok Wan referencing ‘Fix It So She Dreams Of Me’; foot stomping closer ‘Joy Division Oven Gloves’, and the garrulous spoken word invective of ‘National Shite Day’.
The main focus of this surprisingly heavy and moshpit-friendly set remains the old classics though, all building to a barnstorming rendition of the group’s signature track, ‘The Trumpton Riots’. Along the way there’s been the sort of mordant between-song banter one would expect from the Bard of Birkenhead. “Guitarist Ken is the first man in Wallasey to eat Quinoa,” Nigel tells us, “and I’m the only man in the whole of the Wirral who pronounces it properly.” Pete Wylie comes in for some good natured abuse (“his new band’s called Fat Wah!”) as does local doom-peddler Nick Cave, and the theme tune from BBC quiz show Pointless gets several impromptu outings.
Having eschewed a cover version last night in Birmingham, this evening sees a wiry take on Magazine’s ‘A Song From Under The Floorboards’ before the riotous closer. As the crowd, clad in an archival range of HMHB T-shirts, are water cannoned out of the venue to make way for marginally more contemporary General Levy, the night is still young, even if we’re not.
Many promoters have tried to get the Biscuits down here in the past decade and a half – indeed, a few years back your writer spent a drunken hour in a Cambridge Travelodge with the band’s manager trying to negotiate such a thing – but it’s a Herculean task. Hats off to those who pulled it off then.
The speed at which the gig sold out and the obvious dedication of the local fanbase suggests it’s wise to drag Mr Blackwell’s scabrously witty and obtuse lyricism (seated upon his band’s genre parodying magpie music) back to these shores as soon as feasible.
Refreshingly, it must be noted that this was the first gig we’ve been to in years where our view wasn’t obscured by a sea of mobile phones held aloft. It would be nice to think that’s because tonight’s crowd wanted to experience rather than document this rare visitation from their heroes. More likely it’s a result of handsets as dated as said heroes’ cultural references. “Son, what’s a camera phone?”
Concorde2, Friday 18th October 2013
Words by Adam Peters
Photos by Ashley Laurence
