Help She Can't Swim

A few hours before Right Now Jordan Blilie’s telling me that they – they being The Blood Brothers, and Jordan Blilie being fifty per cent of their shrieking vocal pair – write songs for 17-year-olds. Just so happens that the band members aren’t that age anymore; ten years into their collective life they’ve become men, leaving the playing for kiddie-kicks shits ‘n’ giggles well in the past. But Right Now I’m knocking 27, and Right Now I’m in the centre of a writhing pit: more dancing than moshing, but elbows in eyeballs nonetheless.

And I’m lost in it: smiles and arms aloft, followers of all things fashion raising mega-pixels from the sidelines while the core of this crowd goes ballistic; sweat and sweetness and hugs and hollers to the tune of the most fractured and frantic punk-rock this side of a million bands too obscure to splatter themselves across the pages of ‘zines dated October ’97. The Blood Brothers’ influences are far from well-documented; The Blood Brothers’ influence is positively palpable, from teenage demons kicking up the post-Dischord DC dust worldwide to the labelled-up and loose-hipped revellers that are scene to be seen. They’ve outgrown their roots, rising up from the underground to spark a fire of their own invention; they’ve cold-shouldered easy rides and coattail coasting to pursue paths accessible only by young machetes.

Am I too old? A cursory scan of those around me – each is beaming, each is screaming, and each is equally lost – implies that I’m the granddad of the clan, before and beneath the five twisting and twirling themselves around a shopping centre stage. Yet all are even, in age and race and wage and waistline, when brought together by such celebratory chaos: I could be a full ten on top of my present age, hair totally greyed and belly bordering on the boulder-proportioned, and still I’d throatily croak “FIRE FIRE FIRE” with scant regard for a general practitioner’s advice to suck Lockets and sip lemon tea.

Right Now the vanguard’s battled its way through illness to stutter-slur its way through a sadly shortened set, but they’ve consolidated their position as prime exponents of everything punk rock nonetheless; of everything that punk rock should mean, of the risk-taking side-steps and fuck-the-past future-thinking. Young Machetes, the quintet’s latest long-player of blood-spilling breakdowns and height-of-intellect lyrical indulgence, wasn’t-slash-isn’t a certified success: mixed reviews followed in its stateside wake, and critics on this side of the great Atlantic divide have also expressed doubts over the band’s apparently new-found fondness for Massive Fucking Hooks. (What, you didn’t get the memo? The Blood Brothers have been writing songs like this since day one.) But nobody here, tonight, gives one: these pirouetting men of modesty and majesty are idols to a sold-out audience, and they stand tall upon their thrones without a care for naysayer niggles. Even when they’re imperfect, I’m rendered removed.

Right Now, they’re the one band that matters. Tomorrow they will be replaced by another, but Right Now (all that matters), The Blood Brothers truly are on fire. Fire. Fire.

Photograph by Ryan Atkinson (click for website)