Inspiral Carpets

“And on the seventh day, God created Manchester”, or so says Joe Bloggs on one of their incendiary T-shit (sic) designs that were fashionable for about five minutes in 1989.

I wonder what he was doing for the first six days? Draining the canal most probably, or maybe even selling the Big Issue on the steps of Piccadilly station? Or maybe he was conducting a choir of angels in time with a chorus of thrashing guitars, the soundtrack of industrial waste perhaps?

And that brings me nicely onto the opening band, Puressence.

Having been around for over a decade, Puressence are one of those bands who everyone will claim to have heard of but no one can actually name any of their songs, which is a criminal waste of talent considering their wide-eyed fanfare in E Minor comes from the same school of thought as Joy Division, The Chameleons and, dare I say it, *U2*.

In guitarist Neil McDonald, they have a behemoth of the six-string casting belligerent riffs and lifts at random, usually several times per song, while the angelic falsetto of James Mudriczki rivals only Andrew Montgomery of Geneva fame in making words so bleak sound electrifying and heavenly.

So why were there only 50 or so diehards in the building watching them, hmmm???

If ever a band were more recognisable by their t-shirt design than their actual physical presence, then that would have to be the Inspiral Carpets.

Those ‘Cool As Fuck’ shirts depicting a cow wearing shades and smoking a fag are the stuff that create legends, and no doubt ridiculous prices on eBay, so by the time the band appeared on stage, a chorus of “moo!” greeted their arrival!

Singer Tom Hingley has piled on a few pounds since their halcyon days, although the rest of the band don’t seem to have changed that much, but from the moment Clint Boon reels off the first few notes of ‘The Real Thing’ on his trusty old Farfisa it feels like we’ve been transported in some kind of timewarp back to the start of the last decade.

To be fair, the Carpets were never regarded as being the most pivotal of the original Manchester bands, something which is quite unfair considering their back catalogue features a timeless collection of hits that most of today’s “too cool for school” generation of mullet-headed poseurs would kill for.

‘This Is How It Feels’ shows that you can write a big ballad without resorting to overwrought soppiness, ‘She Comes In The Fall’ proves that rock and dance music can mix quite evocatively without sounding fake and contrived, and ‘Seeds Of Doubt’ and ‘Out Of Time’ quite simply blow all of the nu-garage rock pretenders out of the window, both offering a beginners guide to the two-minute graveyard stomp in full Technicolor detail.

At times it feels like a homecoming, with each song being punctuated by football-style chants from the boisterously enthusiastic audience and ringmaster Hingley responding in true charismatic showman style.

Sometimes when bands reform, it serves only as an embarrassing reminder that the good old days are firmly entrenched in the past.

With the Inspiral Carpets it merely highlights just what we are missing from today’s over hyped and overpaid rock “stars”.