The Futureheads

Trying not to look desperate, the first band in tonight’s triple bill, The Beautiful Life, get their singer to announce through a megaphone at a startled bar-crowd that the band are about to begin. The first intriguing thing about them is the presence of an electric mandolin, but the way that the group weld together The Jam’s estuary harmonies, Black Sabbath’s chord progressions and a few basslines that The Cramps may want to have a word or two about is more intriguing still. One song displays the sinister overtones of Muse before a cacophonous wall of video-game noise takes over, and another track has the couplet “I thought he was an urban intellectual / Turns out he’s a grumpy heterosexual”. Once the electric violin comes out and they start singing about alcohol abuse, though, they instantly seem to sound and indeed look like The Levellers with panto banter. Entertaining, then.

Mower, meanwhile, are a bit more straightforward. Not that that would make them good by default, but the combination of two chords, one wailing vocalist and a handful of colourful, abrasive scuzz-pop songs usually does quite nicely ‘round here. The drummer is so efficiently ferocious that he snaps a stick clean in half before a guitar string is even struck, the bassist is the relatively ‘calm’ one who cracks the most jokes between songs and the vocalist plays guitar like he’s still practising How To Play Punk Chapter Two: Solos, but accidentally picked up a stun gun instead. Evidently displeased with the strobe lighting – “This isn’t Wembley Stadium”, they chuckle – they play well through the jangle-rawk of ‘Rest In Peace’ and later end with their biggest, horniest hit ‘After Dark’, which sees writhing-on–the-floor action and two-thirds of the band before the last note is barely plucked. And their Beastie Boys cover probably shouldn’t work but, rather spectacularly, does.

Faster! Faster! On bound The Futureheads, wide of eye, elastic of leg and angular of post-punk. Very little can prepare you for the sheer power of their verbal harmonies, the guitar noises so spiky that they could make nearby porcupines feel inadequate, and songs so scattered with pregnant pauses that the audience spend most of the set wondering whether they should applaud uproariously or prepare to dance that jerky dance again. In places they seem to beat The Ramones in terms of tempo, lyrics blurt like poetic slogans from their lips, and their covers of both Television Personalities and Kate Bush make the songs seem more life-affirming than they already were. Songs like ‘Robot’ and ‘Man Ray’ already feel like classics, ‘First Day’ is possibly the best vari-speed multi-vocal ode to introductory office work since… well, ever, and by the time they’re coaxed back onstage for two more songs the crowd have gone from being amazed to assured of the band’s brilliance. They don’t play ‘A To B’ but it doesn’t matter – we couldn’t recommend them highly enough.