If you were a frequent viewer of Top Gear in its Clarkson/Hammond/May era, there is a particular laugh you will be very familiar with: the combined hoot and exclamation that the three of them, and Clarkson especially, would engage in when driving a fast car around a bend. It was a sort of ‘WOOOOwraghhhahahaha’, designed to convey both sheer delight at being alive and a certain manly pride in being able to extract such a feeling from a motor vehicle. It was a performance.
At the end of each song that the Cambridgeshire doom-metal band Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats played at the gorgeous Ally Pally theatre – a much smaller room at the east end of the building – I tried to see if the Top Gear lads were really sitting behind me, because their reactions to the songs certainly suggested it. ‘Nice bit of space rock there!’ ‘Digging deep on that one!’ ‘Wow. Never seen Kev play a Strat live before!’ All prefaced by a ‘WOOOOwraghhhahahaha!’
The band did rather invite that kind of reaction: they were performing the entirety of their most recent album, Nell’ Ora Blu, which isn’t so much an imaginary film soundtrack as a wholesale recreation of the 1970s sound of Italian giallo cinema, complete with voiceovers from luminaries such as Franco Nero. Though much of the crowd had come dressed for a Black Sabbath gig, they didn’t get one.
It was every bit as much a reimagining of a past as Timothée Chalomet snarling ‘Play it loud’ in A Complete Unknown, and rather invited comparison to a Sealed Knot reenactment of the Battle of Marston Moor. And yes, Uncle Acid – Kevin Starrs – and his Deadbeats got all the period details right. The whooshing synths, the proggy noodling, the drummer playing behind the beat in the Nick Mason fashion, the crashing guitars. It was all there.
It felt like a supermarket-saver version of a product you know to be perfect
It was brilliant as a conceit, in the same way that Bekonscot Model Village is brilliant as a conceit: can you believe they went this far? Fortunately, I adore Bekonscot Model Village, and I was willing to accept even the most truly pointless moments – very brief passages of interstitial music that played between scenes that don’t even exist – in return for the greater whole, which was exciting and dynamic. As with Bekonscot, it was something that I was glad to have seen – even if it’s unlikely I’ll be revisiting it for a while.
Brothers Osborne, who filled Hammersmith with cowboy hats, are another one of those country acts whose star has risen inexorably in recent years. The lead singing brother, T.J., is openly gay, which is still an unusual thing in Nashville, and might make you wonder if they do anything differently. They don’t.
In truth, they were far more of a rock band than a country band. There was an awful lot of shredding (the set-closing ‘It Ain’t My Fault’, which doesn’t stop far short of soft metal, seemed to go on for an eternity). The production was also minimal to the point of derisory, and T.J. didn’t have the charisma to fill the room – his sole piece of stagecraft was the two-handed come-hither gesture used in pubs to convey the desire to have a punch-up, but deployed here to encourage a sing-along.
Covers of Tom Petty’s ‘I Won’t Back Down’ (played exactly like the record) and Bob Marley’s ‘Three Little Birds’ (a song that has power only when sung by Marley; performed by anyone else it is greeting-card trite) were wholly unnecessary, and nowhere near as fun as their impromptu version of Dwight Yoakam’s ‘Guitars & Cadillacs’, for which they were joined by country’s black superstar, Darius Rucker. It was the most country they sounded all night – and the best.
This all sounds a bit grudging. Which isn’t fair: there were songs there, and a certain charm. But compared with, say, Chris Stapleton – whom I reviewed in these pages last year – it felt like a supermarket-saver version of a product you know to be perfect. It was cheaper, shinier, more processed. On the other hand, given how good Stapleton is, that’s a little like condemning a bacon sandwich for not being acorn-fed jamon. I just wish they’d been a little more country and a little less rock’n’roll.
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