On Thursday night last week I met with Mr M Sutton and headed South to distant Brixton, there to go and watch The Lemon Twigs. Here is the executive summary of how it all went: AMAZINGLY.
A couple of years ago I asked for recommendations of New Acts to listen to, and the most popular reply was "The Lemon Twigs". I listened to their second album "Everything Harmony" and FLIPPING LOVED IT, as it seemed to have been hand-tooled from loads of bands I LOVE e.g. Simon and Garfunkel, early Paul McCartney and so on. When their new album "A Dream Is All We Know" came out it had also added a heavy dollop of The Beach Boys and Carole King, which obviously I ALSO loved, so I LEAPT at the chance to get gig tickets, not least because I was thinking "How on earth are they going to carry off that HUGE sound in The Live Environment?"
When they came on stage I was thus surprised to see there were only four of them, arranged in the super-traditional two guitars, bass and drums line-up. "Oh right," I thought, "they're going to do a stripped down live version that isn't really like the records. FAIR ENOUGH." The first song started with one of the brothers singing and all was as I thought... until it got to the chorus and they UNLEASHED THE THREE-PART HARMONIES. My GOODNESS but it was incredible, suddenly this GINORMOUS SOUND erupted and it was ASTONISHING. Me and Mark - and pretty much everyone else in the room - just LOOKED at each other in amazement. They sounded incredible!
The next song was the same, and the next, and pretty much onwards throughout the evening - every song sounded like THE MASSIVE HIT AT THE END, except there was always another one after it. There were also GTR SOLOS and TWIDDLY BITS and LUSCIOUS BASS and the whole SOUND was fantastic - we were a long long way from my early days of gigs at The Charlotte where everything sounded like DUB. The rather wonderful thing about it all was that DESPITE (I said DESPITE) the fact that they were all ludicrously talented at their instruments it was still loads of FUN, and also full of TUNES. Usually when people are even SLIGHTLY good at their instruments everything becomes IMMENSELY DULL and TUNELESS, but here not only did it remain exciting and catchy but also all the songs remained SHORT. They just rattled through song after song, each with 17,000,000 hooks but rarely over four minutes long.
It got a bit much half way through when they CHANGED INSTRUMENTS and were STILL GRATE at everything. The bass player went on keys, one of the singers went on drums and so on and so forth and then they ROCKED ON through three or four songs that way. It felt rather like SHOWING OFF at this point, but by now we were all in and AGOG so were powerless to do anything about it.
The first encore featured one of the brothers doing three songs on a Spanish Guitar which involved a) him checking the tuning by knocking off 30 seconds of AMAZING gtr playing b) performing a song he'd apparently written that day AND KNEW ALL THE WORDS ALREADY c) and then doing my favourite song off the second album with us all singing along. The band then came back for the second encore, and this culminated with them playing a cover of "Good Vibrations".
Good vibrations. The whole thing. With just four people. PERFECTLY. I mean, by now it was like they were DARING us to be FURIOUS at the amount of SHOWING BLOODY OFF that was going on. I have honestly never seen anything like it - I've been to AMAZING gigs and I've been to gigs where the ARTISTES were really good at it, but I've hardly ever been to see a gig where it was BOTH and definitely not one where everyone on stage appeared to be LARKING ABOUT quite so much while doing so.
We staggered out into the night BATTERED by what we'd seen, and also a bit worried that whatever we saw NEXT would seem to be a bit rubbish. On the way home we bumped into Former Fortuna Pop Supremo Mr S Price, who said that he'd seen them three times THIS WEEK, and we agreed that it had been GRATE. Because, in case it isn't clear yet, it really really had been. WOW!
