This blog has been sadly neglected for a long time, so it’s time to blow the dust off it and crack on.
As The Great Hoax Reset, or whatever utter morons are now calling it, raged, there was little in the way of music to get excited about.
Or was there?
Some bands were actually doing live shows in empty studios and streaming them for free on YouTube. Some were charging people to watch them on third party websites – it’s hard to fault this as bands had had their livelihoods more or less taken from them. And some were doing peculiar Zoom meeting-style renditions of some of their best known songs – check out some of the S.O.D. and Sepultura stuff for the best examples of this. Some even began penning new albums, EPs and single tracks and putting them out to give fans something to get excited about.
But what I, and many others, missed was the thrill of going to a live show. A show in a dingy room where your feet stick to a beer-stained floor and sweat runs down the walls as violent-looking moshpits swirl around and knock plastic pint pots out of the hands of strangers.
Well, I’ve been to two in the post-COVID world or the between-COVIDs world or whatever it is, so it’s time to see if I actually remember anything about them.
The first was my old pals Acid Reign on singer H’s home turf in Leeds.
This was at a venue I’d never previously been to and that I didn’t know the location of. So I sensibly got hammered and attempted to navigate my way there using Google Maps. I ended up asking three people for directions before successfully finding the place. Even when I got there, it looked like a derelict building, but the presence outside of young long-haired upstarts and older now-bald-but-previously-long-haired upstarts told me I was in the right place.
Three bands were on before the main attraction, but I missed two of them due to drinking heavily and having nostalgic conversations with a fellow ageing metalhead from Barnsley about important topics including Which Megadeth Line-up Was Best? (the correct answer is the Rust in Peace line-up) and Which Is The Least Shit Testament Album? (a trick question, as they’re all rubbish).
I made it inside to see Riptide, who there was quite a buzz about. They all looked about 15 but were very metal with their posturing, rifftasticness and shredding solos. And the young girls who were there watching swooned over them throughout. Afterwards, I talked outside with the singer/guitarist and found out that he also plays in Evile. An eager youngster asked if he could take a selfie with him. I asked if he wanted a pic with me too and he frowned. “I’M KERRY KING, YOU TWAT!” I slurred before lurching to the bar for another pint of overpriced IPA.
The roof truly went off for Acid Reign. I’d previously seen them in a poorly-attended working men’s club and a tepee, but this audience were the most up for it I’d seen. And the band were buzzing too.
It’s never wrong to hear the classic Goddess from their debut EP from a million years ago and the big numbers followed. They coped well without one of their guitarists who was getting over the Lurgee and functioned well as a four-piece, even on songs like The Fear where two guitarists are generally de rigueur. I barged around a sweaty moshpit with fat, sweaty, shirtless buggers and screamed along to every song. There’s a video on YouTube where I can be observed for a few seconds at the start of Motherly Love, which is my five milliseconds of fame from this gig.
Soon, I was staggering off into the night back to my hotel. There was still enough time for me to pour myself into a pub on the Headrow and deliver what I thought was a half passable karaoke version of Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now before securing a kebab and turning in.
The second was Oirish thrashers Gama Bomb, who I last saw in a pub in York almost a decade ago.
I could have seen them at an all day festival in Leeds on the Saturday that featured other legendary bands like Carcass and Paradise Lost, but I chose to have a weekend in London and catch them at the Underworld on Sunday night instead.
This gave me the chance to meet Twitter friend @lobstergirl666 who had taken the long journey (psych!) from Bedford with whom I had a potted rant about everything that’s wrong with this country before having £7 surgically removed from my wallet for a pint of Neck Oil. Luckily I’d pre-loaded at some marginally cheaper pubs and a few mega-nips of John Daniel’s, so I didn’t need much.
Gama Bomb took to the stage at, was it 9 o’clock? It all seems quite hazy. They opened with Sea Savage, the title track of an album that was recorded entirely during lockdown. Singer Philly seemed more pleased to be there than the crowd. And that’s not to say the crowd weren’t pleased. It was wall-to-wall beaming grins and close to two years of frustration were taken out in a vast moshpit. I elected to adopt a standing and watching approach, remembering how long it took to recover from my pit activities at the pervious gig.
All the anticipated songs were played, with the exception of the blink-and-you-miss-it Shitting Yourself to Live, which I was devastated about. However, their other short one, the RoboCop-themed OCP, got an outing, which certainly made my night. And Thunder Over London, from their recorded-in-lockdown EP that came after their recorded-in-lockdown album and the recorded-in-lockdown standalone single was incredibly well received by the home crowd. Somewhere between 15 and 20 songs were played, but it was all a blur of technically brilliant thrash metal.
But seeing Gama Bomb in Camden was special, not just because they call it their home from home (two band members having lived in London at some point), but because if you go on Google Street View, they are always the band who are playing tonight at the Underworld.
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