Britrock Must Be Destroyed
London Hammersmith Eventim Apollo
The toast of the late 20th century overcome lost limbs, technical hitches and visions of ‘God’ to thrill the former Hammy Odeon.
Attention, rock promoters! Terrorvision’s Tony Wright has got an idea. He’s just negotiated his way through the metal fencing outside Hammersmith Apollo, which is channelling queues of fans into the venue for tonight’s triple-header 90s rock marathon, and observed, “It’s like a maze… in fact, that would be brilliant! You’d choose one of four entrances, then weave your way through this maze, and each path would lead to a different band playing in a different part of the venue. You wouldn’t know who you were seeing until you got in there!”
It’s an intriguing idea, but you’d have to say the current format for the Britrock Must Be Destroyed tour is working perfectly well. A rotating bill of three headliners – Wright’s party-rock mavericks, adrenaline-fuelled scuzz-punks The Wildhearts and West Country groove-rockers Reef, with laid-back harmony-toting tunesmiths Dodgy opening up each night – has reached London on night three of the tour, and all involved seem in high spirits on the back of two sell-out shows in Manchester and Birmingham.
But this venue is special, as is confirmed when we stick our heads round the door of The Wildhearts’ dressing room. “I’m like a kid whose dreams have come true,” says bassist Danny McCormack, who rejoined the band last year after a 14-year absence. “I’ve never played Hammersmith Odeon. I used to come here and trip me balls off on acid watching bands like Sepultura, Motörhead… so I’m over the moon. It’s one ticked off my bucket list.”
You know egos need to be left at the stage door when you’ve got a band as well known as Dodgy opening up at 5.30pm each night. Offered a half-hour warm-up slot that some bands who have sold the best part of a million records might think was beneath them, they’re up for it. And that, you suspect, is what they have in common with the three headline acts – a simple desire to just play to as many people as possible, and status anxiety be damned.
But there’s a few weeks of the tour still to go, and then the trio will head to Australia in August for a string of dates Down
Under. So if it does get tasty, who’s the handiest in a fight?
“Reef, definitely,” reckons Wildhearts drummer Ritch
Battersby. “They’ve got God on their side, haven’t they?”
A brief glimpse outside the stage door reveals Jack Bessant, bass player with the Somerset quartet, his long white beard swishing majestically as he does tricks on a skateboard. He clearly knows something we don’t.
“He could stick a staff in the ground and the earth would crack and you’d all be paralysed,” agrees Tony Terrorvision.
“He were doing some tai chi earlier, slowly fighting an invisible person. Who was he thinking of?”
That question is left hanging as we hear the rumble of
Dodgy’s opening set starting – the evening has officially begun.
“I guess it makes sense for the band with the most hits to warm the crowd up for us all,” quips Ginger Wildheart.
And as it turns out, the laid-back harmonies of the Bromsgrove trio (now expanded to a four-piece) prove the ideal way to ease the evening into life after a sun-soaked Sunday. But they were never going to get the party started in earnest. That duty is taken on with great relish by Terrorvision’s Tony Wright, who may resemble a rebellious accounts clerk as he struts on stage in a skinny black tie and suit, but who is about to remind us what a bank holiday weekend is all about.
“It’s nice to wear a suit and not be in court,” he reasons, and the band’s variations on formal evening wear don’t stop them from rocking like bastards. When Wright lifts his mic stand high in the air as if to challenge us to drown him out on Alice, What’s The Matter?,
he soon gets his wish as the crowd chants the chorus back at him with serious gusto.
My House and Perseverance sound as groovily dishevelled as ever, and while they’ve never been slick or stylish, they’re thunderous fun, like funk punk rock with steel-capped boots on. And even if the T-shirt count in the venue is easily won by Wildhearts fans, Terrorvision grab us by the short and curlies by sheer force of personality.
There’s a telling moment when Wright introduces Some People Say with the comment, “For this next song you need to get your lighters out… or rather, your iPhones if that’s a bit too last-millennium for you.”
Curiously, far more flames go up than phones. People are literally partying like it’s 1999. “That’s been a really interesting thing on this tour actually,” Ginger Wildheart noted. “There’s been a noticeable lack of iPhones recording the show. Because people are really into it for the music, not just to say: ‘I was there.’”
And even if many in tonight’s crowd are of a similar vintage to the musicians they’re watching, no one’s got their pipe and slippers out.
“Once the moment grabs you, it don’t matter how old you are,” Tony Terrorvision will explain later over a vegan cupcake (diet keeps you young, kids!). “You throw yourself into it… and you ache later. It’s just slightly more embarrassing to say you’ve got neckache from headbanging when you get to our age. Try telling that to your teenage kids tomorrow morning…”
And once Wright, 50 today, has been presented with a cake and balloons by the roadies mid-set and sprayed the crowd with champagne, he goes back to bouncing around like a toddler on tartrazine. As they end the set with a joyous rendition of Oblivion that turns much of the venue into a single pogoing mass, you realise how much these shows depend on a receptive, up-for-it crowd of overgrown party animals refusing to act their age.
As it turns out, though, other variables can have an influence, and as The Wildhearts take the stage at 7.30, Ginger is put right off his stride by a technical hitch with one of the pedal boards. Always an individual who suffered regular visits from the black dog of depression (just a couple of days before this tour opened, he tweeted, “Not sure what will ever be harder to get through than today’s urges to kill myself. This was fucking brutal.”), he seems distinctly fucked off from here on in, and although the following day he will hail it as “a proud moment in our history”, for now he seems to have gone somewhere pretty dark.
From where we’re standing out front, though, it actually intensifies the energy of The Wildhearts’ show. “Can we fucking do this then, or what?” he barks, and then the band explode into the highly apposite I Wanna Go Where The People Go.
So begins the most intense period of the whole night as the foursome prove Mr Lydon’s assertion that anger is an energy by blazing through a five-song barrage of lightning-fast bangers in the shape of the above single, the multi-hooked assault of TV Tan, the romantic anti-anthem My Baby Is A Headfuck, and then a blizzard-like knockout flurry of Suckerpunch and Caffeine Bomb. The heart-warming sight of stagedivers gleefully greets them, and after that blast we can do little more than breathlessly sing along to every other line of 29 x The Pain. If they’re like this when they’re having a bad night, we can only imagine how they sound on the crest of a wave.
Afterwards, the frontman’s emotions certainly aren’t seconded by the rest of the band, even those who had to sit down for all but the opening track. “I fucking loved it,” beams Danny McCormack. “The last two nights were fucking outrageously good, whereas tonight was just… excellent.”
Seasoned Wildheart-watchers will understand why this tour will mean as much to McCormack as it will
“It don’t matter how old you are, you throw
yourself into it… and you ache later.”
Tony Wright, Terrorvision
to anyone. He had half his right leg amputated in 2016 as a result of drug-related misadventure.
“It was cos of injecting into me foot,” he explains. “Coke, speed, heroin, you name it. My toes went black and fell off, then I had to have the whole lower leg removed. But I’ve got it under control – as you can tell by me eyes. Ha ha ha ha!”
Despite a newly fitted prosthetic leg, he can only stand up for the first song of the set. “I’ve only had the new leg for 14 weeks, so I’ve got to build it up.”
But he’s also happy to be doing it straight. I mean, it’s not all fun when you’re off your cake.
“One time when I was on stage in the nineties, I was convinced I had a tail – and it was waggin’!
I was really embarrassed because I thought everyone could see my tail. It turned out to be my guitar lead.”
Meanwhile, what news of Ginger, who left the stage and retreated to the tour bus, not to be seen again all night? “He just gets in a bad head-space sometimes,” says McCormack. “When you suffer from depression it’s just a hard thing to cope with, y’know. He’ll bounce back, he always does.”
There’s no such dampened enthusiasm out in the main arena, where a crowd whose energy levels have already peaked twice tonight greet Reef. They may have been as often associated with Britpop as Britrock back in the day, but when they launch into Place Your Hands as their second number a huge roar goes up to greet Gary Stringer’s ‘AARRIGHT NOW’ aside that punctuates the opening bars.
Stone For Your Love follows, channelling the kind of heavy R&B that created the whole hard-rock genre in the first place, and reminding us that what this band specialise in is rock that really rolls, underpinned by gutsy funk-rock grooves, chiefly created by drummer Dominic Greensmith and the aforementioned, faintly mystical figure of Jack Bessant on bass. Not only does he look like a member of ZZ Top beamed in from the afterlife, but he also plays barefoot on a cowskin rug.
“I sometimes get asked what it’s like to not be the coolest member of the band,” laughs Stringer after the show. “But I love him. And he’s definitely got some next-level wisdom going on!”
Back on earth, Naked’s elastic, propulsive riff is impossible to resist, and new guitarist Jesse ‘Son Of Ronnie’ Wood performs it as well as it ever was by his impossibly well-named predecessor Kenwyn House. But they save the heaviest hit for last, as they encore with a robust assault on the AC/DC-ish Revelation, their current single.
But then, something a little odd: they choose to use the few minutes they have left before the curfew to play the same song all over again. “They like a smoke, don’t they?” notes Tony Terrorvision as he watches from the side of the stage. “Maybe they were stoned and forgot they’d just played it!”
Not so, we learn afterwards, as Stringer explains that they needed a video to accompany the song’s single release. But now? During an encore at Hammersmith? Really? It’s pretty much the very definition of an anticlimax.
Yet they clearly do things differently, these boys, a fact confirmed when we meet the great Mr Bessant after the show, and he explains his unique approach to sartorial style and stage comfort. “Is my strength in my beard? I couldn’t say. But Darwin was a dude, and he’s the nature brother. I’m going down that road. The sun soaks into that beard, man, and it feels good.”
He takes another swig from a plastic can of scrumpy that looks like it was manufactured some time in 1982. “Why go barefoot? Music’s all about your feet, man. If my feet are happy, I’m happy. Nothing worse than hot feet.”
Fair comment. And this alternative approach reflects how the three acts’ contrasting styles complement each other so well – different parts of the past three or four hours have offered gnarly, ferocious punk, bluesy, boozy rock’n’soul, irrepressible funk-rock fun and most styles in between.
And few have enjoyed it more than the man we find sitting beside the upstairs bar at the aftershow party – Mr Danny McCormack. He gets up on his hind leg when he spots some free champagne waiting on the bar and begins serving it up to us. “Here’s to living the fuckin’ dream, man!” he beams.
Some things in Britrock truly are indestructible.