Those Damn Crows
Bristol Exchange
Welsh hard rockers with arenas in their sights make a detour to an intimate setting.
It’s less than three hours ‘til stage time. Everyone has battled Storm Ciara to get here, and the auditorium at the tiny Exchange is full of gear. Bassist Lloyd Wood is limping on an ankle that’s doubled in size since he leapt off a riser last night. Singer Shane Greenhall is losing his voice and feels like death (he apologises for his pre-show silence in very polite mouthing and improvised sign-language). Completing the picture is Kev the guitar tech, covering for Shane on mic-checks by bellowing “Sausage! One-two, one-two! Arse! Sausaaage sandwich!!”
A different band might have been freaking out by now. But Those Damn Crows are made of strong stuff, and they sure as hell aren’t about to be unseated by a few ailments and a bit of extreme weather.
“I mean Shane’s broke his ankle twice,” affable drummer Ronnie Huxford explains at the bar before doors open, as a grinning Lloyd hobbles off backstage. “The boys are always flying off ramps and landing awkwardly and nearly breaking their necks… But it’s all rock’n’roll, innit?”
Almost every show on this tour, on the back of game-raising second album Point Of No Return (No.14 in the UK album chart), has been upgraded due to demand. Last night they sold out Wolverhampton’s KK Steel Mill – two years previously they were playing for 20 people in a pub down the road. Some fans who were at the KK show have travelled down for more tonight, while the generous contingent of Welsh voices in the room suggests a few followers have come in from their motherland as well.
“We tried to get a smaller room, but we couldn’t find one!” Greenhall will declare when they go onstage, in possibly the Welshest Welsh accent ever. Even on below-par form he’s a beaming fireball of megawatt Dave Grohl-come-Eddie Vedder charisma. The Vedder of the Valleys, if you will, and the face of their muscular, arenaready brand of hard rock. It’s music you could credibly see next to the Alter Bridges and Black Stone Cherrys of this world. Are they rock’s next festival headliners?
“Yes,” Ronnie replies at once, dead serious. “Give us the chance, definitely. That’s the bar.”
Growing up in Bridgend, the members of Those Damn Crows spent much of their teens playing covers at jam nights in local pubs. By the time they were 16 and playing in a school band (encouraged by their music teacher), they were organising showcases and taking coach-loads to London gigs. “We just didn’t invite anyone to see us from labels,” Ronnie laughs, “but you don’t know at sixteen, do you?” After school, he opened a tattoo studio and played AC/DC-style rock in another band with guitarist Ian ‘Shiner’ Thomas, while Shane played a mixed bag of country, pop and rock covers on the club circuit with his brother – as well as designing kitchens and writing songs for other artists.
A few years later both Shane and Ronnie lost parents (Shane’s father to cancer, Ronnie’s mother to a brain hemorrhage). Not long after, Those Damn Crows came together. “For me personally it was sitting at the dinner table with my wife and family and they all basically said ‘you need to get back in a band,’” Ronnie says. “The tattoo studio was doing great, we were winning awards and travelling everywhere… so life was good. I was like ‘I’m earning money, I am happy!’ And they were like ‘nah, music makes you happy.’”
Today it’s easy to agree with that assessment, as chatter over beers backstage turns to influences, which go well beyond the usual suspects. They’ll rave about AC/DC, the Foo Fighters and Aerosmith, but also Bad Religion, Sepultura, Johnny Cash, Rancid, Bad Brains, Minor Threat… As if to prove the point, guitarist David Winchurch holds up a record by the latter, purchased round the corner earlier on.
Downstairs, meanwhile, the Exchange is stuffed to within an inch of its life as Hollowstar warm up the crowd. It’s like a sardine can of NWOCR’s grass-roots devotees, with Those Damn Crows T-shirts (plus those of others like The Fallen State, Kris Barras and more), Steelhouse and Stonedeaf festival hoodies abounding.
Pretty much everyone knows Shane’s not been well, because they follow the band’s updates on social media. Accordingly, no one’s all that put out when the band are late in bursting onstage, making up for lost time with fully fired-up opener Who Did It – a bracing boxer-punch of a song, inspired by the ongoing issue of suicides in Bridgend (and the media scrutiny surrounding it).
“It’s been a thing since we went to school,” Ronnie explained earlier. “As dark as it sounds you could meet someone on a Friday and say ‘how’re you doing?’ And then two days later you’re hearing off somebody else that they’ve driven off a cliff.” Still, for all their willingness to tackle heavy subject matter, tonight’s show is no po-faced affair. They don’t take themselves too seriously – Shane even introduces the refrain for Behind These Walls with a wry, “it’s very fucking simple, we are Welsh after all” – and the strapping likes of Long Time Dead and Set In Stone are thrashed out with Cheshire Cat-grinning zeal. By the time they draw towards a close with older fan favourites Don’t Give A Damn and Breakaway Shane’s on top of the speaker stack, cajoling his faithful like he’s headlining Download festival. Soon after, he and guitarist David are down in the crowd playing, singing and dancing with delighted punters, flanked by a large Welsh flag that’s appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
Post-show, the area by the merch table is rammed, and the band are clustered around chatting to fans like old friends.
“Music gets people talking,” Ronnie says. “Fans talk to us as people, not just musicians and that’s why they’re buying the merch, selling out the venues, because they love this album and they know we want to give them a third and fourth album and keep going as long as we can. It’s more than a fanbase, it’s an extended family.”
“Fans talk to us as people, not just as musicians.”
Ronnie Huxford