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| The Swiines |
“Cheers you fuckers!” sneers The Swiines’ frontman, Scott Bugg, shortly after taking the stage. You’d have to accept it’s a reasonable salutation before this impressively charged-up Social crowd. Their exuberance tonight - one suspects - owes as much to relief at being finally indoors after queuing in the bone-splitting cold of the revisiting blizzard, as it does to openers The Souvenirs’ cockily potent set flicking on the ‘lecky to the eve of the weekend.
But noisy and eager they are, and so sandwiched between the aforementioned’s Smiths-oid Punk and Indie-pop headliners Twisted Wheel is a good spot for this home-grown quartet: affording them the luxury of a primed and pumped audience while still keeping the option open of scarpering should things get out of hand later on.
Squeezing onto the Social’s nano-stage, the band hit the ground running. Bugg comes over like some sort of indie chemistry experiment involving Gaz Coombes’ Cheshire cat looks (he wears his sideburns so long they look to almost meet up under his chin) and the insouciant swagger of a (very) youthful Ian Brown. Add a pippet’s worth of Kelly Jones’ guitar aplomb and you’re pretty much in the picture. Throughout the punchy band’s short set he proceeds to bob and weave and writhe around the mike-stand as if working out the best angles from which to smack the thing flying into the throng with a good swing of his chest-strapped Fender.
New bassist, Rory (a kind of shorter, less buff, bass-wielding version of Brendan Fraser) gets a rapturous welcome from his introduction, and proceeds to deliver a satisfying figure of robust, twisting lines that crawl around the songs’ melodies like strangulating ivy.
This is all aptly demonstrated tonight during The Swiines searing indie anthem My Plastercine Bowl, into which multiple heaps of Magical Mystery Tour and Venus in Furs have been spooned to produce a gaspingly miasmic composition. Live, they chuck in an extra Jaegerbomb and whisk the whole concoction on turbo - splattering the Social’s ceiling with some top drawer Verve-esque wah-wah from stringsman Adi Young and a truly great sing-a-long chorus. The crowd, unsurprisingly, lap it all up with gusto.
Perhaps the only danger area for The Swiines though, can be heard during chipper new single, Stoneface: the prominent demonstration of the singer’s occasional drift toward some very Gallagher-esque elasticated vowels. But played live the song is delivered with such winning upstart charm that, coupled with Bugg’s Trent-wide cheeky grin, the band jump clear from idle accusations of being mere Baggy pastiche or Liam lionisers.
And by the time their last chords die out to a feedback hum, Swiine fever has all but taken hold of the Bodega. If they carry on like this on the live circuit, it’ll take more than a few truckloads of Tamiflu to bring them under control.
The Swiines supported Twisted Wheel at The Bodega Social Club on Thursday 18 February 2010.
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