“Haven’t you heard?” asks Mario Cuomo, with a devilish glint in his eye, “Rock ‘n’ roll is dead.” Apparently all those US dates with Arctic Monkeys earlier this month didn’t teach him anything. Or perhaps it’s Alex Turner who skipped a lesson or two. The frontman with the impressive mane is addressing the “geezers at the back”, adding with a sneer “you call them geezers, we call them old motherfuckers!”, to which no one in the crowd assembled in Birmingham’s Hare & Hounds takes offence. His delivery has all the menace of the blond kid from ‘The Karate Kid’; it’s only when the band starts playing and he’s chucking water bottles you need to start ducking for cover.
He’s aiming his jibes at those of us not at the front of the venue rapturously throwing ourselves about in a sea of flailing limbs to the Chicago group’s riotous set. I can’t speak for everyone present but can only assume they too had excuses as worthy as having nearly pulled their groin playing five-a-side earlier in the week. If not for that, I’m sure I too would have been going mental. This in spite of the fact that I now approach music’s young blood with the same thinking as Matthew McConaughey’s character in ‘Dazed and Confused’: “I get older, they stay the same age”. Only he’s talking about sleeping with high school girls and I say it with more jaded resignation.
You can read for yourselves on their tragically brief Wikipedia entry that an NPR DJ who selected The Orwells’ ‘Who Needs You’ as his summer anthem declared “You can’t say The Orwells without saying ‘young’”. And he was absolutely right. Every single article I’ve read on the five-piece talks about the fact that all of its members are barely out of school. For once though, the older generation isn’t on the outside looking in. I shouldn’t have to say it, but these guys are in no danger of becoming a dubious fad like Twilight or boy bands. They may not like to admit it themselves but there’s enough of the Stones, Stooges, and Strokes in their DNA to get even a corpse’s toe tapping.
Getting to the bottom of the certain oedipal inevitability of wanting to kill your musical forebears that comes with youth would probably require the services of the bloke Metallica hired in ‘Some Kind of Monster’ to tend their wounded egos. Cuomo’s pronouncement that rock ‘n’ roll is dead begs the question that if the genre is indeed deceased, how is it that The Orwells are quite possibly the best rock ‘n’ roll band I’ve ever seen live? Does that mean Arctic Monkeys aren’t rock ‘n’ roll anymore? It has been a while since anyone called the lads from Sheffield fresh-faced and could there be a more apt symbol of selling out than performing and accepting an award at the MasterCard BRIT Awards by MasterCard as brought to you by MasterCard? Perhaps the o2 wasn’t the best place to check the pulse on rock ‘n’ roll? Answers on a postcard please. On last night’s evidence, I’ve come to the conclusion that rock ‘n’ roll is dead, but so what? Long live rock ‘n’ roll!
I do have an admission to make: I nearly didn’t go to this gig. A combination of some very late nights, the aforementioned groin injury and the fact that this would be my second trip to the Hare & Hounds, a few minutes away from Birmingham’s hipster locus in Mosley, in three days after reviewing Cate Le Bon there on Tuesday meant I nearly stayed in. What was I saying earlier? Oh yeah, long live rock ‘n’ roll… Still, in my defence, there’s only so much real ale, cardigans and sensible shoes one man can take. I decided I really couldn’t pass up the opportunity and I’m glad I didn’t because seeing The Orwells live is an amazing experience most of those lucky enough to snap up tickets to their nearly sold out UK shows will be unlikely to forget. The rest of you don’t know what you’re missing.
Drinking straight from a bottle of red wine, wiggling his hips and feigning orgasm and eventually ending up shirtless and crowd surfing, singer Mario Cuomo is a thrilling force of nature to behold. The band likewise are terrific to watch, dispatching one top tune after the next from a well of ear-splitting feedback. Opener ‘Other Voices’ is only the first of the band’s seemingly endless array of numbers celebrating joyous, carefree teenage years, with the lyrics “take a drink and let’s make out… light up a smoke and start to fry”. Singing songs about running wild without fear of consequence as kids are wont to do would be trite were it not for the irony laid on thick by Cuomo taking another long swig of his wine and wishing Kurt Cobain a happy birthday before launching into latest single ‘The Righteous One’, with its substantial echoes of Nirvana’s ‘In Bloom’. It’s clearly not just the house red they’re developing a taste for however, the bleary eyed psychedelia of ‘Dirty Sheets’ indicates that they are getting to grips with a more herbal tonic than just the booze they still can’t legally purchase in their home state.
Fans will have been waiting with baited breath to hear new material from The Orwells’ upcoming second album and I can tell you that the new songs aired are uniformly excellent, revealing far more depth, ability and ambition than 2012’s debut ‘Remember When’ suggested. I think when it comes down to it, the crucial factor to this band’s growth and long-term future will be that no one is calling them cool. I know this because cool bands get mocked in YouTube comments whereas The Orwells’ recent performance on the Late Show with David Letterman had people rushing to their defence, saying they weren’t the butt of any joke at their expense. The Orwells are not being named the new wave of anything. It would appear unjust. Listening to and reading the lyrics of ‘Mallrats (La La La)’, up until last year The Orwells’ best known single, reveals an anthem for the teen experience on par with the more celebrated ‘Royals’ by New Zealand’s Lorde. Except The Orwells haven’t won any Grammys or made Radio 1’s A-list. The only list they’ve made it on so far is MTV’s when they named them one of the criminally overlooked artists from 2012. That no one is looking in their direction means they could well stealthily deliver the best record of 2014.
To that end, they would do well to re-enlist TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, the producer of ‘Other Voices’ and their breakthrough track ‘Who Needs You’. It became clear last night that he is the only person so far who has come close to capturing on tape the lightning-in-a-bottle that is The Orwells playing live even if his role was memorably described by The Guardian’s Paul Lester as “using an experimental hammer to crack a very basic nut.” People have argued that it shouldn’t matter who is twiddling the knobs on the other side of the glass, a band will always sound like themselves on record for better or worse. Those people are idiots who have obviously never heard any of The La’s outtakes or more importantly never seen The Orwells live.
The crowd at the Hare & Hounds last night heard the exciting voice of a new generation, a generation that wears a Chicago Bulls jersey because they actually support them and not because the world and his wife had some piece of Michael Jordan-endorsed merchandise in the ‘90s. As if more proof was needed, they began the encore by tearing through The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ with more brutal, prowling intensity than Iggy Pop & co. have been able to muster in decades. For my money, they made it their own. This is definitely rock ‘n’ roll, it’s nothing new or different and yet it’s more dangerous, sexy and awesome that is has been in years. To misquote Lincoln Steffens: “I have seen the future, and it rocks.”
Elliott Homer
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