The Noisettes @ Birmingham Academy – 23 October 2009
I missed the support, being on a mission to buy some chewing gum to freshen my breath…
Although the new Academy has been introduced before on this site, this was my first visit and I would just like to say that it’s definitely an improvement both as regards sound, and in the view you can get from all angles, not being crammed under the balcony or squashed into the pitifully small dance floor area of the old Academy. And it has nice, wide aisles and stairways. In short it is a proper venue. I don’t like the corporate sponsorship and nationwide homogenisation of music venues, but then money talks at the end of the day, and it was the same with the old ‘Carling’ Academy (which as I’m sure you’ll remember, sold the worst Carling in the world).
The Noisettes are a mix of pounding dance punk rhythms, glam rock, jazz… even Motown influenced pop. It’s an eclectic sound, which suggests a band trying to forge its own identity. The first of these sounds is nicely demonstrated on their opening track, ‘Don’t Upset The Rhythm’ which gets a pretty rapturous response. It sets the glamorous tone with huge shiny disco balls that wouldn’t look out of place in ‘Saturday Night Fever’. However, there is quite a lot of variation in the tone and texture of the material, and the slower, jazzier numbers get a markedly more lukewarm reaction from the crowd. Many people see fit to talk through them, which probably says more about the attention span of the audience than the quality of the band. One odd track is a cover of The Killers’ ‘When You Were Young’. A jazzy, restrained version of this song does nothing to capture the melodrama of the tune and it didn’t really work for me. Saying that, next up was an epic sounding song called ’24 Hours’, which I don’t think is a very well known part of the Noisettes’ work but was a real highlight.
The guitarist at first made me think of Mark Ronson, especially on the more jazzy stuff, but this comparison was thankfully dispelled after i heard him play some tasty solos. I similarly admired the wild haired drummer’s passion, as in when he lost his sticks near the end of the last track and started hitting cymbals with his bare hands. However, the real star of the show is frontwoman Shingai who gives an injection of glamour to the gig. She has the look of a model, and musically is a mix between Siouxie of the Banshees, Billy Holliday and Grace Jones. Switching between vocals and with a bass strapped on she is a mesmerising performer who drapes herself over the drumkit, scales a 20 foot high rope ladder and at the end track, a cover of T Rex’s ‘Children of the Revolution’, runs round deliriously up to the balcony and accosts a man called Rob, praising his ‘hot shirt’. She even sung a few of the last tracks hanging upside down from the light rope ladder which got a massive cheer.
After Shingai borrowed a safety pin from the front row, to pin something on her huge golden dress together, the band played ‘Never Forget You’. This one shows the Motown/soul side of their influences most obviously. It is the latest single from their album, ‘Wild Young Hearts’ and is the sign for hordes of drunken girls to start dancing and teenage couples to start passionately necking, cos its the song everyone knows.
While I really enjoyed The Noisettes in concert, where their mix of influences makes sense and you get won over by the vivaciousness of their frontwoman, I wonder if this would come over on record. From looking at a few websites, various authorities list them as anything from ‘furious jazz punk’, to ‘Brit pop’, to ‘blues-punk’, to ‘indie rock’, ‘post rock revival’ and so on. It could just be amateur music journos’ love of throwing fancy words around or it could be that The Noisettes are trying to cover too many musical bases. Great live band though, I loved them!
Review – Adam Moffatt
Photos – Ian Dunn