At the end of a tour that seems to have been rolling since the Carling Leeds Festival in August (the last time I saw ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA!) tonight has been sold out for weeks. The palpable excitement is even getting to the ticket touts scavenging the railway arches of Leeds darker corners.
With sales and guestlist added together, attendance numbers are off the scale. Getting through the crowd, even a yard from the very back door, is a precarious toe crunching journey.
As is right and proper, the crowd is graded from 16 year old ID fraudsters at the front, history and politics students in the middle and seen-it-all-before punk Dads and hippy Granddads at the very back. The local pride and anticipation are full blooded. There are shouts of recognition, pleasure and welcome as the band walk on to a triumphal burst of "The Touch" by Stan Bush through the pa.
The band look knackered and delighted in equal measure. Tom makes a short and heartfelt introduction about promising to do his best, despite a ravaged voice and hoping that the crowd will help him through. (we've spotted the setlist and it’s going to be eleven songs). He needn't have worried, the crowd are well prepared and the band are going to play a storming set regardless. How could they not?
At this point my analytic descriptive powers were inexplicably removed. The place went mental. The power surged, the Mensheviks took over the Winter Palace and delirium swept the Imperial Steps. Thunder, machine guns, screaming, bodies hurled in every direction. Flailing, spinning, clattering, yelling onslaught of irrepressible energy, enthusiasm and fun. I should have been in the Granddad section, but I like this band. A lot. So I wanted to be a bit closer – like jammed up under the monitor speakers (see photos, left).
The set has been well practised and tested (always to destruction) so this last night gets a final explosion of release, fomented and matched by a mosh-pit of insurrectionary hedonists. Early on Tom hurls himself, still singing, over the heads of the first three rows. He rolls in flight and is caught, fondled (still singing) and propelled right back up to his proper place in the centre of the spot-lit, smoke-affected stage. 5.9, 5.9, 5.9, 6, 6 (as the Soviet gymnasts used to dream)
I'm still one of the non-initiates who hasn’t got a clue what the lyrics are about. But I get a sense of desperate gulps of communicative effort hurled against a security glass panel of corporate indifference. Livid colours and lumps of flesh are splattered wildly and indiscriminately into some kind of self-constructing vortex that will drill through our dullness before long. It’s humanlife bursting out of the dead alien chest of the last generation's failed astronauts.
Each song (as we now know) has a number for a title and the fact that I can't remember which is which is part of the point. It's not my turn to be at the edge of things – semi-witted critics like me are not supposed to be able to decode, represent, overwhelm and own the music with "understanding". To get this stuff you have to be there. You have to be in and of the crowd. If the video evidence makes sense in ten years time, so be it. But right now immediacy and abandonment is everything. It’s serious, wholehearted, life-affirming fun.
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The music, alone, is still pretty formidable though. It is awkward, challenging stuff that the tutor books won't be able to reduce to chord diagrams too easily. In terms of rock school credentials, the band's PhD knowledge of the field is prodigious. There's a lot gong on between vocal, guitar, synth and bass that steps well beyond the obvious Gang of Four and "angular, spiky" first-attempt descriptions. At the most frantic moments, with bass drums and voice on LOUD AS POSS, Whiskas is playing some pretty ambitious guitar fragments. The apparently blasé drum sound is precision stuff that never descends into the mechanical parade of standard chops that drummers like to present as music. Katie is connected with the whole band as a full, listening, active contributor in a way that's rare in rock/punk bands. And when those heavy artillery moments arrive, stage lights fizzing on an off to keep up, bass and drums create a single blast that sucks the breath out of you. The opening of set closer "Eleven" is majestic.
South By South West is the next big gig, and ¡FORWARD,RUSSIA! can march on to the next level after that. They had been preceded by a lively, complex and exceedingly well drilled O FRACAS. One of the great things about the ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA! Movement is the serious espousal of dozens of other good causes over the last couple of years. Every time they play another hard-working and worthy band gets on the bill with them No management-convenience deals here. Friends, colleagues and competitors all get a shot – just so long as their aim is up to the job. And in the case of O FRACAS their rifle shot stuff is deadly accurate. On first listen it seems to be bright guitar riffing and choppy tempos (and so it is, in part). Bu the warm tones and inventive lines of a rather funky bass set up some other kind of secret pleasure too. There's a lot going on with O FRACAS, and it's well worth listening out for them. Opening band DEAD DISCO (three women, one drummer) did the difficult job of keeping the restless crowds in good spirits.
www.forwardrussia.com
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