I usually blag my way into gigs but some bands are worth coughing up cash for, and We Could be Astronauts are always worth a fiver, so I was happy to pay. I wasn’t as happy to pay more than the entry fee for a bottle of Tyskie, and you’ve got to wonder if venues aren’t killing themselves more than they’re making a killing with prices like that.
So I decided I needed to really take it steady on the booze, and thankfully Screen People – performing as a two-piece in the absence of their bassist – kept me distracted. With a post-punk sound that occasionally sounded a bit like Muse only without the overblown bombastic shit, they were pretty solid. So too were Hull five-piece The Holy Orders, who gave us a set of anthemic indie with a sturdy rock edge. The drummer was priceless to watch, but he did a mean job on the skins.
We Could be Astronauts are my kind of band: hard drinking and hard rocking, and the harder the drink, the harder they rock. They were on fire from the start with a killer rendition of ‘The Volunteer’. ‘Loose Lips’ – one of their album’s more slow-burning gems – was belting. The sound might not have been happening on-stage, but out front it was meaty yet clear, the interplay between the two guitarists providing real texture while Stuart Fletcher’s bass rumble really filled out the sound at the bottom end. Rather than take out any frustrations on the crows, they sank more booze and channelled their ire into the music. Things really stepped up a notch with ‘Game Over’, fingers and fretboards a blur as they attacked it at a hundred bloody miles per hour. That really got the contingent of cheerleading girlies down the front revved up, and a guy in a leather blouson jacket was busting moves all over and came close to spilling my exorbitantly-priced beer. Thankfully, he didn’t or I’d have had to have words.
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There was a clutch of new material in the set, too. It might take a little while to bed in, but the early signs are promising, and they wrapped the set up with a monsterously rifftastic version of ‘War Pigs’. Top notch.
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