Your LMG’s 50th issue bash at Mercury

Friday 10 June 2011

The good people at Your LMG celebrated their 50th issue with a great line-up of bands at Mercury last Friday: Peachy Keen, Sabretooth and 2 (unplugged and…’plugged’ I guess) sets from Taxi Violence all made for a really fun night.

The only other time I’d seen Taxi Violence had been at Synergy last year; I’d always heard great things about them but was pretty underwhelmed when I saw them. I rate it was probably me having an off day instead of them because they do have a great reputation, so I was keen to seem them again…

They started the evening with an acoustic set (having just released an acoustic album) and were joined by Sleepers guitarist Nico Roos and We Set Sail’s keyboardist Richard Brunyee. It was pretty cool and I was already enjoying them more than previously, but I’m not entirely convinced acoustic suits them…

Up next was one of the night’s main attractions for me: Peachy Keen. I really, really enjoyed them, both listening to their music and watching them – they really have their image down and it compliments their music perfectly (seems a stupid thing to say, but as someone who prefers audio and visuals to match, I like that sort of thing)…the double bass alone would’ve won me over, and the occasional additional drummer was a neat trick too.

Peachy Keen were loads of fun, a very cool band.

There were some brief thanks and speeches from the LMG team after Peachy Keen…

‘Sabretooth’ is an awesome name for a band, it really is. I’d heard it before but never seen/heard the actual band; in my mind they sounded pretty hardcore, heavy, metal, all those things…in reality they were more like a tribute to my least favourite sounds of the 80s…

They did their thing really well and they had an ocean of enthusiastic fans loving every minute but I just can’t take that kind of music seriously…the 2 guitarists were the real 80s mascots – the one looked like a cross between Slash and a gypsy woman and the other was a deadringer for Brendan Fraser in Airheads. Plus they each had an electric fan at their feet to blow their hair around while they played…

To add to the experience, I happened to be standing next to their biggest fan (human, not electric) who went completely nuts for every song and even told off his sweaty neighbours for readjusting Gypsy Slash’s fan to blow on to themselves…

I dunno, theirs is not a breed of rock that I know a lot about but I got the general sense that Sabretooth’s fans were way more hardcore than the band themselves and I thought that was pretty amusing…there were stage divers and a mosh pit, screams and horns and the band were covering Van Halen and Whitesnake…again, not my thing but they’re very good at it and put on quite a show…

Taxi Violence returned and laid my doubts to rest: they were great. Cool tracks and bundles of energy; I don’t think vocalist George van der Spuy spent more than 10 seconds in the same position during any part of the set. They were joined again by Nico Roos and Richard Brumyee as well as the legendary Bingo doing his hypnotically deranged axe-grinding-spark-showering thing. Great fun.