She Wants Revenge & The Soho Dolls at The Roadhouse, Newton Street, Manchester.
The Soho Dolls
You might be forgiven, seeing that they’re fronted by a girl wearing only a short skirt and some strategically placed tape, that the Soho Dolls might have some design afoot to distract their audience from their music, which you might expect not to be very good if it needs such a distraction. Distracting as she most certainly was, the music was pretty jolly good too - a varied range of songs that called all sorts of things to mind from New Order through The Kaiser Chiefs (or possibly those other ones that are a bit like them but aren’t them, you know, the ones with the one about walking away) and possibly even unto the lovely Morrissey. They were great. I’d like to see more of them. Come to Leeds and York, Soho Dolls!
She Wants Revenge
These chaps, judging by the size and lurid colour of their tour bus, must be something to somebody somewhere, but I’d never heard of them before last night. They were similar in style to the previous act, except the sounds of the various instruments all seemed to merge together much more and give a kind of continuous single sound that occasionally wandered a little too near the cacophonous to be pleasant. Only occasionally, though: most of the time they were ripping, especially the front man, who leapt about like nobody’s business all the while he was singing. In the end I found myself wondering about the curtains and the carpet, which I think either means I’d imbibed too much gin to pay attention to the end of their act or that all their songs were a little too similar to one another to remain interesting. Still, very enjoyable and I certainly wouldn’t actively avoid going to see them again.
Incidentally, on the way to Mabirmingchester the train stopped in Stalybridge, which was filled with smoke from a gigantic heather fire on a nearby hill. It was all very post-apocalyptic, and set the mood nicely for the rest of the evening: it was (from both groups) music to watch the apocalypse by, I think. Yes.
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