Live Review

Guildean Gang – The Purple Turtle, London

• 5th Feb 2009

We all have strange relationships with childhood memories, from playing football in the park with jumpers for goalposts to our first cigarettes hanging out of bedroom windows with The Smiths playing. At the risk of showing age, we’ll say that’s all pure example. What the Bedfordshire new boys Guildean Gang seem to do live is pull those reminiscences in sync; the lose ends of Supergrass concerts, baggy jumpers, Nirvana t-shirts, losing your virginity, discovering great music, understanding why cider can be so evil.

In their cheeky dark pop songs they try and tear apart influences and butt them against newer bands such as Arctic Monkeys and Wombats, which in fairness they do though really there’s no need. The sense of wistfulness in their set is not wanting for contemporary comparison, it’s irrelevant as the influences they draw from are so natural and well executed, while the band manages to not really sound like too much we’ve heard of late. Certainly not out of the six-strings of anything in the past decade anyway. The set is highlighted by a rather delightful and unexpected Clash cover and their debut single ‘Dennis Bergkamp’. There seems to be sonic confusion when the single lands, with its bleached raw verses colliding into the rebellious albeit difficult to define chorus and huge, Cure-like bass riffs which plunges the song along.

The band seem a tad naive on stage, not unrehearsed or unprofessional, rather quite charming and childlike. Like it’s all still an adventure. It’s wonderful because of that, and with a complete set of viciously danceable (in a Franz way) and well thought songs, they’re certainly a real positive prospect for 2009.