Paperjam

The Young Knives, Birmingham Academy 31st May

Gigs // Jim // 3rd June 2007

As a famous musical act, I imagine the choice of support band can be a difficult one. I imagine you want the crowd to be entertained and warmed up, but not massively impressed – you don’t want to seem second best. Being very old, I went to see Oasis at Knebworth, the band on before them was the Prodigy, almost probably at the zenith of their powers. In the words of the old knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Oasis chose poorly. No-one wanted a bunch of Manc whinging and guitar solos after the whole crowd had been yelling “PSYCHOSOMATIC ADDICT INSAAANE” and throwing everything that wasn’t nailed down as high in the air as possible.

Rather like Harrison Ford (probably not a comparison that gets made a great deal), The Young Knives chose wisely. Their support band is called Winners, with a name like that you’d better be pretty fucking good – which they aren’t. There’s seems to be a load of them yet the noise they are making is a bit dull and indistinct, all the songs go on for ages and I get a bit bored. Actually very bored indeed, the main act could walk on, shit in a bucket and walk off and it would probably be more involving than this. Having said that Winners don’t quite to descend to the boring depths reached by interminably dull support band The Hours, hand-picked by Jarvis Cocker to make him look even better than he actually was at the Roundhouse last year.

This gig was re-scheduled from a couple of months back, not sure why but it is in the main room of the Academy, rather than the “2” bit at the back. To celebrate this I go to the toilet and am slightly surprised to see that they have got themselves one of those geezers with a tray of aftershave and a shonky line in sales banter. “Freshenupfreshenupfreshenup” he intones almost mystically as indie-kids file in and out, thoroughly perplexed.

After the intervention of the best looking roadie I, or most of the crowd judging from comments, have ever seen, The Young Knives come on and kick off with some slow, droning effort. Oh no this is all wrong – they’ve gone shite. Then they kick into The Decision which is ok but something is amiss, there appears to be some kind of technical problem that was screwing things up. “I don’t know what you were doing during that song”, says Henry Dartnell to the man known as The House of Lords, “but I hated it. It was shit”.

This is fairly indicative of the funny, if slightly bitter-sounding banter that passes between the brothers throughout the evening. For example, one exchange goes a bit like this:
“You look really old in those clothes”
“Well at least I’m not the one wearing a tank top”
“Fuck off. You fucking twat”

Things are thankfully sorted out and TYK are now operating at full strength, they start blasting out the likes of Here Comes The Rumour Mill with a big rock swagger. The crowd seems really young, I think a few people might be having their first experience of drink and drugs, some kind of junior school slam pit appears and all manner of lanky kids bang into each other like they are at some completely different gig. Then they start getting glow-sticks out, which is just odd isn’t it?

The band are due in the studio soon to record their new album so they are trying out some new songs, there’s one called something like Up All Night which sounds ace. Henry says they are going to put out one record a year for the next forty years and “make a shit load of nothing out of it”.

Suddenly we get their best song, the pounding, desperate yelp of Loughborough Suicide followed by the punk pop of Mystic Energy. They are really going for it now and the light show is put on an appropriately mental setting. They finish with Weekends and Bleak Days, all big crashing guitar and jumps off the drum riser.

Quickly back out for an encore, they give us a bit of a dull acoustic-ey one that I don’t know and then do the stop/start album opener Part Timer. Perhaps inevitably they finish with a sublime She’s Attracted To, there is more jumping around and the sound of a large proportion of the crowd yelling “You were screaming at your mum and I was punching your dad” - despite the fact that most of them aren’t old enough to have yet experienced the joy of an uncomfortable dinner with some bird’s parents.

The Young Knives are off to get drunk, they’ve earned it. Absolute quality.

HEADING

Young Knives Web Site

They keep it pretty up to date too, shit. Should've got to the Koko gig.

Loughborough Suicide

Video of them doing it at the Loughborough students union. "I'll neeeever go down fiiiighting"