8th November 2013
Soup Kitchen
8/10
Future Of The Left are several things if not confrontational: energetic, uncompromising, hilarious. Still, they are very, very confrontational and in Andy ‘Falco’ Falkous they possess one of rock’s quickest and most sardonic wits. Tonight, with Soup Kitchen’s tiny dancefloor rammed and several audience members forced to camp out on the stairs to the bar, Falco, and the rest of his troupe go on the rampage.
For a venue much more accustomed to showcasing delightful indie cannon fodder, FOTL are an unusual prospect. No one writes quite like Falco, criticising everything within and beyond his horizon, and whilst many have attained cult of personality through similar methods, few have managed to do so in such an obscure, hilarious and, frankly, likeable way, all the while injecting a ton of personality into such impersonal lyrical themes. To put that into context, the third song in contains the chorus “Bread, cheese, bow and arrow, the staple diet of rodents” and yet the crowd shout that back as if it were some deeply personal war cry.
It’s far from the only occurrence, either. Tonight’s gig is peppered with similarly bizarre refrains, the loudest being the excellently titled ‘You Need Satan More Than He Needs You’ which also proves the moment when the gig descends into mayhem and en-masse circle pits. The sound is far from excellent, but then, FOTL are hardly a band that exist in surround sound, only beer, sweat and wit, a point proved when one member of the audience is handed a Stella for activating a distortion pedal that Falco can’t reach at the climax of ‘How To Spot a Record Company’.
Audience members heckle and are fiercely heckled down, choice cuts from new album How To Stop Your Brain in An Accident are wildly received and for reasons unknown, the drum kit is disassembled and paraded through the audience halfway through closer ‘Lightsaber Cocksucking Blues’, but the band play on. Could it be that Future of the Left are Britain’s most entertaining/uncompromising cult band? Who cares? They are fun. Serious fun.
