Bristol Rough Trade, May 5th 2022
If a girl is a gun, BEX is hellfire.
BEX does not take space; she makes it. The room’s walls close in as she starts to sing. As an outlandish, primal force, it is instinct to watch her, but it’s star power that keeps us hypnotised. Her physicality and energy onstage – even when performing to an audience not typically cut out for punk – is unmatched. Every minute feels like revolution.
Her heavy metal persona is made all the more striking by her unnerving youth; at twenty, there is something oddly moving about a girl so young being so angry about the world around her.
BEX told The Bristol Gig Guide that she’d written her debut single, “Tiptoe” – which came out at midnight after the concert – about a man who’d followed her into her dressing room at a gig. The riotous anger of that experience is channelled tenfold into her stage presence: a wall of sound and an image in red, BEX is like a peacock in a steel cage.
Despite being so young, there is something about BEX that reminds the audience of an earlier era in punk. She sells handmade zines after her set and performs songs only a handful of people have heard before. She’s moving in with her bassist, and she shouts out her band’s van driver mid performance.In the last few years, there’s been a sense that punk has lost its authenticity; it’s difficult, after all, to stay true to a movement based in rejecting authority when today’s music promotion is online, muted by strict censorship guidelines.
If BEX’s mix of new-age social media fame and ‘school of hard knocks’ punk philosophy, though, is an indicator of the music’s future, it seems her and punk have a long and happy future ahead of them.
@katejeffrie
Tom Dodd Visuals
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