The Crofters Rights, 21st March
Italian band Leatherette – aptly named after the iconic punk record ‘Warm Leatherette’ by The Normal – take to the Crofter’s Rights stage to give their debut album, Fiesta, the party it’s been gunning for.
While on record their heady post-punk, jazz-infused sound saturates the music like petrol through a Molotov cocktail, onstage it’s pure punk. Girls in Vivienne Westwood-esque attire are seized, trancelike, by the music. They move statically, erratically. The room is a time capsule for revival: it’s a scene that’s been played for decades – these are actors playing familiar roles, with well-worn lines – but it all feels new.
Andrea Gerardi, the lead guitarist, plays with a bow, creating a gothic, baroque style that lends depth to their wall-of-sound aggression. Jacopo Finelli, the saxophonist, claws at life itself as he sucks at his reed, drops his microphone into the bell, and plays like he’s running out of time. Some of the sound he creates pitches operatic; it could shatter wine glasses at a party-crashed dinner.
The stage steams until the room is curtained in sweat and smoke, but it only adds to the band’s chaotic patterning. They thrive in small spaces, if only because of their innate ability to make them into caverns of ritualism; places talismanic, on a different plane.
As an Italian band who mostly perform in English, they speak the language as a slam poet pronounces their art: there is an intense and deliberate pressure on each word. It is as if they’d never been taught the Englishman’s way of speaking it; they can’t lie, everything excites them, and they are utterly romantic about the utterly mundane. Finelli wears a tee-shirt that professes, ‘All My Morals Come From Punk’, and it rings like bells: they sing what they know, having been educated at the school of hard knocks. Their glory-days, punk-drunk epiphany is one not to miss. Truth-seeking, after all, is as timeless as punk itself.
@katejeffrie
Kate Jeffrie @katejeffrie
Role: Lead Writer / Interviewer
I review gigs, and interview bands and musicians.
Available For: Gig Reviews, band interviews
Qualification: I study English Literature at the University of Bristol.
First attended gig: The first gig I remember going to see was Lewis Watson when I was 13, at a pub a few towns over from where I lived. My friends and I all loved him, and I remember how shocked I was that someone I had on this pedestal could be stood on a stage just a few feet away, drinking a beer and playing guitar!
First gig reviewed: The first gig I ever reviewed was Palace at the O2 Academy Bristol. As a band I wasn’t particularly well acquainted with, it was a testament to how live music can bowl someone over, even when it’s coming from strangers.
Dream gig: My dad saw The Smiths on their first tour, and since they’re my favourite band, I think seeing them in an intimate venue would be a dream
