About 100 yards away, 10,000 people had gone to watch Peter Kay do jokes about garlic bread. They were evacuated after 45 minutes. Some would say they were lucky. (Not me, of course.)
Still, in the shadow of the Utilita Arena, another northerner was having an eventful night of her own. Kim Jennett, by her own admission, had scoffed her tea a bit too quickly and was now worried she might have pulled pork on her face. There are worse ways to start a gig, frankly, and there are many worse ways to introduce yourself to a room than with that sort of honesty.
Besides, once she started playing, none of that mattered. “Voodoo Woman” was acoustic blues stripped to the bone, full of character and grit, while “Let Me Be The One” showed the strength of the voice and the writing. “Love Like Suicide”, an older song she has redone, felt darker now, as if it had grown into itself with time. That, perhaps, was the theme of the set: songs being able to shift shape and still retain their power.
My theory of a great song translating to any format held up again. “Like A Stone” was a cover, and it worked beautifully. So did “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin, which became something else entirely, and Jannett seemed delighted mostly because she’d managed to get people to sing a “Peep Show” line. And if you had “acoustic version of Slipknot’s ‘Duality’” on your bingo card, then frankly you’re better at this than me.
There was depth too. “Bones”, only the second time she’d ever played it, came with a story about the expectation placed on women in music, and her passion was clear. About her hometown of Warrington, “Hell Is Wherever You Are” was delivered with the sort of affection only people from places like that are allowed to have. Jennett was funny, open, slightly chaotic, and very, very good.
Then the downstairs of The Flapper did what it does. A dark pub on the banks of the canal suddenly took on a dungeon-like quality. Low ceiling, black corners, the feeling that the walls are closing in. It was perfect for Oli Brown And The Dead Collective.
“Sinking Ship” exploded from the shadows. Raw, huge and ominous, it made the room feel smaller and the band feel bigger. “Heard It All Before” carried traces of anger, but Brown and Sam Wood were having far too much fun with it for anything to feel one-dimensional. That is the trick here, really. These songs are dark, certainly, but they are not leaden. They move, they breathe, they rise and fall.
“Goliath” floated somewhere near prog, proof that this material is about peaks and troughs as much as riffs and choruses. “Father” was even more striking. Brown admitted he’d rather let the music talk for him, and my goodness, it did. As dark as anything Tool ever did, but with a different kind of ache underneath it.
“Everything You Want” brought more of a groove and was less dense, while “Haunted” sounded enormous, anchored down by Wayne Procter, who gave the whole thing weight without ever turning it blunt. “Home Sweet Home” was introduced as a sentimental tune that means a lot, and it showed. There was passion in it, but no cheapness. No easy tug at the heartstrings. Just a song that mattered.
Then came “Your Love”, fragile and full of heartbreak, with a touch of Jeff Buckley in the vocal and an incredible build towards the crescendo. The control was remarkable. “Estranged” underlined the feeling that these songs belong in places bigger than this, and yet somehow they enveloped the venue perfectly.
“Cracks”, the new single, might be the clearest signpost of where this can go. Brown’s mellifluous voice carried the verse before the chorus swept in with the sort of widescreen drama that felt all the more apt given they’d come out to Radiohead’s “Creep”. By the time “Falling” arrived, Jannett’s earlier comment about the light show being superb felt bang on. It added to the disorientating, claustrophobic feel of it all, turning The Flapper into somewhere feverish and strange.
There is something ironic in the name, perhaps. Dead Collective or not, Oli Brown has never felt more alive.
