No fanfare. No grand entrance. Just a three-piece gettin’ on with it as Kit Trigg ease into opener “Free N Easy” and immediately make it plain that this isn’t about posing. It’s not an Almighty cover either. Instead, it’s modern hard rock with bite and crunch, played by a band who look completely at home on this stage.
And my, how them boys do swang, as the Electric Boys might put it. “Makin’ It Swing” lives up to its name the second it locks into its chorus, while “Snake In The Grass” is delivered with such venom that if you happen to be the person it’s about, you’d probably be pricing up a move abroad by the time it’s done. There’s real feeling here too. “Grow With The Flow”, dedicated to a departed friend, lands with proper emotional weight, and “Light At The End Of The Tunnel” is a beauty, full of Led Zep strut and pure ebullience.
Morgan Linley on bass and Max Reid on drums — more of him later — give the whole thing shape and swagger, and a new song, as yet unnamed, turns out to be one of the set’s real highlights, steeped in classic rock and full of promise. By the time “Goin’ For Glory” swings for the bleachers, Kit Trigg have underlined exactly how much talent is in front of us.
Then Muddibrooke come out and do what Muddibrooke always do: mean every single word. Every time.
And they don’t sound like anybody else. Brooke has apparently made the trip from Derby with her winter socks on, but other than that there’s nothing remotely throwaway about any of this. Maximum Volume Music has seen them what feels like a million times by now, and the truth is they just keep getting better. Anna’s harmonies add even more shape to songs already bursting with personality, and with a debut album set to be produced by Luke Morley of Thunder, there’s every reason to think bigger things are coming. On this evidence, they deserve to.
The newer material sounds immense, and the older songs still carry their own strange, ragged magic. “Devil” sounds like it’s been dragged in from somewhere dark and half-forgotten, and even the quieter moments have a restless edge. “Turn To Dust” offers catharsis rather than calm, and “ADHD” makes it plain that this is music born from a mind that never really stops still.
“Cocaine” rides in on a bass groove that gives Brooke room to snarl, while Morgan adds harmonies and Reid absolutely hammers his kit behind her. Their cover of “You Don’t Own Me” is superb too, and in truth it sums this untamed trio up rather perfectly. They can take something familiar and make it feel like theirs. Then Morgan takes the mic for “Gotta Get Away” — “if you wanna go to the bar…” Brooke jokes — and it turns into a proper stomper. At this rate, they’re not going to stay one of the best-kept secrets around here for very much longer.
“It’s just a shot away…” goes “Gimme Shelter” as Dan Byrne steps out on stage for night one of arguably the most important tour of his life so far. Whether that shot is fame, fortune or something even bigger, who knows. But this place is sold out, the atmosphere is there from the off, and Dan Byrne deserves every second of it.
From the second he launches into “Savior”, from the album due in May, you get the sense he’s not just here to play songs. He’s here to claim something. “Like Animals” crushes, there’s an early singalong, and Byrne is very obviously in party mode. Byrne is emotional too, and a fair few of the newer fans are clearly here for “She’s The Devil” — one of those songs that ends up taking on a life of its own. Byrne jokes that it’s always the songs you least expect that become the hardest to sing, but that’s the thing about songs like that: they stop belonging solely to the person who wrote them.
There’s swagger all over “Hate Me”, and you suspect that when Byrne is playing arenas — and on this evidence that doesn’t feel like fantasy — he’ll still be wheeling that one out. “Praise Hell”, the new single, injects a little soul into proceedings, while a new acoustic guitar gets its first outing of the tour on “Easier”, a ballad from the “Beginnings” EP that quite clearly means a lot to him.
With the new album still a couple of months away, the set is naturally heavy on material the crowd doesn’t fully know yet. That could have been a problem for a lesser artist. It isn’t here. The new songs are uniformly brilliant, and there’s even a world premiere for the synth-driven “Sober”, which builds superbly and suggests Byrne’s palette is getting broader by the show.
The standalone single “Sentimental” is greeted like an old friend. Glenn Clay adds plenty on guitar, Max Reid returns behind the kit, and Colin Parkinson — introduced, gloriously, as “the funkiest man I know” — brings exactly that to the low end. “Cherry And Leather” comes armed with a proper sleazy riff, and Byrne even finds room for a crack at Audioslave’s “Show Me How To Live”. Planet Rock didn’t call him a voice of a generation for nothing, right?
“Hard To Breathe” sounds huge. No, make that humungous.
And ending with “Death Of Me” — the first song he wrote on this solo journey, and one he’s got tattooed on his arm — feels exactly right. It ties the whole set together: the ambition, the graft, the belief and the sense that this is only the start of something much bigger.
I spoke to Dan Byrne once and he told me this site gave him the first review his first band ever got.
In that case, we’re honoured to have played even the tiniest part. Because if tonight proves anything, it’s that sometimes talent really does rise to the top. And as he leaves the stage, Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” plays out around KK’s, and that line — “I made up my mind, I ain’t wasting no more time” — rings round the room. That’s Dan Byrne all over: solo, and never better.
