Continental Lovers are rock stars. Pure and simple. You can tell that by frontman Joe Maddox being decked out in his shades. As for the rest of them, resplendent in their Dogs D’Amour stage clothes from 1989, they have sleaze nailed. The current single, “Connection” (“it’s into the thousands on Spotify, which is about 80p,” offers Maddox), is a shining example of what they do, but there are others too. “Can’t Get Her Out Of My Head” drips with lust, while “Dale Arden” is more tender but no less cool, and MV can pay them no higher compliment than this: they do a version of “Dead Flowers” to finish. It is, without question, my favourite song in The Stones catalogue, and yet Continental Lovers find a side to it you never knew existed. A superb band and one of the best at doing what they do.
Willie Dowling knows it. He is—despite the fact he’s currently in The Quireboys lineup, a position he occupied previously—an acquired taste here. MV will always be proud to nail our colors to the mast and say that we are huge fans.
Much of the set comes from the just-released slice of brilliance, “The Simpleton,” and that includes the anti-Brexit (maybe anti-Reform Party these days?) “Long Drop Down,” the quirky nature of the Sparks-ish “I Killed My Imaginary Friend,” or the more tender “Sadie Goldman.”
Capable of biting political satire to go with his tunes, songs like “The Gravy Train” (“this was about how much I hated Tories; now I hate Labour just as much”) or “Fuck You, Goodbye,” which he dedicates to “MAGA Wannabes,” come from the heart.
Ending with The Grip’s “Vera Daydream” (“from when I was nearly famous”) proves that for well over thirty years, Willie Dowling has had the ability to write songs like no one else. And if he’s a “hard watch,” as he puts it, then you suspect that he cares not one jot.
And speaking of thirty-odd years, I’ll give you this phrase: “We’re The Quireboys, and this is rock n roll” has meant nothing other than rock n roll in its purest form since the 1980s.
There’s a feeling of going back to the future here too, as Spike has reunited with bassist Nigel Mogg as well as Dowling, and this revamped lineup has just released “Waldour Street,” a kind of tribute to the late Guy Bailey and a quite magnificent album.
You can tell the band—Luke Morley from some band you might have heard of, and Harry James, an unknown drummer (don’t @ me on Twitter, I know…) complete the roster for this show—rate it too, given how much new stuff they play.
They start with one, “Jeeze Louise,” and as ever, there’s such a joy emanating from the stage and a feeling that Spike would rather be nowhere else than where he is right now that you get swept up in it all.As we saw on the launch show in the spring, there’s a welcome dusting off of “Can’t Park Here” and “Tramps and Thieves” from the vastly underrated second album, and the new songs in particular, “Raining Whiskey”, the wonderfully silly “I Think I Got It Wrong Again”, and “Happy”, have injected new life into them, to be truthful.
The thing about The Quireboys (and let’s make no bones about it, they are one of my favourite bands ever) is that they’ve always been better songwriters than they’re given credit for, and if the spectre of Guy Bailey is never far away (and neither should it be), then the gorgeous “King of New York” is a fitting epitaph.
There are, of course, a whole ruck of songs I’ve not mentioned here yet, and they are those from “A Bit of What You Fancy”, the debut album that opened me up to a whole new world. I adored it then. I adore it now, and what am I supposed to say about songs like “Misled”, “Whippin’ Boy”, “There She Goes Again”, and “7 O’clock” that I haven’t before? They are genuine classics.
Two more of them end the set: “Hey You”, and in the encore, it ends with a phenomenal “I Don’t Love You Anymore”, yet it’s the one before that sums it up, “Like It or Not”, the first song in the encore, on which Spike sings: “I’m The Quireboys singer, like it or not.”
If you’re reading this, then you know their travails over the last couple of years, but there’s only one The Quireboys. Never original, but always the best. Never mind the kings of New York, but certainly the kings of Nuneaton tonight.
