The D4, The Tremors, TheAampirellas @ The Rev,22/01/05

Tue 25th Jan, 2005 in Gig Reviews

I’ll get straight to the point. Tonight’s show ended with The D4’s lead guitarist, Dion lying in the middle of the crowd at The Rev, playing at full propensity with blood streaming out of a nasty cut on his stomach. This scene pretty much explains the whole of the show.

Opening act, The Aampirellas, had a mighty big task ahead of them. Not only were they opening for one of the hottest rock and roll bands doing the rounds at the moment, but they were playing to a relatively empty and unresponsive crowd. Such is the woe of many support acts, however, and the band did everything in their power to play as dynamic a set as they could. Playing a brand of rock and roll laden with catchy as hell pop hooks, the band played an impressive set which got better as both the band and crowd warmed up. Old favourites, Stars And Stripes and Grand Times sounded as if they came directly from AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap sessions – automatically making them a worthy inclusion on tonight’s bill. Good as they were. It’s worth noting that the main crowd response after the set was “were they better with a second guitarist?”

It’s easy to see why the next act on tonight’s bill, The Tremors, are popular. They’ve got the whole package. Aurally, they sound tight, they’re kind of catchy and there’s no musical anomalies in there to trick even the most musically doltish of listeners. Visually, they’re fun to watch, vocalist Geoff Corbett stomps around the stage with the confidence of a mob boss in his home territory and drummer Cec Condon’s unorthodox style is deadset mesmerising. These elements mould together to make a band that’s fun to watch for a while, but it inevitably wears thin after a while. Soon you’ve seen the same old moves, heard the same old hollering and rock and roll riffs and you kinda wish they would stop. Having said that, the crowd, which was slowly building, seemed to eat up every second of the show with closer Bad Teenage Poetry clearly being most popular.

By this stage The Rev was still hardly what you would call full. I guess a poorly promoted show put on the night before the Big Day Out was never going to attract a big crowd, but the group of punters present was even more scanty than I had anticipated. Someone obviously forgot to tell The D4 that there weren’t many people there as they stormed through a drunken high-octane set of rock and roll that could very well have been played in front of a crowd of tens of thousands.

From the outset, The D4 were here to fuck things up. Fresh from their set at the renowned Little Steven’s Underground Garage Festival, they let loose as soon as the first chord resounded though those big Marshall stacks. The underlying aim of the band for tonight’s show was clearly to prove that they aren’t to be lumped with the rest of the new rock revivalists, many of whom are incredibly banal.

Firing through a set of songs from their debut album 6Twenty, their new album, set for a March release and even throwing in a Hoodoo Gurus cover for good measure. They fell into the drum kit, played solos on top of the pool table, spent a good amount of time in the crowd and swigged from bottles of red wine. They sounded awesome and looked even better, providing a dynamic live show that I certainly was not expecting to see. I just hope Dion got that cut attended to.