Gig review: Quireboys + Willie Dowling + Continental Lovers at Islington Assembly Hall, London

Gig review:  Quireboys, Willie Dowling and Continental Lovers at Islington Assembly Hall, London on Sunday, November 24 2024

By STEVE MASCORD

WHAT is different, then, about going to a gig like this – this being a hard rock band from the eighties of some acclaim – and attending a similar event in Sydney or Melbourne?

There is a different vibe here at the almost-100-year-old Islington Assembly Hall than Spike and his bandmates would have encountered elsewhere on this tour by his reconstituted Quireboys. Put simply, the 56-year-old Jonathan Francis Gray didn’t pull the bandana, waistcoat and scarves from a vacuum and the hall tonight is full of his dandy-ish contemporaries.

It’s a scene – and a place to be seen.

Openers Continental Lovers are better dressed than any of them. They look like they went shopping on Melrose Avenue 30 years ago when they were each, oh, two years old. This is ramshackle honky tonk bluesy fare in the Quireboys tradition from the Nottingham visitors and they finish with the Stones’ “Dead Flowers”.

But none of the other songs stick in the punter’s mind long after they conclude.

Second on the bill is the Quireboys’ current keyboardist Willie Dowling. He seems to have an engaging sense of humour: the full billing is Willie Dowling and the Invisible Band and sure enough, it’s just him, his keyboards and a bassist.

“Buy some merch – or he doesn’t eat,” beseeches Dowling, who warns us we may not like his music. And, to be fair … you know … we don’t. Because it’s quirky eighties pop with clever lyrics and we’re here to see a rock band. Both supports seemed extremely likeable people but all in all they didn’t really fly. Another night for them, perhaps.

We’ll not go into chapter and verse here but basically Spike was sacked from the Quireboys, there were two versions of the band, the other version changed their name to the Black Eyed Sons and now Spike has brought in early bassist Nigel Mogg and basically started the band again. They are joined by Thunder pair Luke Morley (guitar) and Harry James (drums) – and Dowling,

And after a hurriedly assembled small show last year at the Camden Underground, this was an infinitely tighter, more entertaining and just plain better display from Spike’s Quireboys. At first it looked like being an example of the harm bands do to themselves when they split, so sparsely populated was the room shortly before kick-off – but these people are old pros and showed up just in time for the main event, well oiled up despite it being a Sunday night.

Clearly Spike is not going to mine much material that reminds him, or the audience, of the previous line-up. The whole show was drawn from just three albums – 1990’s A Bit Of What You Fancy, 1993’s Bitter, Sweet And Twisted and this year’s Wardour Street.

With this line-up, the ornate ballads “King Of New York” and “I Don’t Live You Anymore” soar majestically. Thunder are masters of Big Rock. But on the other hand, the majority of the material does not have the swing that musicians who had played this stuff for years had been able to imbue.

This was more a straight-ahead rock delivery than a sort of back-alley pin-stripred reprobate exercise that perhaps all the back alley pin-striped reprobates – with grey hair – had come here tonight expecting.

But they almost certainly, like your reviewer, had a jolly old night anyway.