Gig review: Bulletboys + Garden Of Eden + Alpha Sista at Nightrain, Bradford

Live review: Bulletboys, Garden Of Eden and Alpha Sista at Nightrain, Bradford, Wednesday,  March 13 2024 

By STEVE MASCORD

Q: HOW many people would show up to see Bulletboys if Judas Priest were playing a 20 minute drive away? A: 35.

On websites like this we love to indulge in the majesty of rock: arenas, stadium, clubs full to overflowing as musicians soar or bomb. Thumbs up? Or thumbs down? But that’s just a sliver of what life is like for working musicians.

There’s the weekend in cities like London, New York, Sydney or Melbourne. But then there’s Wednesday nights in places like the Bradford, one of the most deprived urban areas in Britain.

When I saw on my Facebook timeline that people were making the trip from London to see Priest at the First Direct Arena in Leeds, it should have twigged that very few people were going to be here tonight at a club called Nightrain to see Marq Torien’s current BulletBoys line-up. But it didn’t until Torien mentioned it himself at the start of the show, promising an ‘intimate’ show.

Sadly your reviewer had other commitments that prevented him from hearing any more than one song by Belfast’s Alpha Sista but what I heard I liked: urgent, powerful and melodic hard rock with ripping guitar. Singer Hayley ‘Storm’ Norton joined BB on stage later but as for the rest of the band, I’m keen to check them out in future.

Garden Of Eden are also an unpretentious outfit on the upper end of hard rock, straying not just into metal territory but occasionally into thrash. Featuring bassist Steve Unger from Metal Church, their vocal delivery is reminiscent of Motorhead thanks to mainstay Dan Crenshaw.

He says it’s “been a good run … we’ve played some festivals”, the unspoken caveat being that tonight the ‘good run’ is over in front of barely a quorum.

Many of the times I’ve seen Bulletboys there has been something awry, usually tiny kinks in the self-awareness of vocalist/guitarist Torien.

At the start of the short-lived reunion with the original line-up more than a decade ago, it was an over-theatricality and sterility. On the Monsters Of Rock Cruise there was a lot of name dropping between songs with those same – now re-estranged – original members in the audience.

Tonight there were multiple excuses (due to there not being multiple people) for Torien – now joined by guitarist Ira Black, bassist Brad Lang and drummer Fred Aching – to get it wrong spectacularly. That is the opposite of what happened.

Sure, the dramatic instrumental flourishes at the end of several songs were probably not required in front of 35 people. But Torien’s performance and those of his cohorts were consummate. Say what you like about the hair metal era but these musicians have a technical mastery of their instruments that is perhaps not compulsory today.

I also have immense admiration for Torien in that he knows just how good latter-day songs “Symphony” and “Rollover” are and won’t trade them for, say, “Hang On St Christopher” or “Owed To Joe” just because more people heard those songs. “Symphony”, in particular, is a work of art and more people need to hear it.

One more aside, not at all about music: Lang went from looking like a truck driver to looking like a sex god just by taking off his leather bomber jacket after a few songs. Amazing!

All in all as good as I have seen any line-up of Bulletboys play. No encore – and nor did we expect one. Either of us.