Gig review: The Southern River Band at Thekla, Bristol

Live review: Southern River Band at Bristol Thekla, Tuesday, July 2 2024

By STEVE MASCORD

WHERE to start? I thought about opening this review by explaining Thekla is a boat permanently moored at the mud docks in this picturesque British city dotted with canals. The Southern River Band became the Midlands Harbour Band tonight. The cargo hold, which is presumably where this show was played, is ‘lined with Australian jarrah wood, which is very durable’.

I thought about starting at the end, a local in his sixties shaking his head and saying ‘I’m blown away by that, if I’m honest’.

I considered perhaps recounting some stage banter from flamboyant frontman Cal Kramer. When he took off his shirt he said: “I haven’t been doing heroin. I was raped by a swarm of mosquitoes in Leeds”.

But I’ll settle for this: no setlist.

Not that there wasn’t one, but there was no visible one. Nothing taped to the tiny stage downstairs on this old boat built in 1958 and abandoned in Sunderland in 1975.

The Southern River Band – completed by Pat Smith on bass Dan Carroll on guitar and Tyler Mitchie on drums – change their setlist most nights on this UK, Europe and Scandinavia jaunt but they’re young enough, hungry enough and mentally adroit enough not to need it written out for them.

This is an incredible rock’n’roll band and seeing them belatedly for the first time can consume you if you’re not careful. There’s this crime-noir theme running through the “Vice City” songs and videos that can enchant you.

Or there’s the fact they portray a Cheap Trick-style light-and-shade image-wise, two flamboyant members (Kramer and Mitchie) and two in RM Williams (Smith and Carroll). Listening to them will not prepare you for the experience of seeing them live; maybe they sound like a more serious Darkness.

(Then again, they dressed as knights opening for The Darkness at Warwick Castle).

That’s not the full picture; if you’ve heard them on Spotify you have only the sketchiest idea of what TSRB is really about. But when you are peddling boogie to Brits, how do you stand out, then?

By being stratospherically, mind-blowing, devastatingly, soul-shakingly GOOD. That’s how. Kramer immediately establishes a rapport with the crowd, asking questions (‘one and a time’), checking that everyone in the circle pit actually wants to be a circle pit and even cracking himself up when he says of jazz musicians: “They work on scales. Snakes have scales too and I’d rather have one of them in my room than someone playing jazz.”

Southern River Band possess that elusive, youthful combination of virtuosity and ferocious emotion that many of us remember from gig-going when we were much younger. There is zero contrivance or arrogance in this snowballing slice of waterborne mayhem as eyes widen in disbelief – not least mine.

Events gather pace masterfully. The songs are, a record producer from the eighties or nineties would say, too long. “Stan Qualen” (a combination of Status Quo and Van Halen, Kramer explained at London show) is seven minutes long and has only a couple of minutes of vocals.

But by going back to the roots of blues-based hard rock and making their own rules, The Southern River band have re-engineered the genre just enough to achieve the one-in-a-million lottery prize of … freshness.

The main set finale of “Vice City II” is just staggering in its conception and execution, a “Stairway To Heaven” for these supremely talented sandgropers.

But this has been an analytical review and that does not achieve the primary aim of reflecting the impact my first night in the presence of the Southern River Band. This was a guttural performance, with grimaces and grins and grit, that hit the heart a good 90 minutes before the head could attempt to explain it.

I’m sure this is how British audiences reacted the first time Airbourne came through. They will fall much more deeply for The Southern River Band than perhaps even they could hope.

I may have even seem a pom trying to haul up the anchor and sail away with them.

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