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The Larry Love Showband - Thursday
March 17th 2005
It’s 10.30 on St Patrick’s Night. The tickets
sold out weeks ago and there is a capacity audience
awaiting a night of ‘sweet, pretty, country, acid
house music’…but where’s the band? ‘Well
some of them are lost in Harlesden, and Larry Love is
in a private drinking den in Soho’ come’s
the answer from a nearby mobile phone!
 This
is the Larry Love Showband, the acoustic wing of those
Brixton country acid house reprobates the Alabama 3.
This is to be expected.
Twenty minutes later the band show up, Rock Freebase
(guitar), Nick Reynolds (Harmonica) and Zoë Devlin
(Vox), followed by a somewhat dishevelled Larry Love,
half an hour later.
In ten minutes a bottle of JD gets sunk and the band
are on stage – no sound check – and crack
into their tribute to the man in black, ‘Hello,
I’m Johnny Cash’. Harrow has not seen anything
like this – beer hits the ceiling – and the
hoedown has begun.
They follow this up with ‘Let the caged bird sing’,
dedicated to Paddy Hill and the Birmingham Six and then
hit straight into their number 41 (with a bullet!) hit
single and Soprano’s endorsed, ‘Woke up this
morning’, which prompts the first drunken sing-along
of the night. ‘There’s a train a coming’...who
can argue?
‘Have you seen Bruce Richard Reynolds’ follows
raucously, a tribute to the great train robber (Ironically
Nick’s dad!). One of the best cuts from the new
album, ‘Outlaw’, it goes down a storm. You
can visibly see members of the audience turning to true
converts before your eyes.
Zoë sings like an angel on ‘Up above my head’,
and the male contingent of the audience are all instantly
in love! Larry smokes some more fags (where else do
you get a voice like that?) and Rock Freebase strums
the intro to ‘Aint goin to Goa’ a song dedicated
to ‘holiday makers everywhere’.
‘2 heads’ follows and leads to some chaotic
one legged dancing as Larry sings ‘I’m gonna
hop to heavens door’ and I do believe that some
drunken punter has actually plucked his eye out for
Jesus!
‘Mansion on the hill’ is up next. ‘The
meek aint gonna inherit shit’ sing the crowd and
the band leave the stage to perhaps the biggest round
of applause I’ve ever heard at Trinity.
They encore with their cover of ‘Speed the sound
of loneliness’, Larry and Zoë both hollering
the refrain ‘out there running just to be on the
run’. ‘They are the best live band in the
country’ screams the quote from the Guardian on
a nearby poster. I don’t think anyone who saw this
gig tonight will disagree.
Chris Perdue
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