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The Lovely Eggs
100 Club, London
AMERICA’S Next Top Model (ANTM) is all looking fierce and Tyra’s homilies. Despite its desperate coolness, it never gets beyond “industry” and safe.
For realness you need RuPaul’s Drag Race, where wit and intelligence strut it for all they’re worth. There’s both toughness and heart and so it is with music — the Lovely Eggs bring realness.
Their latest album This Is Eggland is launched at this gig, and what a gig. The Lovely Eggs’ music has bollocks. Front-person Holly is a woman and she's got Boris Johnson’s in her pocket. The band is from Lancaster and they’ve been showcasing Lancaster Music Co-op on their current tour, with local writer Ian Marchant kicking off the night by launching his A Hero For High Times about the history of British counter-culture. He's doing it at the right gig.
Co-op band Mr Ben and the Bens also play and, as Porky the Poet quips, they're “the only band to have Lego on their rider.” Young they are and pretty good too.
It’s great to see this sense of community. In proper style, the tour has its own print fanzine and there's even a Tim Wells poem in it. So much music today is industry, it’s inspiring to see a band that sees the joy in craft.
Not from Lancaster but a good egg, Porky the Poet does a rousing set of sparky poetry, standing next to an Arts Emergency banner (arts-emergency.org).
Both he and The Lovely Eggs spit some fury at our Tory overlords and in particular the dwindling opportunities for working-class people in the arts. The Lovely Eggs are going the right way about it, doing their own thing, doing it brilliantly and giving support to those around them.
As for the music — category is lo-fi psychey punk perfection. They might just be Holly and David, but they fill the stage with a building energy of the sort I last saw Linda Hayden spooking up in Blood on Satan’s Claw. It works its way into the sellout crowd and everyone is possessed.
New single Wiggy Giggy is getting a lot of airplay on the non-ANTM stations and that and its stomping predecessor I Shouldn’t Have Said That show that the band know exactly what RuPaul means when telling the kweens: “Don’t fuck it up.”
This is Eggland is available from thelovelyeggs.co.uk.
