“Pruning, pruning, pruning, pruning, pruning” declaims a suited and booted Robin Dallaway into his microphone on stage at Birmingham’s Castle and Falcon on Sunday night, and it’s as if time falls away back to the mid-1980s. Suddenly, it’s a Friday evening. The Tube is on Channel 4 and an exceedingly strange black and white film that has been especially commissioned by the show is introduced by Max Headroom. “The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes” bursts forth as bells chime and a brain-scrambling groove takes hold, while suburbia is transformed into a very odd place indeed.
The Very Things were once a supremely English creation. They made eerie and unsettling psychedelia which owed as much to old black and white B-movies and 1960s’ television programmes like The Prisoner as their mutant garage rock musical influences. After releasing a couple of albums and a handful of singles, however, they were gone and seemingly without a trace. However, a couple of years ago, bandleader and creative powerhouse, Robin Dallaway brought the band back from the dead and put out the very fine Mr Arc-Eye (Under a Cellophane Sky) album. Yet, it is only now that they have felt ready to climb back on stage after a 40-year hiatus.
Not wishing to be consigned to the Heritage Act box, a good half of the Very Things’ set was culled from their new material and was met with plenty of enthusiasm from an audience who, in the main, looked like they will have remembered these Worcestershire oddities from their first go-round. “We’re Working on It” with its looped “Daddy, what makes a dream?” sample and spacey but driving groove started things up and was soon followed by the sharp, sung-spoken “Driver” with its wailing saxophone, the album’s dramatic, Fall-like title track and plenty of other gems culled from their come-back disc.
Needless to say, older tunes like the band’s hymn to Birmingham, “This is Motortown” and the ghoulish, voodoo psychedelia of “The Gong Man” had plenty in the audience beaming too, as they shook bits of their bodies that had probably not been shaken in a while. However, the crowd reaction to the final one-two of “The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes” and the more recent “I Said Yeah” made it emphatically clear that all those present were more than happy to welcome the Very Things back into their lives to hear both the new and the old songs. In fact, for the encore, we were treated to an, as yet, unrecorded song, the bouncy “Hop on Pop” and the older, discombobulating “Down the Final Flight” before the band were hauled back for a third time and a spectacularly skronky second performance of “Mr Arc-Eye”, which had saxophonist Svor Naan bringing particularly other worldly vibes to the party – and the Very Things’ audience made it crystal clear that they were on board for the whole menu.
Of course, some band reunions seem altogether predictable and planned before the original incarnation even calls it a day. The return of the Very Things, however, is anything but that and, on the evidence of this weekend’s show, they are the unexpectedly tasty medicine we need right now that totally hits the spot.
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