It’s not often that a band manages to get a Birmingham crowd dancing from the front of the stage to the back of the hall. However, Lambrini Girls achieved this feat on Saturday evening – from the very first bars of their set until they finally exited the stage after an encore of the lairy “Big Dick Energy”.
It’s not even as if Phoebe Lunny and Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez have had a great deal of time to build their audience either. Lambrini Girls only formed in 2019 but they’ve certainly grabbed the zeitgeist by the short and curlies in that time and in doing so have attracted a seriously diverse fanbase – with male, female, trans, white, black, Asian, straight, LGBT+, school kids, retirees and all points in between all getting down and getting with it. In fact, the Birmingham audience only seemed to be short of shy, retiring wallflowers who didn’t really want to get involved – and, let’s face it, that’s no loss at all.
It also helps that there is something less of a divide between band and audience than is usually the case. Physically as well as metaphorically. Singer and guitarist, Pheobe Lunny definitely seemed to spend almost as much time in the mosh pit as on stage at XOYO, urging on her audience to build circle pits, human pyramids and to generally go bananas as the band belted out such future classics as “Bad Apple”, “You’re Not From Round Here” and “Filthy Rich Nepo Baby”. These riot grrrl-flavoured anthems may be pretty basic and seriously speedy but they certainly bring a tsunami of sound that is more than enough to carry even the more demure along with their rowdy mosh pit.
Lambrini Girls don’t just have a blistering set of songs to play though. They also have plenty to say about the state of the world. Lunny introduced the excoriating “Boys in the Band” with “This is a song about sexual assault and abuse in the Brighton music scene”, urging everyone present to call out unacceptable behaviour, no matter who is at fault. “Special Different” was preceded by drummer Misha Phillips urging people to support trans kids, while the blitzkrieg assault of “God’s Country” began with a tongue lashing for Keir Starmer’s crew in Westminster – “Our government is completely fucked. They want to make the rich richer and poor poorer”.
Needless to say, the rebellious atmosphere wasn’t just contained by the stage though and cries of “Free, free Palestine” were soon usurped by the more direct “Death, death to the IDF” from throughout the mosh pit and beyond. This was one time when Lunny let the crowd take the lead and didn’t join in though – “You can say that but I’ll get arrested”.
Finishing the main set with a neat one-two of “Craig David” with its screaming audience participation and the howling electropunk of “Cuntology 101”, Lambrini Girls took a quick breather before returning for the toxic masculinity put-down of “Big Dick Energy”. It surely was a fine repost to anyone claiming that punk is now a lifeless carcass. This was, without a hint of a doubt, the real thing.
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