Abby Clarke headed over to Nottingham’s Rough Trade on Sunday 1st September to catch an intimate midday set from indie heroes The Futureheads.
Iconic indie rock four-piece The Futureheads played an intimate show at Nottingham’s Rough Trade, celebrating the launch of their new album Powers, their first LP in over seven years. The show was a joyous mixture of old-time classics alongside new music, which was interspersed with hilarious anecdotes and discussions with the crowd to create a fully enjoyable and immersible experience.
They kicked off with Jekyll, the opening track of the new album, after frontman Barry Hyde promised the crowd that it was ‘going to be loud’. He was not wrong, the music exploded through the room and set the tone for the rest of the show, assuring the audience that despite it being a Sunday lunch time, the band will not be holding back. Hyde joked after the song was finished that “it wasn’t a very 1 o’clock in the afternoon song” as it “wasn’t very mellow”, but mellow wasn’t what the crowd were looking for either.
‘Their reluctance to end this show was clear by how they kept adding more and more songs onto the bill.’
The band then asked the audience if there were any requests and after a shout of The Beginning Of The Twist they launched straight back into the music with more explosiveness. This energy was then interrupted with a short story from Barry Hyde, accompanied by some background Jazz from guitarist and vocalist Ross Millard which told the amusing tale of when Hyde was cleaning his electric oven with a metallic scourer and bumped is head on the extractor fan. This accident created an electrical circuit leading to a blackout and some déjà vu and became the story of Electric Shock. Hyde then asked if the crowd could assist in counting in for the song as he joked that drummer Dave Hyde couldn’t count to seven.
The set continued to be crammed full of great music and good humour, managing to transform the atmosphere from that of a gig to a relaxed group of friends enjoying their weekend together. Barry Hyde did become serious for a moment when he introduced Animus which he explained was the feeling you get when you want to move, and the song was describing the suffering which accompanies depression and how you are ‘working your way out of your existential puzzle’. However, he also described it as being an upbeat song and jokingly moved the conversation back to the relaxed atmosphere of earlier by laughing over its 35 individual chords and whether bassist David “Jaff” Craig would be able to play them all correctly.
‘The show was a joyous mixture of old-time classics alongside new music, which was interspersed with hilarious anecdotes and discussions with the crowd to create a fully enjoyable and immersible experience’
Bringing the show to a close, the group admitted that Rescue Rooms in Nottingham was their favourite venue on their last tour, and their reluctance to end this show was clear by how they kept adding more and more songs onto the bill. However, the crowd were momentarily puzzled when the final song began and Hounds of Love had not been played, although this confusion was short lived as they then went on to do a second final song and played it anyway, a perfect end to a great performance.
The Futureheads continue their string of intimate tours this week, heading to venues including Bear Tree Records in Sheffield and a sold out homecoming show at Bonded Warehouse in Sunderland, and then later in the year will be 2Q festival in Lincoln before their fifteen year anniversary tour begins in December. The group have smashed back onto the UK music scene proving their talent for creating both clever and catchy indie-rock songs never went away.
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