We’ve always had a soft spot for Spector.
After all, anyone who knows us well – or, indeed, reads One on One regularly – will be be able to see exactly why it’s pretty hard for us not to adore them. We don’t know about you, but two of our favourite things in life are clever wordplay and brilliant music; so, when a band like Spector come along, armed with a set of lyrics that are equal parts witty, sincere, and faintly ridiculous (‘We broke down on the M1 / you said “call the AA”, but I didn’t know which one‘) and a back catalogue that’s full of more hooks than a fisherman’s supply shop, it only takes a cursory listen to a couple of tracks for us to fall head over heels in love with them.
Luckily, their live show didn’t disappoint in the slightest
With this in mind, you can only imagine how excited we got when we found that these merry men would be touching down in our fair home town on their UK tour. Despite this, though, we couldn’t help but to feel slightly nervous as we walked into the venue. What if they weren’t as good live as they are on record? What if the subtleties of the songs – the twinkle in the eye, the nuance of the lyrics – didn’t connect with anyone else in the audience? What if we were – dare we say it – disappointed?
It was an hour of perfect pop-rock, and we adored it
Well, dear reader, we’re delighted to report that this wasn’t the case. If you ask us, Spector‘s set at Bristol’s Thekla was an hour-long exercise in how to put on the perfect indie-pop show.
To put it simply, it just had everything we wanted. It had the classics: Celestine, All The Sad Young Men, Chevy Thunder and Stay High were all dutifully trotted out over the course of the band’s set, and each and every one of them was met with a roar by a teenaged crowd who were getting steadily more excitable – and, in an entirely unrelated matter, noticeably drunker – as the night wore on.
Then, of course, you had the new songs; songs like Fine Not Fine and Untitled In D, that just might be some of the best that Spector have ever produced. They’re rawer than their earlier efforts, but they’re all the better for it: there’s an almost primal, animalistic quality to them, and a sense of anger that isn’t present in their earlier efforts, and it that suits them down to the ground.
Most importantly, though, you had a charismatic frontman in the shape of Fred MacPherson, a rhythm section so tight that you’d struggle to get it to buy you a pint, and a lead guitarist whose primary duties for the evening seemed to be split between playing razor-sharp indie licks and looking effortlessly cool in the corner of the dimly lit stage.
Hopefully this will make our traffic spike
So, in case you hadn’t noticed, we thought that Spector were rather bloody good live. We’re not surprised, though. They’ve got enough of a back catalogue to set any stage alight, a frontman who’s seemingly unwilling to let anyone in the vicinity not have a good time, and an uncanny ability to pen the kind of under-the-radar indie disco lyrics that 2030’s indie kids are going to want to wear on a t-shirt.
What’s not to like about that?