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Shellsuit frontman Ed Doherty uses the catchphrase “it’s all happenin’” this evening, and he might be right.
During a walk through the otherwise calm streets of Leeds on this fine Sunday evening (May 15th), Live4ever overhears a grindcore band playing above a Mexican restaurant whilst Doherty himself has just taken to the stage of the bijou Headrow House venue dressed in a moped rider’s crash helmet and ski goggles.
The Post Office isn’t open at this time so there’s no reason for the outfit other than to protect himself from potentially hostile punters. Doherty candidly reveals later, “Me dad got legged down the Anfield Road by Leeds fans in 1978”, but there’s little chance of that as the benign near sell-out crowd is gathered in anticipation of the (sort of) Liverpool band’s first trip east of the Pennines. Ever.
It’s hard these days for artists to be of genuine cult status, but Shellsuit manage the designation without much effort. Having released two clannish but well received albums and consisting of two former postmen (Doherty and the beanie hatted guitarist Lee Scanlan, plus tonight an ensemble of glamorous assistants), they now remain one of the few groups in Britain never to have featured in The Guardian, a concern only even partially overground in their adopted city.
Much of what makes them so personable is down to a sharply cocked socio-political observation in their songs; jumbled diatribes such as ‘Iraqis In Shellsuits‘ which chide Britain’s creeping nationalism and xenophobia, or eviscerate life’s failure to meet people’s dreams on ‘The Radio Sings‘. There is a way to gently fillet the working class from the inside with affection and pathos and Doherty, despite his wisecracking and larger than life stagecraft, is doing just that, observing with sweetness and tolerance, its foibles close to the grain.
On record mostly delicate and muted, musically the night is harder edged (and slightly more chaotic), a pick n’mix somewhere between The Beautiful South and Scouse alt-hero Michael Head with a dollop of Mark E. Smith‘s totalitarian bonkers thrown in for good measure. They still manage to faithfully render the bleak (and laugh out loud) satire of ‘Postman‘, but the leggy ‘Bali, Thailand, Sydney, America‘ and the booze sozzled ‘Shaky Half Hour‘ acquire different perspectives; less about education, more about realisation.
In a way, despite their parochialism, this is the twenty first century’s own folk music; grassroots radicalism wrapped in kitchen sinks, lottery tickets and the lappy. That’s what we should all be about after all – the strong looking after the weak. Democracy, basic decency. That these values are being eaten away as we return to the stymied depravity of the Victorian era is something Shellsuit care about – closer ‘Suntan‘ a strident deconstruction of a life reduced to trivia, an existence where the banality of self as peddled by the infamous newspaper has replaced being part of anything cohesive, centered or principled.
In many respects Shellsuit aren’t so much a throwback as a throw forward. The more music becomes an exercise in Trust funded karaoke the more bands like them will spring up like weeds. To be like this and preserve your sense of humour is of course paramount – nobody likes a Roundhead.
The good news is that Doherty keeps the audience in stitches whilst the music keeps them dancing, and if they’re asking…well, we’ll always be dancing.