Fierce Panda 15^th Birthday
Dingwalls,

London

24/02/09

Can there really have been fifteen years of the folks that brought you Supergrass, Coldplay, Keane et chuffing cetera? Evidently so.

 

So who do the Panda people get in to commemorate their crystal anniversary? First up, capital, whose showcase of their bewitching brew of melody and melodrama – dark-night-of-the-soul music, if you will – is suitably dimly lit but sees them on luminous form. The Gay Blades, meanwhile, cut a fabulous dash; impossibly noisy for but a duo, there’s a glam swagger and rock’n'roll-revolutionary kung fu to them, welded to a demanding daftness close to prime Electric Six.

 

Torch-tressed chanteur Sam Isaac follows with a positively revelatory set too – his once-modest star power’s gone nova in the last two years, with his handsomely-harmonised nuggets infused with a proseytising zeal, and ‘Come Back Home Tonight’ being the missing link between Grandaddy and Lightspeed Champion.

 

And finally, not only does the Spinto Band’s ‘Oh Mandy’ now sound like REM impersonating Fleet Foxes, they even repaint ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ in a celebratorily vivid technicolor. As has so often been the case with Fierce Panda, it’s all more aceness than any one punter can be expected to bear…

 

Iain Moffat