Live review: Alabama 3 @ Brighton Concorde 2

Date: November 25th 2011

Words: John Deering

“You left your virus in my daughter’s Playstation but you ain’t got your hooks in me,” snarls the hopped up Larry Love within moments of hopping up on stage to set the congregation vibe flowing once again.

The Concorde 2 is instantaneously rocking. Pulsing beats, slide guitar, whirling Hammond and nicotine-stained vocals bind together a packed but disparate crowd with that particular trance-intensity that Alabama 3 stamped their copyright on way back in the day.

You have to go back to a period some two decades back to discover the source of the Alabama 3. Some of the denizens of South London’s underbelly street culture got together with the idea of fusing the drug-fuelled fag-end of acid house with traditional country music. They span some mash-ups at house parties and clubs above pubs, then progressed to turning out their own brand of “sweet, pretty, fucking country-acid-house music.”

Their high points were struck early: 1997’s Exile on Coldharbour Lane established them as a quirky but dangerous bunch, and they gained a notoriety for devastating live shows. London audiences were always bigger than the provinces, largely because of the band’s collective ear being pressed hard to the streets of the capital. Often literally, such was their superhuman intake of anything liable to make you extremely high. 

The band’s cover-story is that they met in rehab, where they were moulded into a love-spreading street gang by the Reverend D Wayne Love. Remarkably still standing after any number of years of this kind of caper, Jake Black still hauls his well-cushioned bones onto stage night after night to perform as the Reverend. Mumbling incoherently in his lovable ridiculous deep south accent (despite his formative years being spent in Caledonian tenements) he is peripheral yet essential to the main action. Working in his favour is the notion that whatever he is saying is probably really funny if only we could hear it. 

The cramped stage of the Concorde 2 is home to a drummer, two guitarists, a bassist, a keyboard player, two singers and one mumbler. Three other singers of varying efficiency come and go. The wonder is, with record sales hardly burgeoning and their main source of exposure gigs in venues of this size, how on earth do they make enough money to eat? Maybe they don’t. The real leader of this band, Larry Love, born in the Welsh valleys as Rob Spragg, is blessed with the most perfect deep blues voice you’re ever likely to hear, but his diaphragm-wobbling low notes are propelled from an alarming frail frame. In fact, the procession of backing singers and guests leaves the suspicion that the silver-haired frontman uses their spurious presence to take a breather every now and then.

One of the curiosities of this current line-up is that amongst the fifteen or so bodies struggling for space, not one of them can play the harmonica, a key instrument in the established sound of the band. Since founder member Piers Marsh (The Mountain of Love) and part-time collaborator and great train robber’s son Nick Reynolds departed the scene, there is a hole in the middle of many of their songs.

Their absence is compensated by the reappearance of the irreplaceable Segs centre stage. The bassist was largely responsible for much of the band's finest recorded output, but drifted away a number of years ago. His return is clear for all to hear as his massive dubstep lines rumble the foundations of the cliff that the Concorde 2 crouches under. In tribute to him, Larry Love shrugs off his suit jacket to reveal a Ruts DC shirt, Segs’s oppos of old. 

The newer songs, drenched in South London dub, hold the interest, but this is not what this peculiar sell-out crowd have gathered to hear. Largely middle aged, no discernible particular fashion or style to group them under, this is a crowd probably best described as people who used to be scary. I still wouldn’t want to run into any more than two of this lot in a dark alley, despite the unremarkable attire. And that’s just the women.

They’re not here for the more recent recordings, MOR, Revolver Soul, or the new Shoplifiting for Jesus. They want to hear the songs they revere as classics, the songs that made this band’s name as The Best Live Band in Britain around the turn of the century. Sadly for them, they’re in short supply. We get the magnificent sprawling Sopranos epic 'Woke Up This Morning', a thumping 'Mao Tse-Tung Said', recalling the band’s hero, Jim Jones, and we’re sent early into the Brighton night with the sublime floor-filling 'Hypo Full of Love' ringing in our ears. The street is full of 40-50-somethings grumbling about the absence of more of their favourites. Are the band pushing relentlessly Radiohead-style onwards and ignoring the safe options? Or are they unable to recognise their best songs?

There you have it. Alabama 3. Still going their own way. Nowhere near as good as they used to be, but still better than anybody else.

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