Dry Cleaning deliver joyously jarring intimacy at The Grove
The preamble to seeing Dry Cleaning began with a trip to Gateshead’s premier wine bar, Axis, to sample the little Sicilian number that my better half had described as the best wine she had ever had the week before. This week, she claimed it tasted different, not quite as good. While any vino with even the remotest notion of a Decanter Magazine subscription will tell you that every bottle differs marginally from the next, that wasn’t the case here. Something rather more cosmic was occurring.
This particular Saturday, the approach had been different, thus the results varied. The same concept became apparent at the post-punk gig that followed. Weeks of anticipation had placed seeing Dry Cleaning at The Grove on a pedestal. The main driving force behind this expectancy was the fact that The Grove is by far and away the most intimate venue that I have ever encountered the band in.
However, as droves piled into the tiny gig space, leaving nothing but a staircase by the only entrance/exit free for leisurely standing, a virtue rarely regarded in music came to the fore: a band can actually outgrow certain venues. The tightness of the group could be appreciated from this perch, but Florence Shaw’s captivating magnetism could barely be seen through a cramped sea of tall heads and the whole thing seemed cloistered by the enforced intimacy of the small space. It was petite post-punk, which is an oxymoron in itself—an interesting one, but not quite what you’d order from the menu.
Rather than rendering the 350-capacity space a raucous tomb of angular riffs and freakish toplines, the show felt momentarily shackled and hushed by the humility of the venue. So, sick of constantly shuffling our stances to let people in and out for the bar or toilet, we decided to head into the belly of the beast. We braced the tuts of those now being barged aside and readied our constant stream of sorrys. We perfected our ‘we’re not just pushing forward, we’re actually looking for a non-existent friend of ours who we randomly agreed to meet four songs into the set at an unfixed point’ look.
And we found the promised land. Now, we could see Shaw being intensely weird. We could also see bassist Lewis Maynard indulge in his heavy metal fantasy with ever more vigour. We could utter hyperbolic statements like, ‘I think Tom Dowse might be the best guitarist of the last 15 years’, and, ‘This is actually like rock ‘n’ roll jazz when you think about it’. We could grow to be at one with the intimacy, which was, nevertheless, still quite strange.
Meanwhile, the band steadily savoured their surroundings too. When they delved into the tracks from their very first EP, they recovered a sudden familiarity with small spaces again. The whole thing suddenly felt rather more fitting. Journeying through their annals in the sort of place that they would’ve played when starting out, they asserted their class to the audience. The drunken swarm of nodding heads all recognised the true singularity of what they were seeing.
With a career-spanning setlist, expertly performed, they showcased how fully formed they were born as a band. While many imitators have followed their brief lead so far, you can’t really say that there’s ever been much like them before. This might not have hit home from the back of the room, but when you gaze at them clearly, the intricacy of their odd, utterly original makeup takes hold.
They are a truly modern entity, a weird whirlwind reflective of the bombardment of today’s reality, all tied together in a singular, joyously jarring wallop.
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