You have to feel sorry for the Futureheads; dwarfed on stage by a giant-sized backdrop, replicating the Zutons' album cover and struggling to maintain amplification with some shaky PA equipment, they’ve hardly been given a sporting chance. Luckily for the Sunderland quartet, they’ve brought some tunes with them.
With spiky, insurgent chords and tight-knit vocal harmonies, the Futureheads display all the credentials of a compelling pop- punk outfit. As the band break into tracks from their eponymous debut, vocalist Barry Hyde appears to be losing the power to control his legs, his lower torso seems to be made purely of blamanche. Hyde’s colloquial delivery is quite refreshing, whilst “Oh-ee-Ohhhs” seem to be the band’s trademark in backing vocals.
The Futureheads show an interesting blend of both punk and post-punk. The delectable ‘Carnival Kids’ sounding something like a cross of Television and Adam Ant, whilst new single ‘Meantime’ hints at early Elvis Costello and XTC. It is not often that you witness an act revisiting the work of Kate Bush (bar Tori Amos’s entire career), but the ‘heads take on the 1984 classic ‘Hounds of Love’ is a joy to hear: quirky, without being overtly doused in irony, a worthy testament to the band’s potential.
The Zutons waste no time in offloading the big guns from their arsenal. ‘Zuton Fever’, ‘Remember me’ and ‘Pressure Point’ hit the audience with suitable aplomb. The staccato sax line and impressive light display of the latter, has the audience into an early thrall and further crowd favourites ‘Havana gang brawl’ and ‘Dirty dancehall’ have the Dome on their dancing feet.
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Perhaps the unexpected highlight of the Zuton’s set is ‘Railroad’, a beautifully crafted piece of pop, with its clockwork rhythm, picaresque imagery and accelerando tempo. The song has a glorious ending: all five band members singing a Capella together, and it’s almost as if the House Martins never split up. Closing the set was another one of the five singles to be taken from the band’s debut, the stomp-a-long ‘You will, you won’t’.
Whilst the band came back on for an encore, I couldn’t help but feel this was detrimental to the performance. The new material aired was substandard to the night’s proceedings, whilst the concluding Bon tempi fuelled medley felt slightly contrived and a touch overcooked. I always say that it’s better to leave a cat wanting more milk than to pump her full of UHT; or words to that effect.
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