Radkey - 100 Club, London - March 5 2014 (Live Review)
Thursday, 06 March 2014
Written by Alec Chillingworth
These days, you really have to sell yourself to the media in order to make a decent fist of this music lark. Even then, most bands are never going to make their fortune. It's a vicious business, one that can spit out all but the instant success stories.
Radkey have garnered a huge amount of media attention over the past year or so and with just two EPs under their belt, a packed 100 Club shows the brothers’ immense promise. Opening act Lyger play to an unwilling crowd, though, with only a few drunkards headbanging along with Radkey, who are in the front row of their own gig.
It's a shame that most of the crowd are standing about like bloated corpses, because Lyger are pretty bloody good. Crunchy guitars cut through the air alongside some pretty bizarre time signatures, giving their grungy brand of rock an extra dimension. Sadly, their catalogue of tunes are lost on the audience tonight.
Turbogeist seem to be more to the crowd's taste, with guitarist/vocalist Luis Felber swaggering across the stage like he's playing Wembley. Their punky rock 'n' roll is in the same ballpark as Radkey’s and it’s a much more chilled out, casual affair than Lyger. They play, they take the piss out of each other innumerable times, and they leave. Simple as that, really.
It takes Radkey about 10 seconds to kick up a heaving moshpit of flailing arms, legs, and various other appendages. Dee, Isaiah and Solomon Radke – guitar/vocals, bass/vocals and drums respectively – have essentially put together a bunch of songs that the Misfits have failed to write in recent years. Opener Out Here In My Head is so punk it should have its own brand of safety pin named after it, while the brooding Cat & Mouse showcases a slightly more sinister side to the brothers' catalogue.
Isaiah handles crowd management, constantly thanking those in attendance before blasting into yet another session of glorious punk 'n' roll. New track Feed My Brain goes down an absolute storm, and the absence of any security whatsoever leaves the crowd splurging onto the confines of the obscenely sweaty stage.
The moment of the night arrives when Dee croons, 'I got somethin' to say!', and launches the band into an exemplary cover of Misfits classic Last Caress. Not only do they write Misfits-style songs better than the Misfits, but they now actually play Misfits songs better than the Misfits, too.
They close with Romance Dawn, neatly drawing a line under one of the best live sets of the year so far. If this is the sort of reaction they're getting when they haven't even got a full album out, one can only imagine what's next for Radkey.
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