‘Aw, wassup, Leeds? We’re the Bronx, from Los Angeles, in the United States,” yells gruff-voiced frontman Matt Caughthran, for the benefit of anyone who thought the City of Angels was in Yorkshire. Forty-two years after the first Ramones album, their high-octane punk-rock still reverberates through bands such as this one, now in their 16th year and on a mission to bring punk into the 21st century. Their opening salvo of rama-lama punk gives way to bubblegum thrash, furious hardcore, along with hard and classic rock. There is no place in tonight’s set list for anything by their alter ego band, Mariachi El Bronx, but it seems significant that they sport moustaches as well as punk tattoos.
Otherwise, no wheels are being reinvented, but the entertaining, shaven-headed Caughthran seems to see everything as another means to have some fun. A pipe above the stage means he can dangle from it. It’s Tuesday, so he leads a chant of: “Fuck Tuesday!” When he asks for requests and fields a comical barrage of demands for Spice Girls songs, he joins in the banter: “You guys have such terrible taste in music.”
Caughthran’s irrepressible persona gives songs about personal freedoms a certain extra fizz. He transforms White Guilt into an arena-sized shoutalong, and joins in with the slam dancing for Heart Attack American. The big man introduces 2008’s more angular, Fugazi-ish Knifeman – about holding it together in a crazy, unfair world – as “the closest thing the Bronx have to a mission statement”, and he ends it in appropriate fashion, being passed over the audience’s heads and deposited back on stage.
- At Mama Roux’s, Birmingham, 17 January. At Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, 18 January. Box office: 029-2023 2199.
- At the Fighting Cocks, Kingston upon Thames, 19 and 20 January. Box office: 020-8974 6469.
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