Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
There are nights in which you can guess with a fairly decent degree of accuracy exactly what you are going to get from a band or artist that you have gone along to support, wallow in the sounds of nostalgia or be thrilled with the execution of a song you have loved for all your live being performed live and with passion.
The support act, the ones designed by fate to warm the hands and soul up at the beginning of the evening, for them it can go either way with new friends won, the chance of a lifetime thrown away. All live music fans have come across both but to support a man who has arguably been mentored and befriended by one of the leading exponents of his genre and who has already arguably released possibly the album of the year, then thoughts must lean to the point in the audiences mind, that there must be something about The Mentulls in which to flock to, to drag others out of the bar and suggest to them with heightened spirits that there is more than one band in which to watch that night.
The three musicians that make up The Mentulls, brothers Andrew and Jamie Pipe and Nick Coleman, stepped on stage and proceeded to capture the hearts of the audience who had made their way to The Citadel in St. Helens and if it had been anyone else’s gig, any other headline act that night in the venue, there might have been a beautiful mental fatigue, an overwhelming outburst of spirits that had been spent by the end of the The Mentulls appearance in which the main act would have struggled to top.
To have pre-conceived ideas about the support act can be dangerous, the openness of the mind to take in something or someone new is even more important as programmes such as X Factor encroach like a disease into the public’s appetite for new live music. In The Mentulls, the Blues, thankfully a strong genre of repute anyway, has yet another band in which to see the live performance thrive and prosper as it should.
With tracks such as the superb originality of Motorway of Madness, the stunning Reflections, Be Home Tonight and On The Road Again being played alongside a steaming Philip Sayce Medley, there was nowhere for the ostrich like approach to life to stand and cower at the sanctifying effect that this band had on an audience who had between them probably seen every measure of Blues/Rock band going between them. When, as an audience member, you see a gentleman of advancing years, helped by his equally smitten daughter, try to walk towards a band such as The Mentulls at the end of the night to congratulate them on their dynamism then you know you have just seen something that is only going to stay within people’s hearts.
A great opening act for Danny Bryant, utterly compelling. The Mentulls should be on every Blues fans radar!
Ian D. Hall