Let’s get it out of the way nice and early, Andrew Stockdale, the last remaining founder member of Aussie prog-rockers Wolfmother, could well be the lovechild of messer’s Page and Plant. A voice that makes a microphone obsolete and had it not been for the hiatus from the latter part of the decade could well have been challenging Matthew Bellamy’s crown as the greatest guitarist of the new millennium.
As it is though, stadium rock stardom will have to wait for a short while, not that the sold out crowd packed into Brixton Academy will lose sleep over that thought. Instead they receive a riotous set full of hard rock classics that the last 30 years has been devoid of.
Opening up however are Texan quintet The Black Angels who seem to do very little to warm up the early arrivals, and a later than billed start wouldn’t have helped matters. Before the polished 70’s style rock of the main attraction arrives the audience are “treated” to a fuzz-laden mess complete with slurred vocals which make Liam Gallagher seem eloquent. Somewhere in the middle does seem to be the occasional promising riff, but that is ruined by following up with a scream into the microphone that must have shocked the engineer at the sound desk judging by the distortion. Putting it in perspective, there was a better response for The Small Faces classic “Lazy Sunday” which caused a mass sing-a-long.
Stockdale, and the hired help in keyboard/bassist Ian Peres, rhythm guitarist Adrian Nemeth and drummer Dave Atkins, rip through cuts off both last years re-emergent offering “Cosmic Egg” and 2005’s breakthrough self-titled album but in truth its easy to see what the public came for. That is in no way a slight against the four piece, rather a compliment to the high standards which they set themselves with the likes of “Woman” and the conceptual “White Unicorn.”
By the time Stockdale comes bounding out for an encore of “The Joker and the Thief” every cliché about raising roofs and shaking foundations could get thrown in. There aren’t many singer/lead guitarists that can pull off the two with such aplomb which puts the Wolfmother front man in the upper echelons and deserving of hefty praise.
Words and Photos by Benji Walker
