The Get Up Kids / Lakes

What is emo?

Maybe an existential question isn’t the the best way to start a review, but bear with me, it is relevant to The Get Up Kids. The Kansas five-piece have been touring their sophomore album ‘Something To Write Home About’ for the past few months and tonight is the fifth of seven UK gigs.

That came out 25 years ago, but I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really aware of its release at the time. Oddly enough, as while the band are rightly regarded as influential and seminal and all those other journalistic cliches, they passed me by. Could simply be an age thing, in that way that acts sometimes “miss” a generation. But of that “certain age” in common with much of tonight’s crowd in a packed St Luke’s is photographer Craig, who has rather dragged me along to this show with promises of an unmissable gig from this “life-changing” (for him) act.

Aside from that enthusiasm that makes any true music fan an evangelist, seeking to convert people like me into new followers, there’s also the self-confessed point that anything he writes will be a “fanboy” review. (Plus he gets a night off writing.)

It’s regularly accepted (by the uninitiated at least) that there are two types of emo – yer emotional hardcore most famously “invented” by Embrace (not that one) and Fugazi et al, and the later “emo” acts like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy etc, all black eyeliner and synths. In fact, The Get Up Kids provide the link between those as original keyboard player James Dewees – replaced by Dustin Kinsey – was, for a time, a member of MCR. Meaning that the GUKs are actually “second wave” emo. Still following?

The band themselves, I’m advised, would be happier describing themselves as “indie”. Ah, but what is indie I hear you cry? That is a whole other philosophical debate. However, what it means is that when selecting support acts they go for something a bit less obviously part of any scene – ok, apart from being broadly… well, “indie” – like tonight’s openers, Lakes.

If we were to use the “E” word for this Watford sextet it’s be “fourth generation”. Some of the band look barely old enough to be in a licensed premises, but they do say, like policemen, that’s a sign of age. However, they have clearly had a good musical education from parents or elder siblings, with hints of Frightened Rabbit and The Seventeenth Century in their rousing set (these references geographically biased as well as clearly being stuck somewhere around the earlier part of the 2000s).

They also employ wee electronic interludes between the songs (like ‘Sings The Greys’?) making for an interesting as well as cohesive set, which would, you suspect, lend itself well to stripped-down or acoustic performances as required. Indeed, they never quite fully rock out despite four guitars in the mix – they’re no Teksti-TV 666 after all (that reference for the Finnish noise rock aficionados out there).

There’s a new album, ‘Slow Fade’ (on Big Scary Monsters, home to We Were Promised Jetpacks for the nostalgia heads out there) and some of the crowd will be eagerly appreciating its early July release judging from the enthusiastic reception for ‘Peach Fuzz’, while an ambitious attempt to get the entire audience clapping along to their closing number just about pays off.

So, these kids done, we move onto the godfathers of whatever movement Lakes are part of. The reason for my lack of Get Up Kids familiarity is unclear to me – despite their forming in 1995 and taking inspiration from a “life-changing” (for them) double bill of Nirvana and Jawbreaker. Debut album ‘Four Minute Mile’ was produced by Shellac’s Bob Weston, no less. The band may also have inadvertently helped invent pop-punk, thus giving us McFly, though Charlie out of Busted’s favourite band was Aereogramme, so make of that what you will.

And yet, very much on my personal radar in the late 1990s were acts like Won Mississippi, who namechecked the GUKs (my abbreviation) in an interview, while I know that at lease one of Curators / Paper Rifles is at tonight’s show.

And it’s that latter act who are my closest reference to the GUKs sound. Before the show I’ve been doing my homework; listening to the reissued album I joke that given my own limited experience it’d be really useful if they just played that album, in order. And my luck is in – that’s exactly what they have planned.

When Craig writes his reviews he often mentions the between-bands or walk-on music, and often it’s significant. Tonight, we get a blast of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Are You Experienced?’ and to be honest I can’t really see a link, aside from the fact that like Lakes, tonight’s headliners have received a fine musical education, one that goes further back than Seattle’s (ok, Aberdeen’s) ‘other’ most famous sons.

Looking at the crowd I’d say that some of of them would have been in the audience when they toured that album as a new release. A quarter of a century on, however, there’s no danger that their enthusiasm has dulled, even if this translates as bouncing rather than a full-on moshpit.

As advertised it’s 25 years since ‘Something To Write Home About’s release, and The Get Up Kids launch straight into that album’s opener, ‘Holiday’ with the Glasgow crowd immediately showing their voice. There’s pogoing to ‘Action & Action’, and some more subdued swaying to ‘Valentine’, as these now-50-somethings show no more signs of the passage of time than an audience who will be mainly reliving their teenage years.

Guitarist Jim Suptic wants to up the ante though, employing that old showbiz trick, challenging the St Luke’s throng to better last night’s Mancunian crowd in the singing stakes. Apropos of nothing, he’s sporting what appears to be a Kafka t-shirt – well, let’s call it Kafkaesque, as it could just as easily be Uri Geller.

What’s apparent to these unskilled ears are two things. That they are, I’d guess, as good as they were 25 years ago – Pryor’s throaty yowl is, as on the record, note-perfect. And those influences- Nirvana and Jawbreaker – aren’t as obvious as might be expected – the guitars are brighter, there’s none of the stop-start rhythm of the latter. What can be heard are traces of bands they co-existed with – Idlewild, themselves having had US alt.rock as their alma mater, while there will be points when uneducated ears might ask the question “is this the new Green Day?”

As the album unwinds, it’s those who have followed the band from the start who will have got most from this format – the response to ‘Long Goodnight’ could surely have been heard in Manchester, while closer ‘I’ll Catch You’ is climactic, the album’s dozen tracks done an dusted in a breathless 45 minutes.

Which means that an encore is inevitable as much as for value-for-money purposes as to properly sate a rapt audience keen for more. On they troop, Kinsey and drummer Ryan Pope joined by Suptic for… well, “What’s this song about?” pipes one audience wag who may well have experienced this setlist on previous tour stops. “Kansas…” Suptic laughs, delivering a nice semi-acoustic interlude from 2002’s ‘On A Wire’ before the “hits” are taken on.

‘Walking On A Wire’, also from the band’s third album, is notable for its much fuller sound – from, I’m advised by our resident expert/fanboy, a period when the band started to experiment more with their sound. ‘Stay Gold, Ponyboy’ is halted by a technical breakdown prompting Pryor to suggest that “no-one likes that old shit anyway”. The crowd, however disagree, the atmosphere seemingly have picked up now that the band are free for the constraints of the “classic album in order” format. Indeed, Prior offers a “fucking awesome” as acknowledgement to the crowd’s engagement, followed by an apology for swearing in church.

The closing three numbers are almost hardcore in their intensity, and – finally – we get an intrepid crowdsurfer to go with the raucous singalong.
Closing with ‘Don’t Hate Me’ from ‘Four Minute Mile’ The Get Up Kids depart the stage with a promise that they’ll be back. Well, that debut album will be 30 in two years time. It’s already marked in my diary.