If you were a frequent viewer of Top Gear in its Clarkson/Hammond/May era, there is a particular laugh you will be very familiar with: the combined hoot and exclamation that the three of them, and Clarkson especially, would engage in when driving a fast car around a bend. It was a sort of ‘WOOOOwraghhhahahaha’, designed to convey both sheer delight at being alive and a certain manly pride in being able to extract such a feeling from a motor vehicle. It was a performance.
At the end of each song that the Cambridgeshire doom-metal band Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats played at the gorgeous Ally Pally theatre – a much smaller room at the east end of the building – I tried to see if the Top Gear lads were really sitting behind me, because their reactions to the songs certainly suggested it. ‘Nice bit of space rock there!’ ‘Digging deep on that one!’ ‘Wow. Never seen Kev play a Strat live before!’ All prefaced by a ‘WOOOOwraghhhahahaha!’
The band did rather invite that kind of reaction: they were performing the entirety of their most recent album, Nell’ Ora Blu, which isn’t so much an imaginary film soundtrack as a wholesale recreation of the 1970s sound of Italian giallo cinema, complete with voiceovers from luminaries such as Franco Nero. Though much of the crowd had come dressed for a Black Sabbath gig, they didn’t get one.
It was every bit as much a reimagining of a past as Timothée Chalomet snarling ‘Play it loud’ in A Complete Unknown, and rather invited comparison to a Sealed Knot reenactment of the Battle of Marston Moor.
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