Live Review : Steel Panther + Wayward Sons @ Victoria Warehouse, Manchester on February 9th 2020
If the joke isn’t funny anymore then nobody has told the five thousand people queuing in a storm to get into the venue. This is the night we were warned to stay in, batten down the hatches and hold our children close, yet a sold out crowd has ignored the prophets of doom and ventured out into the night. Even the Man Citeh game was cancelled due to Storm Ciara but Victoria Warehouse didn’t care that there was at least an hour long queue to get into the venue. Seriously if you’re going to frisk everyone and check the contents of their wallets then get more staff on the doors. Perhaps use the security who go around the vicinity bullying punters into paying £10 to park on public land would be a start.
To say I was fewmin by the time I got in was an understatement, I ordered a pint and slowly thawed out.
Tonight's audience is a bizarre mix of forty and fifty something glam survivors who are here to re-live the debauched eighties and twenty something's who view tonight to be on par with going to see Jack Whitehall or Jimmy Carr. The latter demographic really struggle with openers Wayward Sons. You see this is a proper rock n' roll band with a proper rock n' roll singer and the millennials in attendance (who weren’t still stuck in the queue outside) have come, pure and simple for comedy. While Toby and his mates ply their increasingly political heavy rock, you can clearly hear the hum of disengaged conversations from the disinterested. To give them their dues they do clap along when they are asked to, but they are here to laugh and not to sing along with upbeat funky rock. Despite the half-arsed interest of half the crowd, ( the other half still outside) Wayward Sons are excellent and show that no matter how old you are Rock N’ Roll dreams do come true. Toby is the perfect angry old man, using scuzzy riffs and pounding choruses to scream at the injustice of it all. This is certainly not their crowd, but they still manage to be memorable. Who knows maybe their crowd were the ones still trying to get in.
Steel Panther shows have evolved from Rock gigs into something that more resembles the Rocky Horror Show. Loads of folks have made the effort and it is Wigs and cheap Lycra spandex from eBay all the way to the back. Everyone now knows the joke, but rather than become stale and unfunny we have owned it and now revel in it en-masse screaming the punch-lines back at the band. It is a bit like going to see Peter Kay and booming the lines of the “Garlic Bread” routine back at him. New Album “Heavy Metal Rules” seriously stinks and I suspect the band knows it as it gets a pitiful three songs for it. The crowd are here for the songs that they know and ‘Asian Hooker’, 'Party Like Tomorrow is the End of World ‘and 'Poontang Boomerang' all evoke gigantic communal sing-alongs that you would not want your grandmother to hear.
The other thing about Steel Panther is that they are not a bunch of comedian’s pretending to be a band, they are actually a bunch of virtuoso musicians that have hit upon a money (shot) train that has turned them into unexpected superstars. The Guitar solo from Satchel is up there with anything George Lynch, Warren De Martini or Eddie Van Halen could throw out and Michael Starr’s vocals again blew me away with his range and power, at one point he sang a line in a rock operatic style and the guys standing behind commented how they could have listened to a full song as his voice was amazing. And as for Lexxi Fox’s’ outfit well don’t get me started on that! But at the end of the day Steel Panther is about mindless, filthy communal fun. There is audience participation all the way through with pink haired girls being serenaded at, fake stage invasions and the obligatory kid called upon to play guitar. As a woman I’m not offended by any of it as I know it is all tongue in cheek and us bitches are all in on the joke.
It may now be all very familiar, but this does not in anyway dent the enjoyment. It’s a joke we know and love and don’t tire of hearing. Silly, crude and juvenile but that is why we are here and God, do we lick it up.
