Leeds’ Brudenell is mobbed yet again as it has been for all my post-pandemic visits since live music resumed this summer, throngs of visitors still super-keen to make up for lost time, squeezing the last drop of their weekend for a trio of live acts culminating in Brighton’s hook-laden power-pop noir exponents Black Honey.
Mancunian singer-songwriter Phoebe Green shares her delight at playing to an already full Community Room ahead of the main event, her lush detached pop songs almost as striking as her fabulous copper coloured curls. A blend of Camera Obscura, Goldfrapp and The Sundays, the material oozed an assured level of craft reinforced when later stampeding through her recorded material. Green’s latest single ‘So Grown Up’ proved the pick of the bunch, a bittersweet ode to the passing of time.
Flushed with the top ten placing of their latest release ‘Written & Directed’, the Sussex quartet look pretty pumped as they emerge, piling into the uncompromising break-up track ‘I Like The Way You Die’, a song clearly influenced by Franz Ferdinand’s classic ‘Take Me Out’. Notwithstanding, when Black Honey do borrow from others, they seem to do so in an artful way and seemingly get away with it. The appropriately titled ‘Beaches’, is a gloriously grubby sliver of surfer grooviness making you think of Tarrantino covering Blur’s ‘Girls and Boys’. Closer ‘Run for Cover’ is eerily reminiscent of peak Pistols but not a soul inside cares one jot, at one point enthusiastically singing along with ‘Corinne’.
Lead singer Izzy Phillips comes across as trashy yet demure, confident without being brash and boasts a cracking set of pipes, presumably honed during the band gigging their bollocks off over the past six years, and delighted to be back doing what they do best after a year off the road. Her three bandmates are clearly not fussed that Phillips assumes the focal point of Black Honey, at one point leaping into the melee stage-front to mingle with her adoring fans. Rock and roll baby!
Words - Mike Price
Black Honey official