The first thing you notice about the 2018 live incarnation of Gomez is that lead singer Ben Ottewell finally boasts an appearance catching up with his oak aged Mississippi delta growl; seemingly so out of place two decades ago on the then fresh faced 21-year-old, who sang like he’d been brought up in a New Orleans brothel drinking moonshine instead of breast milk.
At a full to bursting Leeds Academy, this is a hometown hoedown of sorts, Gomez the band first coming together when sharing a house in Ilkley back in the mid-1990s, the dwelling’s garage providing vital rehearsal space where the original demos were captured, one of which ended up in the hands of the proprietor of a Sheffield record store, the rest as they say being history.
When ‘Bring It On’ first hit the shelves, (the fact there were still shelves then highlights how much music consumption has changed in the intervening times) the languid road trip North American overtones seemed such a breath of fresh air after the Beatles obsessed Britpop era had seemingly burned itself out in a blizzard of Bolivian marching powder. Platinum sales and a subsequent Mercury gong reinforced the notion the next big thing might be here but alas, Gomez never quite kicked on as they might have done, perhaps through no fault of their own at the dawning of the digital music age, setting a trend for post millennial bands making a big initial splash then going backwards with each resulting release, sound familiar?
Nevertheless, ‘Bring It On’ has aged rather well and in the era of playlists and mixtapes, tonight’s show gives everyone the chance to hear the album from start to finish once more, and I for one am foaming at the mouth at the prospect.
Not surprisingly, every track from ‘Bring It On’ is more than enthusiastically received, with a packed crowd eager to lend a hand with the vocal work on several occasions, the highlight being a brilliantly sprawling version of ‘Here Comes the Breeze’, one of those great two-part songs in the tradition of ‘Layla’, and ‘I Am the Resurrection’. The remainder of the set is dominated by numbers from follow-up ‘Liquid Skin’, with Ian Ball, Ben Ottewell, Tom Gray, Paul Blackburn and Olly Peacock clearly revelling in the fans’ enduring love for this still fine band, still containing all original members, not many other bands can still say that.
Words - Mike Price