Live Review: Spring King - Spring King - South Street Arts Centre, Reading 24/01/2018
A cold and windy January night in Reading, what better place to kick off the incredible Spring King’s headline tour!!
A very strange scene greeted us as we walked into the South Street Arts Centre, half the room looking like a normal gig venue and the other looking like a school drama room (black curtains, rows of chairs etc.). Never the less the room was slowly filling up as opener Valeras took to the stage to kick off the night, an eclectic mix of smooth indie guitar and hard hitting backing drums filled the room as they played multiple songs of their debut EP ‘Knives & Flowers’! Our personal favourite of the set being the top tappingly catchy ‘Colour Me’ which loosened up the stiff crowd.
As the room became packed and everyone took a few steps closer to the stage, the infamous Fizzy Blood strutted onto the stage to blast the audience with their hard hitting punky anthems!! The 80’s inspired ‘Summer Of Luv’ boomed out of the speakers as the band picked up their instruments and frontman Benji showed off his wide vocal range and impressive guitar skills. Those fizzy boys even had time to show off a brand new song ‘Pink Magic’ which the crowd lapped up, definitely one to look out for in the future. The remainder of the set consisted of songs from the bands recent EP with songs like ‘Haunted’ & ‘ADHD’ to which they also just released a music video for; ending the set with fan favourite ‘January Sun’ kicked the whole evening into overdrive ready for the headliner…
Finally it came to the band we all came to see, Spring King! You could tell just from their faces as they took to the stage how excited they were to be back playing shows, especially in such small venues!
Spring King started it all off with ‘Detroit’ a classic off their debut album, but half way through Andy’s pedal board broke so he frantically tried to fix it, this went on for another 10 minutes while the remainder of the band and crowd had a group sing-a-long of the Jeremey Corbin song, including a funky jazz version they improvised!
Once everything was sorted the rest of the set went off without a flaw, countless mosh pits erupted in the crowd with every song that was played; fan anthems like ‘City’ and ‘Who are you?’ definitely getting the biggest crowd reaction! Including a few stage dives which we were not expecting in such a small venue. Similar to their support, Spring King revealed a new song during tonight’s performance; the aptly named ‘Animal’ turned the crowd into a feeding frenzy!!
The show ended with two very rowdy performances of ‘Mumma’ and ‘Rectifier’, the crowd and band not showing any less energy than they had at the start of the gig. Mosh pits galore, Guitars being played upside down and every person in the venue singing along; it was the perfect end to the first of many shows Spring King have lined up for this tour. If you can get the chance to go to any of them we would highly suggest it, maybe don’t take your nan though; we don’t want her breaking a hip!!
Photography and Review by Joe Dick