Live Review: Deadletter - 100 Club, London 28/09/2022
At the London pit stop on their rampant tour of England, Yorkshire come South London six-piece, Deadletter, deliver a blistering spectacle of misanthropy to a crowd that, ironically, are quite enamoured.
Tonight at Soho’s 100 Club, the oldest independent venue world-wide, Deadletter bless the stage. It’s a curious spot, a converted basement set neatly between a Claire’s and a Currys, the incongruity of which does not go amiss. Perhaps that’s why the space itself is a whole story beneath these monopolistic chain stores; it feels like some inadvertent metaphor. Regardless of why, 100 Club’s location embodies the anti-establishment, ‘underground’ tone of a band who, thematically, flirt at the fringes of pop cultural jargon, while simultaneously distancing themselves as far away as possible from what it stands for.
Deadletter, like the notorious plethora of punk bands (the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Siouxsie & the Banshees, and many more) that have visited 100 Club in its history, take misanthropy seriously, and do not like a lot of things, and are not afraid to speak on them. It’s in this ilk, as well as musically, that Deadletter draws on punk music’s discordant, outrageous, DIY lineage, yet it would be more truthful to view them on the infinitely broad spectrum of post-punk, than as an out-and-out punk band. Granted, most bands that fall upon this spectrum are averse to being generalised as such, however I see it as a compliment. A standout of the emerging post-punk renaissance, Deadletter retain that punky DIY feel, but colour it with scathing, intellectual political satire, harking to literature, film, and philosophy, all the while never dealing with these influences in an overly on-the-nose way. Likewise, the music, as in punk, prioritises the drums and the bass, yet is sprinkled with distorted, rhythmic guitars, and flickered surges of saxophone, which altogether surmount to an austere but psychedelic experience.
I’m referring here to the band’s energised studio recordings, which, brought to a live platform tonight, muster up visceral and palpable vigour that make real-time performance special in a different way to recordings. Frontman, Zac Lawrence, himself states of Deadletter’s opening track, ‘Pop Culture Connoisseur’, that the band only record music to support the songs they play live, and that ‘if it wasn’t an archetype to record music then [he] doesn’t think [the band] would be particularly crazy about doing so’ (Badluck Magazine). As I see it, the band’s live performance informs how one should listen to their studio recordings, as the energy of the memory of seeing Deadletter live brings all the audible emotion to the fore; I would argue this same point for a few other post-punk groups such as Squid and English Teacher.
Following ‘Pop Culture Connoisseur’s marching proclamation of modern gloom, the band soon jumped into their first single from the upcoming debut EP, ‘Heat!’, called ‘Binge’. It feels like a unique spiritual successor to the musicality of the Talking Heads, with one repeated bassline and drum loop, guitars adlibbing alongside, and Zac’s deep, dark, sermon meandering above it all. He harnesses dazzling literary technique in his words, seen most notably in the simple but telling chorus: ‘wants, need, hopes, dreams, life’s a binge!’ It’s miserable but joyful in its empowerment, especially with the rest of the band shouting the refrain ‘binge’, alongside him. Every member moves and plays harmoniously, in spite of the recklessness of the sound; the band’s performance of ‘Binge’, like every song, is organised chaos.
Next is their latest single, ‘Weights’, which, too, provides paranoia-induced, jagged guitar riffs that linger over powerful live drums and a menacing bassline. The faith Zac has in his message, ‘life imitates art they say, in which case art must be bitter and grey’, is visible on this angered, quite wild glare he sports, one which impassions the keen swarm of bodies before him. This is one of the most intriguing aspects of the night: the demographic is wildly varied, from the rock-aesthetic, disaffected youth, to those a few hours out of their nine-to-five city jobs, to older folk, all crumbling under the same weights, succumbing to the same insatiable binges of day-to-day life. Nine-to-five ridiculousness, the anger of the elder, the anger of the youth – driven by different forms of fear and angst, yet all siding with the same middle finger to nonsense that punk music encapsulates so well. They debut a new one called ‘Practice What You Preach’ about a Preacher who lived above Zac; before they play, he states, ‘it’s up to you to decide if I was a fan’, before launching in with cries of, ‘The least you can do is shut that f*cking window!’ The irony and the racket and the rage are punk personified.
After a quick replacement to a broken kick pedal and some short thanks appeased by Zac’s, ‘anyway, enough of that shite’, the band come to their triumph of the night, ‘Fit For Work’. The track is, once again, held steady by a stern bassline (which is almost dub-esque) and drums, before being brought to multi-instrumental chaos, and back again: organised chaos. Lyrically, we see Zac at his most political, scathing, and hilarious. The structure of the verses draws heavily from The Fall’s, ‘Living Too Late’, with the repeated call-back of the eponymous refrain giving the track its direction, yet, as opposed to Mark E. Smith’s exploration of ageing in ‘Living Too Late’, Zac satirises the perplexing life-or-death contract that work life seems to instil. He speaks: ‘Johnny’s missing two arms but his legs look dandy, fit for work! Jenny’s post-traumatic but we cannot see this can we? Fit for work!’ He’s angry at the man sitting untouchable on his throne, while armless, legless, post-traumatic folk are forced into situations that they can’t actually, rationally, healthily cope with. I love everything about this song, particularly the message, and it was a pleasure to witness it live, with an audience who shared, unabashedly, that admiration for the band.
Please do yourself a favour and see Deadletter live before, in years to come, the tickets cost a month’s wages.
Words by George Saxon
