Live Review: October Drift - Colours, London 17/05/2023
October Drift brought their latest tour to a loud and chaotic close at London’s Colours on Wednesday night.
The four-piece from Taunton have been one of the hardest working bands for playing small shows, and it’s clear they shouldn’t be, but you sense they enjoy these occasions as much as the crowd do.
When frontman Kiran Roy takes to singing from the bar at the side of the tightly-packed room, or performs with guitarist Dan Young to close the night in the centre of the floor, it feels like they could go big – but they’ll make any room feel like home.
But we’re a while from the end of the night when Oliver Beardmore and his backing band started just after 7.45. They drilled through a short set, rattling through shoegazey tunes, with his voice playing along on top of the music like a separate instrument. He introduced his new song ‘Fade’ – released that night – by saying he played the room four years ago. “It went very badly. I’m so glad to be back.” We’re glad he did, wearing a The Cure ‘Wish’ hoodie that sums up the sonic experience of the show. Last song ‘Closer’ was a beautiful wall of noise to lose yourself in, with elements of Slowdive, but also prog rock and just pure sound.
Bringing a different kind of noise, three-piece Carpark merged it with singalong pop tuneage. They opened with ‘The World Ended in 2012’, an epitome of their vision, before going into ‘Not the Perfect Start’. Vocalist and bassist Hattie thanked the crowd for filing in early, saying “We could have been shit, and maybe we are”. It doesn’t feel like a “giant risk” though (her words), with the unreleased ‘Blow Me Outta the Water’ offering full-blown early 00s girl-pop vibes that made you want to sing along by the end even though you didn’t know it before. Drummer Loda and guitarist Hattie are also adding to the big sound and glorious melodies which make the whole thing pass by in a flash, while an asthma-laden Scottie left the mic stand to roam the stage for ‘Suburbs of Hell’. They made enough noise to keep the crowd chatter at bay, and win over new supporters too.
Carpark felt epic, in a very different way to Oliver Beardmore and October Drift, but still noisy, fun, and fresh. October Drift’s Kiran told the crowd both supports could be headlining “and probably will soon enough”. It’s not an unfair judgement.
Regular readers of WTHB will know the love that flows for October Drift every time they do anything, and this Wednesday night show is the same. They’re a quartet who get real devotion from their hardcore fans, and deservedly so. The love goes both ways.
The show starts just after 9.30 with Kiran dressed in white singing ‘Ever After’ from the middle of the crowd alone, before the other band members, dressed in black, come in to pick up the music. This may be a fair assessment of October Drift – three-quarters dark and bleak, but with a 25% breakthrough of light and joy.
It’s impossible to take your eyes off Kiran, with his habit of exploring venues, but there’s also guitarist Dan, who jumped into the crowd himself at one point to play, bassist Alex Bispham and drummer Chris Holmes. They form a tight unit on the Colours stage – it’s a small venue, but you sense they’d stick like glue if you gave them an arena to fill.
After the opener, they drill through ‘Lost Without You’, ‘Losing My Touch’ and then ‘Webcam Funerals’, the latter a real pen portrait showcasing the images of modern life, all wrapped up in a body of noise. Carpark’s Hattie warned the crowd October Drift would be loud, and you felt the vibrations during almost every other song.
In the big banger ‘Waltzer’, Kiran turns the microphone onto the crowd so that they can sing back the reprise “I don’t think I’m coming back”. It’s followed up with ‘Bleed’, which is beautiful, and sees the singer take to performing the first half of the track from the bar to the side of the venue, before rejoining his bandmates for the finale.
October Drift feel that this was an “incredible tour”, and it was a jaunt that brought them back to one of their earliest haunts. Kiran revealed the “fun fact” that their first London show was in that room to a handful of people in 2015 – some of whom had stuck it out for eight years to see them morph into this live phenomenon. He said: “Thanks for sticking with us.”
There’s good reason to stick with the band though. They’re fun – you’re never quite sure what’s going to come next, except that it will probably be loud. They also take their cues from S Club 7 – they do not stop moving, although October Drift’s beat is somewhat different to 2001 pop gold. ‘Come and Find Me’ saw Dan get in the crowd to be close to the people who made the show a sell-out, and finished with Kiran calling people forward so that he could stage dive.
From there, it’s into the title track of their debut record ‘Forever Whatever’, and then ‘Oh the Silence’ from the same album. However, there’s no such thing as silence in October Drift’s world. It’s driven with same precision you would expect from a band trained on the road to make high-energy rock sounds.
The band were hyperactive throughout the hour and a quarter, and so was the audience. As Kiran said: “You guys are fucking amped up.” So, of course, they try to “end this differently”. They’re concerned it might not work, but once one or two loudmouths are dampened down, Kiran and Chris take to performing ‘Like the Snow We Fall’, a song released on their 2020 EP ‘Naked’, from the middle of the floor, surrounded by the audience. It’s an incredible way to wrap an incredible tour. It created a calmer moment which seemed impossible just moments earlier.
October Drift have conquered sound, and they’ve conquered Colours. Your senses expect more to come, whatever next.
At the end of ‘Like the Snow We Fall’, there’s the sound of a shaken tambourine – which you can hear around the room – and Kiran lifts his guitar up to the lights. Job done, for now.
Words by Sam Draper
Photos by Joe Dick
