aaamusic | On 01, Jul 2010

London, 28th June

The Roundhouse is definitely an iconic venue. It has hosted the likes of The Ramones, The Who, Paul McCartney and The New York Dolls, so there’s no knocking its pedigree. But its reputation precedes it. The truth is, the Camden Roundhouse has terrible sound, no matter who’s playing, their set will be screwed up monumentally by crushingly loud drums, feedback laced guitars and a strange buzzing noise in the background that some optimists refer to as “Bass Guitar” which can shoot what would otherwise be the gig of you’re life down in flames before the third song. So the soundman for the Dead Weather when they played there on Monday night doesn’t deserve kudos for making the gig sound utterly perfect from start to finish, they deserve a fucking knighthood.

Taking to the stage 15 agonising minutes after stage-time, The Dead Weather, looking so heroically cool in regulation leather jackets and tight jeans that even Jack Whites bizarre feathered hat can’t offset it, swagger into their cover of Forever My Queen by Pentagram and everything goes duly apeshit, which leads to my only major problem with the gig, the crowd themselves. There is a right way and a wrong way for a crowd to be at a gig, the right way is an energetic crowd having a great time while being considerate of others around them, the wrong way is when the crowd contains a few tanked-up middle aged fat men who think that moshing is waddling around shoving people who are trying to have a good time. It only takes a few to royally mess up a gig, and it takes a special to band to make you forget about the gurning tools and The Dead Weather are easily on of those bands.

Guitarist Dean Fertita effortlessly peals off the riff to 60 Feet Tall and the night really begins, the second song hasn’t even ended before you realise this is a very different band to the one that first shipped up to these shores last June. Gone are the unhinged bunch of miscreants that held on for dear life as they charged through every song with an abandon approaching murderous and in their place is a focused, charged and ferociously tight live band that have taken the sheer intensity of the early shows and focused it into playing the songs they’ve written as best as they can. This is no bad thing, while the early shows were exciting as hell; some of the more demanding tracks stumbled rather than swaggered, case in point, the reggae-metal whip-crack of I Cut like a Buffalo which was a confused mess at the first gigs, and has evolved into the song of the night by quite a large margin.

Strangely enough, songs from vastly superior second record Sea of Cowards doesn’t show up until 7 songs in, with the venomous Gasoline. Soon after lead single Die by the Drop rears its head and the gig reaches mach 10. It’s heavy like an Osmium elephant, funky like Bootsy Collin’s wet dreams and quite simply spectacular. Jack and Allison’s joint lead vocal do unsavoury things to each as the crowd as the crowd howls out “Some people die just a little!” The strangeness of that lyric probably doesn’t occur to them at that particular moment in time. It’s probably for the best.

As much as Jack protests that The Dead Weather is a unit the moment where he steps out from behind his kit and delivers a powerhouse guitar solo is still the moment of the night for the majority of people, they’re not wrong, he is without question the best of his generation but it’s selling the night a bit short to immediately jump to Jacks solo. The fact alone that there are moments in the set that equal Whites magnificent guitar playing proves that The Dead Weather are far from simply Jack Whites side project, and are instead a genuinely great rock’n’roll band in their own right.

Author: Will Howard