Friday 1 March 2002

GGGRRRAAAAAAARRRGGGHHHH!!! RRRRAAAAWWWKKK!!

You know, Rawk'nRoll.

What do those words conjure up for you? To me, they symbolise blackness & very loud music played and enjoyed by men who look like Pirates. That's what I think, and, more relevantly, that is precisely what I expect of both The Bottlenecks and their audience. Imagine my surprise, then, upon walking into a very crowded upper room at the Yorkie to find the all-pervasive smell of .... the Lynx effect. Not very Rock & Roll, is it? All around me, all I could see were nicely turned out young ladies and gentlemen, having a very nice time, and occasionally going off to fix their make up & do their hair.

The Bottlenecks wouldn't go off to do their hair. In fact, after a hundred-minutes-plus, heavy-rocking,shirt-discarding, set that made walls sweat, you could only imagine them settling down with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a well-thumbed copy of Mel Bay's "How To Play Indescribably Fast Guitar Solos". Indeed, the first thing I heard at tonight's show was a very fast and complicated sounding guitar solo over a pummelling riff, coupled with the remarkable sound of "Gooodd Eeeeeeveeerrrninnnnggg Yawwwksheeeer Howwwwssse". More pummelling riffage follows. Yer man there sings "You're outta your head/You're outta your mind/You're just about to lose control" in such an operatic manner that it's hard to imagine him losing control of anything. Especially his audience. For, whilst the Bottlenecks are many things to many people, they are pricipally a showband. Throughout tonight's show, we get banter like "we're not playing another song 'till some people move down to the front", and sub-Freddie Mercury-styled audience participation of the "dddaaaaayyy-ooo-miss-a-day-miss-a-daaaaaay-ooo" variety. This is something I like about the Bottlenecks - they might have a whole lotta histrionics, but they sure as hell want you to stick around to watch them.

How does one begin to describe the experience of listening to the Bottlenecks? Essentially, if you distilled Iron Maiden's entire output into about an hour and a half, and threw in sundry other metal covers throughout that time, you've pretty much got it. Is it any good, then? That depends entirely on your opinion of the distilled works of Iron Maiden. Within that fairly rigidly defined area, the Bottlencks are quite incredible. Not a riff out of place, not one falsetto vocal fluffed, not an opportunity for a solo missed. Even when they appear to be flagging, as they seemed to be halfway through a run through of "Sweet Child O' Mine", all it takes is another incendiary guitar solo, bit of high-pitched vocal wailing and the most perfect pronunciation I've ever heard of the word "Motherfucker" to get the Rhythm Guitarist jumping on the drums and the crowd going crackers. It isn't just that they know how to play everything very well, but they have an excellent sense of timing about when to do it.

However, take them just a few degrees off course and they will start to flounder. The bluesy, Lynryd-Skynyrd-ish Aerosmith cover they chose fairly early on had ample amounts of oomph, but the Bottlenecks lack groove. Take the riff away from the Bottlenecks, and they don't appear to know what to do. Another weakness of theirs is the songwriting. What they have is (for it's chosen genre) fine, although too often relying upon alternating the chorus-guitarred verses with huge mega-riff-y chourses. However, musical light and shade is almost exclusively supplied by cover versions, which, whilst they work well as a bridge between the band and unfamiliar fans do rather highlight their shortcomings as songwriters. This seems incongrouous to me: the Bottlenecks are rightly proud of their significant achievements as performers, of their reputation, and of their well-stacked following. Why not add songwriting to that list? All your heroes have.

There are stacks of things one could say about the Bottlenecks: the absence of any kind of tongue-in-cheek humour put many regulars off, and the equally perplexing presence of such items as a drum solo before "Run To The Hills", or a cover of "You give love a bad name" left me lost for words. Whilst I hardly noticed it at the time, reading back through my copious notes I find that a good sixty percent of what I heard was cover versions . As Shania Twain would say, that don't impress me much. However, I am falsely giving the impression that this was not a great gig to be at - it was, really. Critics have lately opined that the Bottlenecks spend much of their time "imagining they're playing at Wembley". I don't think that's quite right - the Bottlenecks play every gig as though they're playing at Wembley. They have pace, energy and a reasonably vast amount of virtuosity. They lack long hair. Boooo. They might possibly consider getting a different name - The Bottlenecks sounds like either a blues band or a kiddies programme, and God knows, they're neither of those things. But you really ought to go and see them soon. Because if you leave it a year or two, it's going to cost a bloody fortune to get tickets for Donnington.......

Paddy Garrigan