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RNS/Ólafsson live at the Glasshouse review – quite possibly the best pianist in the world right now
8
Feb

Beethoven’s flamboyant Emperor concerto was an odd choice for this master of pianistic introspection, but Ólafsson nonetheless proved his world class status following a typically daring and dynamic first half from Sousa’s Royal Northern Sinfonia.

It’s a chilly Wednesday night at St. James’ Park, and the music is a heady mix of Hey Jude, a Wembley-themed Que Sera, Sera and a live rendition of Newcastle United’s own gloriously cheesy anthem Going Home. It’s odd to think that amongst the thousands of fans twirling their scarves in the stands one of Europe’s foremost concert pianists, a fresh United scarf draped over his chic turtleneck. What would Víkingur Ólafsson, a man known for his heartfelt and studied renditions of obscure Bach organ works, make of the wilfully dated sax melody and the thumping 80s drum groove?

Almost unbelievably, it turns out the Icelandic piano sensation wasn’t just there out of curiosity. In fact, he’s been a fan since he was a child, boldly going against the consensus of his Reykjavík schoolmates by picking Newcastle over Manchester United. After this 40-minute Beethoven recital in Gateshead, he recounts the wild events of the previous night’s victorious cup tie, provoking chuckles from the audience as he – dressed in a pristine suit and hair neatly gelled in position like a lovable teachers’ pet – struggles to recall the words “howay the lads”. “I originally picked Newcastle because they played exciting football,” he remarks before reeling off several names from Newcastle teams of yore, as if to prove his true allegiance. “But now I realise it’s because they are black and white, like the piano keys.”

It is a bizarre footnote that somewhat explains Ólafsson’s unlikely appearance in Gateshead. The Glasshouse is undoubtedly one of the finest concert halls in the North but, even for them, getting Ólafsson is something of a scheduling coup – the pianist won a Grammy just days ago for his superb recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which is generally considered as one of the finest readings of that legendary suite of music. Next week he has a blockbuster series of recitals with fellow piano god Yuja Wang in the hallowed concert halls of Toronto and New York. Consequently, the atmosphere in a packed Glasshouse is simply electric. The lady next to me can’t help but burst into conversation about Ólafsson, telling me about his “magical” Prom last summer, the majesty of his Bach organ transcriptions and, most giddily, that “he was on Petroc this morning!” If BBC Radio 3’s silken-voiced presenter approved, then it seemed certain we were in for a classic concert.

First, though, we had the first half of the programme to get through. Fortunately, resident conductor Dinis Sousa is not one for adding crowd-pleasing filler to his concerts. He continued his noble work of promoting contemporary classical music with an opening rendition of Ciel d’hiver, the 2013 piece from recently departed composer Kaija Saariaho. The Finn was known for her fascination with light in all its subtleties, and it was the eerie grey of a dusky winter sky that was most clearly evoked here through Charlotte Ashton’s icy opening flute solo. Later, strings slid from note to note unnervingly, and bubbling harp glissandi gave way to alarming rushes of cymbals. The programme notes suggested Ciel d’hiver would be a beautiful experience, but this was more of an orchestral horror film, vividly portrayed by an RNS demonstrating their fine attention to detail, even in avant garde, pulse-free pieces like this one.

It was a fitting warm up for the following piece, Bartók’s masterwork Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, which is known for its inclusion during a particularly unsettling sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. In Gateshead, this was a reminder of why classical music is best enjoyed live – two groups of strings players sat directly opposite each other, and their battling, overlapping melodies made for a thrilling stereo experience. It culminated in the electrifying Allegro molto duel, each section leaning forwards as they dug their bows into the strings like fencers going in for a lunge. The strings joined forces for a jagged and impressively synchronised pizzicato passage, whilst pianist Benjamin Powell’s agitated exchanges with Fionnuala Ward’s celesta (essentially a piano that strikes steel plates instead of strings) proved that the piano, at its heart, is in fact a percussion instrument. Dinis Sousa’s conducting was uncharacteristically rigid throughout, and rightly so: this is a claustrophobic piece of music – a symphony in a straitjacket, albeit a straitjacket from which it is desperately trying to escape.

The choice of Beethoven’s Emperor piano concerto for Ólafsson’s visit to Tyneside was mysterious. The programme had originally listed Brahms’ second piano concerto as the headline piece (a convenient change for me, since I’d already seen Sunwook Kim‘s businesslike rendition of that one in 2023). One concertgoer I ended up asking about the switch to Beethoven said it was something to do with Ólafsson’s health concerns, but this concerto, a piece oozing with flair and self-confidence typical of late-era Beethoven, hardly seemed like an easy cop-out for the pianist.

Even so, perhaps for Ólafsson Emperor really is a cakewalk. It certainly seemed that way as he delved into the fiendish technical passages that open the concerto, sat back on the stool as if even he was stunned by the acrobatic feats his fingers were pulling off. This sort of musical showmanship is somewhat unchartered territory for Ólafsson, who in 2023 distinguished himself as a Bach specialist when he embarked on playing the Goldberg Variations for 88 concerts in a row in a world tour that took in every continent bar Antarctica. He’s adept at drawing out the hidden inner melodies of Bach’s knotty fugues, as well as tricky task of locating the deep springs of human emotion buried beneath the composer’s cold mathematical genius. Setting him to work at some relatively uncomplicated Beethoven then – one clear refrain per movement, repeated over and over like a pop song – felt a bit like taking a Ferrari to work.

Nonetheless, there was never a sense of superiority about Ólafsson’s impeccable playing, giving the opening movement’s radiant refrain all the vigour it deserved, then sitting back during the breaks and eagerly watching his melodies take flight in the violins around him, clearly delighted by the results. Emperor‘s dominant emotion is simple and persistent joy, although Ólafsson still found room for brief moments of reflection towards the end of the first movement, easing off on tempo momentarily before a delightful final flourish of quicksilver scales.

It was the slow middle movement where Ólafsson seemed most at home. Beethoven’s tranquil theme here is often likened to a hymn, but to me it sounds starkly contemporary, and even pop-y (is there a through line from Beethoven’s steadily rising refrain to the chorus of Becky Hill’s pop hit Remember?). In Gateshead, Ólafsson’s elegant piano melodies were superbly matched by Sousa’s RNS, the strings sounding delectable over the theme’s hushed rise and fall.

The eventual third movement, foreshadowed with subtlety by Ólafsson a few bars earlier, was pure elation. The bombastic refrain looked like terrific fun to play on piano, and Ólafsson did well to ensure even the very loud passages remained light-footed and playful. For a studious-looking pianist whose discography leans towards the austere, this was a reminder that he is still not one to take himself too seriously. A final symphonic prank from Beethoven – the dummy of a quiet ending on piano, followed by a blast of conclusive chords from the orchestra – cued five straight minutes of rapturous applause.

It took the insistence of Ólafsson himself for the applause to finally abate. After his charming chat about Newcastle United, the pianist had one last surprise in store: an encore of Jean-Phillippe Rameau’s The Arts and the Hours, dedicated to the late concert pianist and former RNS director Lars Vogt, who had in fact chosen this specific Steinway grand piano for the Glasshouse. The piece – a devastating tapestry of falling melodies and mellow harmonies – was the sort of music that words could never do justice to. The piece’s title and its dedication to Vogt made it a deeply moving meditation on the mortality of artists and the immortality of their art. This was Ólafsson at his most extraordinary; there can be few people in the world this good at communicating emotion so powerfully. Ólafsson had been a close friend of Vogt, and shared with us a text he received from Vogt just days before his death in 2022. The message was simple, but it haunted me all the way home after this scintillating night of music: “Don’t ever take the music for granted.”

The wonderful adventure: why Slipping Through My Fingers is ABBA’s tragic masterpiece
16
Dec

A devastating account of a mother’s loss doubles as a universal meditation on the human compulsion to cling on to the past in a pop single that mixes ecstasy and agony in a way no other song has before or since.

Slipping Through My Fingers is twice as old as me, and yet, unlike any song released before my birth – or really any song released before 2015, for that matter – it stirs something deep within my soul. It’s had a modest renaissance other the last year after Declan McKenna, an indie rock figurehead of my own generation, released a tasteful if unspectacular cover of the track, which somehow remains his second most popular song on Spotify. It’s obvious in McKenna’s tender, wavering vocals that this song means as much to him as it does to me, and yet on paper our adoration of it makes no sense. We should be reaching for remix-ripe disco hits like Gimme Gimme Gimme or TikTok-able snippets like Angeleyes’s chorus or Chiquitita’s outro, not a ballad told unambiguously from the perspective of a Swedish mother in her thirties. Presumably like McKenna, I cannot directly relate to experiencing your child leaving home – on to school, university, or marriage – for the first time, although I have played the “absent-minded schoolgirl” in my own departure to university, and have watched my parents process some of Agnetha Fältskog’s pain in real life.

But the daughter (now 51-year-old Lena Ulvaeus) is far from the only thing slipping away in this pop masterpiece. Add a comma (“Slipping through my fingers, all the time”) and suddenly time, not the daughter, is the song’s principal subject. “It’s okay, we have time,” Donna reassures Sophie moments before STMF begins in Mamma Mia!, but really she’s fooling herself – STMF primarily deals with the disturbing mystery of time’s “funny tricks”. How can a lifelong bond between mother and daughter suddenly be a thing of the past without warning? Even when it feels like there are some things, love perhaps, that can make time stand still, why do memories inevitably fade, and joy revert to a sort of distanced numbness? Why is time so slippery? “Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture,” the narrator admits in the song’s only dud lyric (pictures are, by definition, already frozen), a line that only makes proper sense when heard over that spine-tingling melody and Anni-Frid Lyngstad’s shrill vocal harmonies.

What’s most poignant about STMF, however, is how the mother mourns the idea that she might one day know her daughter entirely. “Each time I think I’m close to knowing, she keeps on growing,” she reflects beautifully. It’s a line imbued with equal parts melancholy and hope – ‘knowing’ her daughter may be forever just out of reach for the narrator, but what a gift it is to have a daughter so nebulous, so unfathomably special that she just “keeps on growing”. In the song’s moving rendition in Mamma Mia!, for a while Donna sings to Sophie’s back, the latter blissfully unaware of her mother’s agony as she preens herself in the mirror. “Do I really see what’s in her mind?” Donna mirrors back. To love is to know one another on the deepest possible level, but STMF comes to terms with the fact that we can never really “know” each other. The daughter will always have surprises for her mother, and indeed the mother hardly even knows herself, ending a verse with “And why? I just don’t know”. Such mysteries are the beauty of living.

That aching emotion you can hear in the music alone – the pull from major immediately to minor in the first two chords, the way a rising, major-chord bridge somehow sounds utterly desolate – perfectly complements the core of STMF’s exquisite tragedy: the mother mourns her daughter, but she must let her go. Crucially, the daughter is not simply leaving – the mother is actively letting her go, having come to the painful conclusion that her sorrow is the unavoidable cost of her daughter’s freedom. “Will you give me away?” Sophie asks, referring to her wedding, still just about young enough to act on her mother’s advice. Donna swallows a yes and nods. She lets her daughter go out of love, and yet weeps as a result of that same, heart-wrenching love.

On top of all that tragedy is a certain world-weariness in ABBA’s swooping melodies and plodding drum groove. This is, after all, a “well-known sadness” and an “old, melancholy feeling”. Has the narrator felt pain this before? Perhaps this agonising dilemma – whether to hold on to the past in vain, or to let go and mourn – is an integral part of human condition? We all have a compulsion to cling on to what we know, and yet the universe transpires to forever keep changing against our will in ways both subtle and profound.

Remarkably, despite the specificity of the lyrics, STMF succeeds (like all the best pop songs) in being readily malleable into whatever meaning the listener sees fit. Whilst traveling this summer, I found myself overlooking the tragedy and reading into the song’s ample euphoria. I took it as a reminder that this moment, in all it’s thrillingly novel glory – navigating towards a sparkling Eiffel Tower at night, summitting a rugged peak alone in the Bosnian mountains, watching the sunset from a boat on the Bosphorus – is of course only transient. In fact, it’s precisely that transience that makes those moments so special. After I arrived home, I found STMF morphed into a rallying cry for a return to that trip’s whole-hearted spirit of adventure and personal development. “What happened to the wonderful adventures?” Fältskog muses, and I hear a call to snap out of all my obsessing over tricky coursework or a patch of unhappiness and remind myself that this too is an adventure and, like the daughter, I will “keep on growing”.

Tellingly, STMF ends completely unresolved. Fältskog returns to the first verse having apparently learnt little from her revelations about love and loss, and the daughter finally waves goodbye, leaving only the sounds of a clock quietly ticking in the background. The mother doesn’t know what comes next for her daughter, and in fact she can’t know; this is not her story to tell any more. The daughter will continue to grow. Perhaps she will become a mother herself, or maybe she’ll find cause to run back to her mother for a spell, temporarily reigniting those wonderful adventures. But without any doubt, at some point along the way, the daughter will feel the full weight of her mother’s thoroughly human dilemma: to hold on, or to let go. In ways big and small, this is a question we all must tackle over and over in our lives. Long may Slipping Through My Fingers keep me asking it.

Katy J Pearson live at Leeds Irish Centre review – illness-battling songstress lifts the spirits
13
Dec

Battling on despite illness, the singer-songwriter’s voice still had just enough oomph to do her finest soft rock numbers justice, and her effortless stage presence brought joy to this rainy Wednesday night in Leeds.

The alarm bells were ringing as early as song one. Bristol singer-songwriter Katy J Pearson opened this evening’s concert in the endearingly ragged confines of Leeds Irish Centre – which looks like it hasn’t changed a bit since it opened in 1970 – with her wistful recent single Those Goodbyes, a treasure trove of gorgeous, meandering melodies and pained reflections on loss. But under the venue’s tinsel-strewn ceiling, something seemed off. Her vocals on the chorus quivered, and she stepped away from the mic in the instrumental sections as if hoping to escape the obligation of having to sing. It didn’t look like she wanted to be there.

She cleared things up immediately after the end of the song. “I’ve picked up a sinus infection, so sorry if I sound a bit shit tonight,” she explained, before joking with guitarist Benjamin Spike Saunders about handing over the cold to him. Pearson apologised to the front row before Saunders chipped in with “The cold is free merch!” It’s indicative of a night that was hampered by Pearson’s illness but uplifting nonetheless, in no small part thanks to Pearson and Saunders’ gift for convivial inter-song patter.

Pearson’s beleaguered vocals are a particular shame because, as an artist, her voice is her greatest weapon. It is a remarkable thing, piercing yet mellifluous, with a delicate sheen that only gets more beautiful the higher into her range she ventures. It’s been likened to a cross between Kate Bush and Dolly Parton, but her music also evokes the trending country star CMAT, albeit with a slightly more sober presentation.

Vocals aside, Pearson also has a gift for beautiful, deceptively simple soft rock ballads, showcased best in her indie classic debut LP Return. Her third album, this year’s Someday, Now, was arguably her first creative misfire. Billed as the first album in which she’s truly taken the helm of the songwriting process, denying her label’s calls for a straightforward pop hit, Someday, Now surprisingly lacked sonic boldness, with a glut of pastel-hued, woozy tracks and a chronic lack of hooks. The fresh material understandably took precedence in Leeds, but tracks like the lethargic It’s Mine Now or the vaporous Constant had a tendency to set the mind wandering.

Luckily, there were plenty of songs from Pearson’s first two albums to keep the crowd moving. The expansive opening of Talk Over Town felt like throwing open the window after the stuffy, staid songs that preceded it, and Pearson’s sole hit Beautiful Soul came with an appealing undercurrent of menace, even though the edits to the chorus melody – apparently a measure to protect Pearson’s voice – detracted from the beauty.

Pearson’s backing band gave an impeccably professional performance, and Saunders’ tasteful guitar solo on It’s Mine Now might have rescued the track had it not been mixed so frustratingly quiet. There were plenty of interesting basslines for Tom Damage to wrap his fingers around, not least in Save Me, noodling his way into a delightful breakdown and finale. Drummer Robbie Kessell, meanwhile, was best described by Pearson herself as “a safe pair of hands,” which is to say Katy J Pearson songs are not known for their challenging drum parts.

In fairness, Pearson’s voice did steadily improve (“adrenaline is a wonderful thing,” she explained), and she was almost at full power for the Fleetwood Mac swagger of Long Range Driver, the new album’s most arresting track. It was a relief, too, that she was more than capable of tackling Return‘s title track alone on stage whilst playing acoustic guitar. An understated ballad about the joys (and sorrows) of personal growth, Return is Pearson’s songwriting magnum opus. In an Irish Centre stunned into silence, Pearson’s elegant melodies proved that, illness or not, she is an extraordinary talent.

It was a testament to Pearson’s Adele-like powers of putting the audience at ease that she could transition from the quiet heartbreak of Return to light-hearted chat with audience hecklers, asking the lighting engineer to turn down the stage lights that were blinding a patch of the crowd. “I hope this gig was acceptable,” she said at the gig’s close, before launching into a story about the last time she played in Leeds and the subsequent “paralytic” night out. Tonight was far from Pearson’s best outing, but it will take more than a sinus infection to dampen this beautiful soul.

Confidence Man live at NX review – ludicrous dance-pop tears the roof off
9
Dec

Fresh from releasing their third – and finest – album, there’s simply no room left for duds in Confidence Man’s supremely silly live show. Even by Newcastle’s high standards, Saturday nights out don’t get much more ecstatic than this.

The first thing you should know about Confidence Man is that the band’s two singers go by the names Sugar Bones and Janet Planet. The other two band members perform exclusively behind what can only be described as wide-brimmed midge-proof hats. Together they make willfully silly dance-pop, and their notorious live show involves camp, somewhat stilted dancing, all duly served to the crowd with unflinching poker faces. If aliens learnt about dance music only through a Wikipedia page and decided to invade Earth in the guise of an Australian four-piece electropop band, they would sound and look an awful lot like Confidence Man.

If Con Man’s aim really is gradual world domination, their plan is working. October’s 3 AM (LA LA LA) was their third LP and quite possibly their best, a full-throttle clubby blast featuring a bounty of nostalgic musical references to Britain’s famous 90s rave scene, plus enough of a resemblance to Charli xcx to get the youngsters like me excited. It is 47 minutes of gloriously uncomplicated party music best enjoyed with your hands in the air and feet off the ground.

It made sense, then, that 3AM only sounded more glorious when flowing out of NX’s meaty soundsystem and into a packed room of dancing fans. Amidst the blasting dance beats, Planet and Bones’ kitsch choreo was occasionally impressive (a few of Janet’s somersaults would score well on Strictly) but always hilarious, delivered with a faux-seriousness that made it clear that we were watching a performance, and by no means the musicians’ authentic selves. In today’s post-Brat world, where popstars are obliged to lay out their deepest and darkest emotions on a record, there was something refreshing about seeing an act plainly giving the fans what they want: 90 tears-free minutes of quality entertainment.

And what entertainment. Breakout hit Now U Do was hastily disposed of at the very start of the set, but justifiably so – Con Man’s new stuff makes this mellow house track sound almost soporific. Recent single I Can’t Lose You, for example, is pure electro-pop gold – a sticky, agitated synth line set to a stellar vocal hook. The band have been churning out winning earworms for years now, but this is surely the most ruthlessly catchy ditty Sugar and Janet have ever penned. Control similarly provoked delirium in NX with its heady swirl of techno bass, backed by suitably batty visuals on the giant screen behind the band – think pigeons with laser eyes and badgers smoking cigarettes.

Not once did Bones and Planet falter in their complete commitment to the bit, launching from one side of the stage to the other as they recounted dancefloor love affairs and wild drug-fuelled nights out, occasionally pausing to execute an acrobatic lift. Album highlight Real Move Touch was served with a particularly involving dance routine, fitting for this breathless sugar rush of a dance track. In Newcastle, Janet’s pivotal yelp of “Don’t you know you make me want to scream?!” sounded utterly electrifying, the perfect distillation of the dopamine-filled mania this concert tended to induce.

Even 3AM’s more questionable tracks were given shrewd facelifts on the night. The patience-testing ode to psychedelics Breakbeat was rescued by a spot of crowd participation, whilst Sugar Bones’ sludgy solo number Sicko came with the theatre of seeing Janet smash a sugar glass bottle over his head (karma perhaps for Sugar Bones uncorking a full bottle of champagne on the front rows – myself included – in a particularly giddy moment a few songs earlier).

It must be said that, if it wasn’t already obvious, lyrically Janet Planet is no Shakespeare. Intoxicatingly heavy frugger All My People reads “With a face like that there’s no conversation / With an ass like that there’s no hesitation” (no prizes for guessing the choreography keynotes here), and pathetic boyfriends account for much of the lyrical inspiration. A Con Man gig is not the place for mulling over nuanced metaphors, nor should it be. Janet and Sugar instead focus their efforts on roof-raising beats and titillating visuals, two things they do extremely well. The exception was So What, which hides its musings on the pointlessness of taking life too seriously behind a curtain of trashy Eurodance synths. Whether they were listening to the words or not, the crowd – encouraged to give each other piggy backs – greeted the track like it was a legendary Eurovision winner.

Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie (or so they call themselves) were unsung heroes, cooking up club beats behind their veils at the back of the stage and more than proving their worth in two extended instrumental breaks that succeeded in keeping the crowd’s hands happily bouncing in the air even without the two frontpeople for encouragement. Sugar and Janet eventually returned to stage wearing little more than light-up underwear and took back control with a terrific rendition of Boyfriend (Repeat), perhaps the biggest fan favourite in a night of fan favourites.

Effervescent hit Holiday wrapped up the show before an encore of 3AM’s title track, home to the band’s most artfully melodic hook. A shirtless Bones flexed his biceps one last time, Planet (now in a frilly maid’s costume) delivered a final pout, and the crowd erupted. It had been a Saturday night out for the ages. Releasing her pose and taking a final moment to appreciate the crowd, Janet finally dropped her stern persona and cracked a smile. Who could blame her? Everything about this night was pure euphoria from start to finish.

Fat Dog live at Project House review – barking mad dance-rock is a treat
15
Nov

The much-hyped band crowned a breakout year with a bangers-only 45 minute blitz in Leeds, packed with mammoth riffs and thunderous bass lines. Even the band’s photographer couldn’t resist the pull of a vintage mosh pit.

Twilight on a moody November evening by the canal in Leeds, and the leaking locks are hissing harshly behind a gloomy row of trees. At 8 p.m. it’s still just about bright enough to make out the passing clouds, oddly glowing with light pollution against navy skies. I’ve only just arrived, but I already feel exhausted – with the murky recent weather, a cold going round and a certain election result, I can’t have been the only one approaching Project House feeling weighed down by November blues. I walked towards the reassuring thud of live music – the muffled sounds of what turned out to be a rather dreadful support slot from Truthpaste – hopeful the music might provide some catharsis.

As it happened, few bands do reckless, enthralling catharsis quite like Fat Dog. Like Black Country, New Road and Black Midi, they were borne out of the fertile left-field music scene centred on the legendary Windmill venue in Brixton, making a name for themselves in recent years solely through notoriously wild live shows. Fat Dog’s unique sound is charged with an impulsive energy that makes it easy for audiences to be swept away by it all even without prior exposure. Remarkably, one scant album into their career, Fat Dog have already carved out a distinct stylistic niche – aggressive industrial dance music with thunderous unisons riffs, scuzzy saxophone and yelped, barely coherent vocals about impending doom. Think somewhere between Madness and Daft Punk, but with more lyrical references to slug invasions. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before.

You could forgive Fat Dog for being exhausted themselves – they’ve essentially been on tour for their entire career so far, including a marathon four performances on various small stages at this year’s Glastonbury. Emerging onto stage to a volley of drums and a tremble of deep synth bass, frontman Joe Love was a wonderfully enigmatic figure, his eyes barely open beneath a canopy of curly locks and a white Stetson. Vocally, he made no sense either, producing a manic yelp of “It’s Fat Dog baby!” at the start of the concert, sounding more menacingly deranged than comical.

Such is the unique appeal of Fat Dog, a band who on paper sound jokey – drummer Johnny ‘Doghead’ Hutch has a penchant for performing in a German shepherd mask, sadly not donned in Leeds – but in reality sound like credible harbingers of the apocalypse. It didn’t take long for the audience to start colliding with each other to the sounds of Vigilante, an album opener which brilliantly pairs a mammoth hook with a haunting, vaguely Eastern European folk melody. Gone were the intricate details of the studio recording – most notably a melodramatic spoken word passage, and a gigantic-sounding string orchestra carrying the hook – but in Leeds an additional percussionist was let loose on an arsenal of bongos and cymbals, more than plugging the gap. The result was an intoxicatingly heavy three minutes that had an instant, drug-like effect on the audience, who duly threw their arms – and beers – up in the air.

Joe Love’s performance was intimate for those in the front row.

It was enthralling – but then again I’m bound to say that, since Love spent a majority of this brief gig right next to me, close enough I could have nicked his hat. He leaned against the barriers for song after song, singing directly to his devotees like a young Nick Cave, only with less heartfelt hand-holding and more woofing into the microphone. It was a thrill to be in the mix of bodies with their arms reaching up towards him, but I doubt the people a little further back from me – spending most of the gig looking at a largely empty stage – would have agreed.

From my fortunate vantage point amidst the mosh, the only possible downside of Fat Dog’s set was that each song was almost too exhaustingly compelling. Seven-minute opus King of the Slugs was a marathon of industrial beats, particularly in its propulsive second half where the tempo was ruthlessly dialled up a notch. Wither similarly took off like a rocket, Jacqui Wheeler’s restless bass riff and Love’s oddball intonations of “You better wither, baby, before you die” whipping up a frenzy in the crowd. The bedlam was so irresistible that, in one exquisite moment of rock ‘n’ roll, even the hired photographer camped out beside the stage in front of me felt compelled to down tools and leap into the crowd, practically landing on top of me. A few seconds later I watched her drift off to the dim recesses at the back of the venue as Morgan Wallace’s saxophone squealed like a wounded pig.

Even I Am the King, the unconvincing ballad lodged in the middle of the band’s debut album, sounded gripping in Leeds, the shimmering backing of strings given new urgency by Hutch’s rapid hit-hats ticking away like a time bomb. “I am the king… and it means nothing at all,” Love repeated again and again with rising desperation, the swirl of synths rising around him like floodwaters. Yes, Love has penned plenty of silly lyrics (his first words in his debut album are “Granny’s tights on my head”), but this was a moment of genuine artistry and the evening’s only opportunity for pause and reflection.

It all came to ahead with an electrifying rendition Running, a stupendous single and one of the very best songs from any band this year. It’s a masterclass in tension and release, evident in Leeds when it triggered not one but three mosh circles (where fans clear an area of the floor then rush into the space when the chorus hits). The lengthy bridge in particular was excruciatingly tense, and by the time the eventual payoff came – a panoply of winning hooks, all neatly foreshadowed earlier in the song – bodies were circulating in the crowd as if swept up in a fast-moving lazy river.

An encore of noughties rave classic Satisfaction – a perfect riff for Wallace to attack on her saxophone – wrapped things up before the clocks struck 10 p.m.. Too early to call it a night perhaps, but I’m not sure if I had the physical fitness for much more, and the revellers around me looked like they’d been worked to exhaustion too. In the end, the crowd simply barked in unison instead of asking for one more song – if Fat Dog had indeed imbued their strange music with some sort of magic potion, it had worked a charm.