‘A summer storm brewing’: Ketamine Kow at The Adelphi - gig review

SUPPORT: Adam from Ketamine Kow gets a helping hand from a packed Adelphi crowd

The Crow’s Nest, a music column by Russ Litten

Gig review - Ketamine Kow, Candid Faces, Bedsit - The Adelphi

On Wednesday June 29th 2022, I slipped out of a peaceful sleepy summertime evening on De Grey Street into a frenzied hothouse of energy and caught a glimpse of what might well be the future.

I’d come to the Adelphi to see the hotly-tipped Ketamine Kow, an outfit of whom I knew little except that they were a teenage punk band who practised at college. It was still early doors, but the headline band already seemed to be on stage.

The place was packed, gasping hot and sweaty, a palpable air of excitement bouncing off the walls. The dance floor was a swaying, lurching, writhing, acrobatic mass of flailing arms and legs. So was this Ketamine Kow? Wow. It was like some mad scene you’d stumble across in the Green Field at Glastonbury at 2am. I didn’t realise they were this popular, that they provoked so much hysteria. No, this is the first band on, I am told. This is Bedsit.

‘BRUTAL, BEAUTIFUL, AND MESMERISING’: Ketamine Kow

Bedsit are a tight and ferocious blast of noise blessed with the pneumatic pile-driving passion of Therapy? and the melodic songwriting nous of the 90s American grunge scene. It’s a glorious, melancholic, bruised black-and-blue kind of feel. They are also fond of the odd quasi-prog rock / sludge metal interlude, which gives the broiling soup of teenagers on the dance floor time to draw a collective breath before launching themselves back into the tumultuous fray. This is not an experience for the faint-hearted. I stand off to one side, soft drink clutched close to my chest, and watch the mayhem ensue.

The next band up, Candid Faces remind me of CBGB’s New York City 1978, not least because one of them has the look of Jerry Harrison from The Modern Lovers. Candid Faces play the kind of angular jagged guitar noise once practised by Wire and Pere Ubu. In addition to these hints of art-school chicanery, Candid Faces have also got a proper pop groove to them, an infectious snarl of fun.

Current tune YEOWCH is a breathless guitar stomp about “getting into a fight with some girl with long nails that stung like hell” and the cops arriving on the scene and everyone scattering. “It was only meant to be a bit of fun”, tuts singer Liz. YEOWCH is a fabulous bit of solid gold trash-pop. It could be the theme tune to a Hanna Barbara cartoon, it’s that good. They also do a killer version of Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer. Candid Faces don’t just have impeccable taste, they have the kind of restless vision necessary to turn their influences into something fresh and interesting. They close their set with the crowd chanting their name, football crowd-style.

‘A BATTERING RAM OF NOISE’: Ketamine Kow

Ketamine Kow take to the stage and the atmosphere - already cranked up to eleven - goes into complete overdrive. Singer Adam has the look of a man utterly transfixed by the sight of something astonishing in the near distance. He bobs and crouches and weaves about while his band mates collide around him, thrashing out a belligerent battering ram of noise over which he roars, screams, stamps, snarls and screams like a petulant toddler stoked up on energy drinks and vodka.

There are tunes, too - jagged, broken glass melodies dragged up from the gut. It’s brutal and beautiful and quite mesmerising. They sound like about twenty different bands at once and nothing else on earth. I can hear Pixies, The Fall, The Sex Pistols, Fugazi, loads of American hardcore, bubblegum pop, bits of English psychedelic whimsy, even a few blasts of what sounds, bizarrely, like free-form jazz metal.

Ketamine Kow are a filthy blast of righteous raging nature, a summer storm brewing. They’re the most interesting new thing I’ve seen for ages. Is it punk rock? Post-punk? Post-postpunk? Whatever it is, it’s violent and vital and exists purely in the moment.

‘AN INFECTIOUS SNARL OF FUN’: Candid Faces. Top, left to right, Joe and Max; bottom, left to right, Taro, Liz, and Ben

Ketamine Kow have that sense of barely held together chaos that is borne of the righteous reckless fuel of teenage kicks, but they are also well drilled, well practised, and have honed their noise with care and attention. One number involves Adam periodically stopping the band, seemingly at random and handing the microphone into the audience. What results is a kind of communal spoken word sound-noise experiment. That shouldn’t work but totally does. Just when you think it’s all becoming a bit of a blurred mess, it snaps back into ferocious focus and they’re off again, a runaway truck ablaze, hurtling down a wind tunnel.

Community is at the core of what this scene seems to be about. These bands obviously care very much about the people who come to see them. At one point, Ketamine Kow stop playing and insist the house lights are turned up so everyone can help look for a missing hearing aid. A hundred-odd sweat-drenched teenagers in melting make-up on their hands and knees. It was surreal and touching - a punk rock riot paused for a few minutes so that they could help their pal.

But rest assured, such sentiments are balanced out by a healthy dose of bile and invective. The debut single, Hometown Blues, is a hacked up ball of hacked-off phlegm, Adam barking out the mantra “a fight, a war, a war, a fight ,the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t bright … Conservative or Labour, it’s just a piece of paper, …”.

‘NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED’: Bedsit. From left to right, George Garnett, Ciaran Hall, Tom Hockney, and Casey Stead

Sexual identity and gender politics is dealt with in You Call Your Girlfriend Babe, I Call My Girlfriend Boyfriend. Other songs have more random, seemingly abstract targets - the demise of the comb-over to the futility of shopping for shoes. Wherever they turn their attention, Ketamine Kow raise their chosen subject matter with the same scorched-earth gaze. And the crowd show no sign of stopping either.

By the time they get to their set climax, Thatcher, Thatcher, The F****** Milk Snatcher, Adam is being passed around the room like a trophy and most of the audience are on the stage. When the lights go up, the room looks like like an explosion in a sauna. The floor is a swimming pool of beer, sweat and discarded T-shirts. There’s a stack of skateboards and rucksacks piled up at the back. Scores of scores of bare-chested people are wandering around like stunned extras in a Vietnam war movie.

I push my way through the steam and out into the cool summer evening, wend my way home, my head still ringing and my face still grinning. Something happened on Wednesday 29th July at The Adelphi. It really did seem like a gathering of the youthful tribes, some kind of kinetic spark, the start of some bright new positive age for the independent rock music scene in Hull. A Pandora’s box has been opened, and a whole new host of bold and beautiful genies have escaped. Watch them weave their grubby magic.