Liverpool’s Stone close out tour with a Sunday night show at Brudenell Social Club
Formed in Liverpool, indie rock band Stone have been making waves in the alternative rock scene since their performance at Reading and Leeds in 2021. A support slot for music’s biggest phony, Yungblud, soon followed. In early February 2022 the quartet embarked on a headline tour around the UK with sold out shows in Glasgow, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester and a homecoming show at Liverpool Art Club Theatre. The last date of the tour saw the group play a stormy Sunday night at Brudenell Social Club’s Community Room in Leeds, with support from Headshrinkers and Seb Lowe.
First on stage were Headshrinkers, a fairly standard modern rock band (though they brand themselves as post-punk, much like every other band trying to flog a record at the moment), they will likely be enjoyed by fans of bands like Sports Team. All in all, they were fairly decent, only let down by a disgustingly pretentious frontman. The same cannot be said, however, for the main support act Seb Lowe. Lowe appeared as a wannabe Billy Bragg – though, without any of the substance or talented lyricism of Bragg. His set was at best cringeworthy and at worst outright embarrassing. The world does not need another middle-class white man singing about how oppressed he is. This is not a dig at the political stance of Seb, much of his songs making very basic center-left statements, but if you want to hear anti-tory songs, there is a near endless list of better acts to listen to: The Tuts, The Menstrual Cramps, Oi Polloi, Elvis Costello, Bob Vylan, Witch Fever, Frank Turner, any band that was signed to 2 Tone Records and pretty much any punk band that is worth their weight. Put simply, Seb Lowe’s performance was uninspiring, boring and repetitive.
The headline act, Stone, gave an energetic live performance, frontman Finlay Power darting around the stage like a woodlouse under a recently removed rock. The performance itself was quite promising, the audience reacted well and matched the energy of the band – which was only dampened by the onstage presence of a guitar tech and tour manager who performed the role of concerned parents throughout the gig, dragging Finlay back in from his attempted stage dives. Stone performed a mix of their more well-known singles and a handful of new songs, including their latest single: the imaginatively titled ‘Stupid’. All these songs seemed to garner pretty good reactions from the crowd – the bulk of which seemed to be under the legal drinking age.
Overall, Stone were fine. Lead guitarist Elliot Gill, in particular, stood out as a brilliant musician with a great energy – which seemed to be the driving force for much of the band’s performance. Their main crime, in my eyes, was a lack of originality. There is nothing particularly new, unique or exciting about the group or its music. If you were to have closed your eyes at the gig, you could have easily believed you were listening to a plethora of other generic indie rock bands. To an extent, this could be forgiven – generic rock bands certainly have their place within the music scene, if only to make other bands look better – if it were not for the ridiculous levels of arrogance held within the group. Perhaps this was to be expected, with the group recently proclaiming themselves ‘The underground voice for the lost youth’ (in spite of the complete absence of evidence to support this claim). From the repeated and cringeworthy attempts from frontman Finlay to ‘open up the pit’ (incidentally, the word ‘pit’ should be viewed as being in massive inverted commas), to two men in balaclavas spraying cheap prosecco and throwing pints of beer over the crowd at the beginning of the encore for seemingly no reason other than to cause annoyance. The arrogance was palpable, the throwing of drinks felt particularly out of order given the high proportion of children in the audience (along with other people who didn’t much fancy their clothes to stink of cheap lager and prosecco). Audience members who throw pints at crowds during gigs are widely regarded as wankers, so my feeling is that bands should be held to the same standards.
With many festival slots planned for over the summer, plus another headline tour in May, Stone will no doubt encounter much more exposure and – with the support of people like NME – will probably become at least moderately successful with their generic brand of indie rock posing as punk. It is my firm belief, however, that the band will not last the test of time and will soon be forgotten along with all the other ‘flavour of the month’ generic indie bands – you don’t hear much from Vistas anymore, do you?
