160. The Pineapple Thief
Islington Assembly Halls
11 February 2017
There’s something gloriously un-rock’n’roll about Islington Assembly Hall. It’s a municipal building. Sure, there are chandeliers, but it also smells faintly of a thousand town council meetings. However, for one night in February, it played host to The Pineapple Thief, the band that still sounds more like a minor character from a Wes Anderson film.
However, once you get past the fruity moniker, what you get is a band who take all the clever bits of progressive rock, strip out the pretension, and injects them with actual emotion. It’s prog, yes, but it’s sad prog, introspective prog, prog for people who stare mournfully out of train windows and wonder if the universe is just a giant metaphor.
They took the stage to polite applause and impolite lighting. And then the first song started, and all politeness vanished. It was lush and cinematic. Songs that build like slow-burning arguments, time signatures that shift like tectonic plates courtesy of the human octopus that is Gavin Harrison, fresh off touring with King Crimson.
Bruce Soord, the band’s quietly magnetic frontman, stands centre stage, guitar slung low, voice soft and keening. Songs like “In Exile” and “No Man’s Land” hit hardest, equal parts beauty and minor key dread.
For all its technical complexity, the gig never felt like homework. There was melody. Warmth. Even the odd joke from Soord, delivered in that delightfully “sorry I’m in a band” tone that prog singers have perfected since 1971. For the encore, “Snowdrop” we all filled in for the clapping parts on the album track and the Hall rose up in a joyous communion in an act that felt decidedly un-prog-like, but nonetheless we all surrendered to as if we were at a Katy Perry concert.
By the end of the night, and a standing ovation later, Islington Assembly Hall had been transformed. No longer a venue that looks like it hosts award ceremonies for recycling. It had become a cathedral where grown men teared up during a seven-minute song about regret, then bought a T-shirt and pretended it was just hay fever.