171. Tigercub
Dingwalls
6 June 2017
Camden on a Tuesday night can be a gamble. You’re either going to stumble into a scene-defining gig or a goth-folk band called something like The Apocalyptic Tea Cosies playing to their girlfriends and a man eating crisps. Tonight, we had a tip off that it might be the former: Tigercub at Dingwalls, a band that is equal parts loud, hairy and gloriously unrefined and so me and a couple of friends went to see what the fuss was all about.
Dingwalls itself is the perfect place for this sort of racket: sticky floors, low ceiling, and a sense that the whole building could crumble if someone hits a power chord too hard. Then the band took the stage, and immediately, all eyes went to the bassist. Not for his playing (which was decent), but for the moustache; a thing of such magnitude and Seventies majesty it deserved its own tour laminate. Imagine a young Burt Reynolds in Kyuss and you’re halfway there. It didn’t just sit on his face; it commanded it. You could hang a towel off the thing.
They opened with “Control” and it was a detonation; fuzzed-out riffs and drums that sounded like they were being played in a collapsing building. Frontman Jamie Hall has that mix of charm and menace that every half decent British rock singer seems to cultivate: all flailing limbs, sardonic grins, and the look of a man who’s just remembered where he hid the bodies. By song three, “Migraine,” the room had turned into a wall of bodies, heat and cheap lager fumes. The band powered through “Memory Boy” and “Burning Effigies” like they were trying to exorcise something. The moustache glistened in the stage lights: glorious, unwavering, heroic.
There’s something oddly noble about Tigercub’s sound: a blend of grunge filth and British self-deprecation. They’ve clearly studied the loud-quiet-LOUD handbook but scribbled gags in the margins. Their big closer is a track called “By Design”, that starts like a smirk and ends like an apocalypse. Jamie throws himself into the crowd, the bassist’s moustache catches the last of the light like a dying star.
When it’s over, we’re a bit sweaty, half-deaf, and weirdly uplifted. Outside, Camden hums on as if nothing happened. But we have seen a band that might achieve something, and we’ve seen a moustache that might get its own TV franchise.