By Dan O’Farrell.
A Monday night in Southampton might not be the most inspiringly rock ‘n’ roll stop on any Australian band’s tour itinerary, but Adelaide’s Coldwave made the stage their own last night (3/3/25) with a jaw-dropping display of musical intensity that left the gathered music-obsessives feeling both challenged and uplifted.
It’s a testament to Southampton’s promoters – Alice Frith and Tom Dyer, recently heard on BBC6 discussing the adventures of Psych Ltd and the emergence of Papillion as a new venue for live-music, as well as the nationally renowned Ricky Bates at The Joiners – that our city ‘boxes well above its weight’ in terms of attracting new and exciting bands to its stages. Of course, this will only hold true as long as the good people of Southampton resist the temptations of Netflix and get out to see these bands play… As always in the discussions about small local venues, the phrase ‘use them or lose them’ is depressingly common.
So I worried slightly for Coldwave as I entered Heartbreakers tonight. It’s a long way to come to play to a few enthusiasts and the support bands. I needn’t have felt anxious: it was a fine night, with enough warm bodies in the room to make the applause loud and uplifting, and a band that could give an equally committed show to an audience of two people or a thousand. Coldwave won over enough new fans tonight to ensure that their next visit will be to a far bigger crowd.
The six-piece band are built round an amazing drummer – Jordan Maywald – who gives a muscular energy to everything they do. Frequently, Coldwave songs seem to dissolve into a dissonant chaos – guitars spiralling off into jet-engine territory, the trumpet skronking into a free-jazz miasma – and it’s the drums that keep pumping, often the last instrument left standing. Lara Petzel’s bass helps this anchorage, but she knows when to back-out, too. It’s messy precision: glorious in its moment.
Coldwave’s songs are all minor-key and murky. They play the marvellous ‘The Ants’ and ‘Italia 06’ from recent releases, and a bunch of songs with which I’m yet to become acquainted. The all hit home. All Coldwave songs dispense with verse-chorus structures and instead concentrate on cinematic dynamics and intense repetition. There’s a touch of early Mercury Rev in their sound, and a flavour of the more ‘difficult’ moments in the Fontaines DC songbook. Singer Harry Evans has a touch of the Grian Chatten’s about him, too – a quiet intensity that boils his initially polite-seeming poetry over into screaming tirades as the music builds.
As a survivor of the early -mid ‘80s indie wars, it still surprises me how much most cutting-edge recent bands owe to the most atonal post-punk moments of The Fall or the early experiments of The Blue Aeroplanes. Everyone’s shouting free-verse non-sequiturs over two-chord drones these days. Maybe it’s the only sensible response to 2025? I need a time-machine to go back and tell my younger self to buy shares in Mark E Smith.
I’ve mentioned the reference points that spring to mind, but – on tonight’s form – Coldwave are much more than the sum of their influences. Their defining difference comes in the form of Sean MacGowan’s trumpet-playing. If that name seems familiar to Southampton music-fans, then it should. Sean-the-psychedelic-trumpet-player-from-Adelaide turns out to be cousins with our city’s own Sean MacGowan – bard of the Millbrook Road, beaming in the audience in support of his long-lost flesh and blood. The trumpet adds a whole other element to Coldwave’s sound – providing the mournful melody line in the slow-builds, then erupting into free-jazz explosions when the crescendos finally arrive. It’s a heady mix.
Earlier in the evening, enjoyable support came from Brighton’s Trapps – well-formed ’78 punk with Sham 69 attitude and great cheekbones – and Southampton’s own Sugar Bang – an entertaining mix of blues-inspired, 80’s flavoured rock with some sweet harmonies.
So, comrades, the message is clear. If in doubt, check it out. You don’t need to be paying hundreds of pounds to watch entitled superstars swan around in stadiums, the stage so far away that you can only see what’s happening if you gawp at the video-screens: invest a tenner (or less) and get down to Heartbreakers, The Joiners, The Railway etc, and catch the globe’s most cutting-edge bands whilst you can. Use them or lose them.
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