Dinosaur Pile Up - Liverpool Music Week

This is just a little heartbreaking.

Dinosaur Pile Up seem to be suffering from one-night-stand-syndrome - at the start of this year they played the Liverpool Korova to a packed and adoring audience, we were all over them! We high-fived them! We invaded their stage! We declared our (somewhat tipsy) undying love for them! And now tonight, we’re sparse, po-faced and unresponsive, and the room is so cold that you can actually see your own breath.

Maybe this is what happens when you put out a performance as good as that - Liverpool (the fickle devil) has experienced it once, and has already moved on to someone else (namely The Grammatics who I discover a little while later playing to a packed out Bumper, just up the road). Ouch.

‘So...this is nice, isn’t it?’ singer Matt beams awkwardly at the 20 or so faces gawping back at him, ‘Intimate....’.

It’s certainly one way of describing it.

Regardless, tonights set is still enough to inspire warm, fluttering feelings of love for the Leeds based 3 piece, even if it is one of the most painfully under-attended gigs recently witnessed, not to mention quiet. Was some kind of a law passed recently which means bands can’t play louder than a certain volume on a sunday night? Some kind of Brown-esque, idiotic law?! I wanted DPU to be loud enough to peel the flesh from my bones, should they be in that kind of a mood, but instead the sound levels barely managed to tickle my toes.

That’s not to say that DPU don’t perform their little socks off. ‘Traynor’ and ‘My Rock’N’Roll’ in particular are thunderous examples of why everyone not in attendance at that gig were absolute bloody fools - with thrashing, fuzzy guitars and bolting, cacophonous vocals splitting at the core of what are some incredibly catchy and indelibly well written pop songs distorted to their darkest corner.

When songs end the silence is mortifying, however. The audience is barely even breathing (I turn around at one point to discover one bloke watching from a crumpled, apathetic heap on the floor). It wouldn’t matter if DPU resurrected Kurt Cobain from the dead and brought him up on stage with them, the audience would still barely bat an eyelash.

Oh well.

‘To think, we were in Barcelona this morning!’ laughs Matt, clearly processing the turn of events that can make your day begin in one of the most beautiful cities in the World and end in a dark and cold little theatre in Liverpool (which is a little like Barcelona, just without the beauty).

It shouldn’t matter that there’s hardly anyone here but it does. The lack of atmosphere is distracting and more than a little disconcerting - with the sort of music DPU play, you want to be able to thrash about a little bit with your fellow man, but with this many people it’d be a bit like orchestrating an orgy with yourself.

A surprisingly good cover of ‘Please, Please, me’ (surprising because Beatles cover songs are generally hard to do well or without turning the stomach) is a bit of out the blue brilliance, even if it does remind me of the days when bands used to cover classic songs for teen movies.

‘Melanin’ and ‘Opposites Attract’ get a few people going - one guy starts slapping his thigh! Another attempts the beginning of what might be a head-bang! Christ! Weezer-esque and lovely (yes - lovely; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with liking Weezer, regardless of what fashion might be dictating to the contrary right now) in a rust-bloody, wire-howling kind of a way. Kind of like a flirtation that comes with a fist.

And fuck me gently with a hi-hat are those drums good. Whatever element of twee DPU run the danger of falling into during anyone of their songs, the drums savagely deplete. Seriously, seriously brutal.

‘Bye Liverpool!’ they wave bravely, before swiftly turning their amps off and escaping the stage.

I approach them afterwards and somehow an apology comes out of my mouth on behalf of Liverpool - I sound like a twat.

‘Aw, it’s okay you know’ they reassure me ‘we’re used to it! And plus it was just a nice chilled gig...’

So you’ve not put off ever playing Liverpool again?

‘No, no, no - you’ll have to come back and see us though’.

Did you hear that Liverpool? They might return! And if you’re very, very good they might even let you invade their stage again. High fives all round, then.