Frankie And The Witch Fingers, Shacklewell Arms, London, 30th May 2025 – There’s a whole lot of things in the Frankie cocktail, it is ultimately a creation all of their own though, that locked-on new wave bite of theirs, that urgent fizz that follows the anticipation, that urgent fizz that flows so well when they’re live and right there in front of you, that immediacy. That need to race to the end with their new wave space-flavoured garage rock that does come, even if they do sound like a cocktail laced with many ingredients, that does come dosed with something extra all of their own. I love being in dark rooms with this band! Last time we caught them in London it was super-stupid hot, the hottest night of the year in more ways than one, last time was Midsummer over in Hackney’s Oslo, people were talking about that one for weeks after, for months after, people were talking about it at the end of the year in terms of being one of the very best gigs of that rather rewarding musical year, people were expressing regret about not going that night, people who weren’t there were claiming they had been there, that was one hot night! So what do they do this time? They cram it all into a smaller venue, into a darker room that was even hotter then last time, a room that you can hardly get into and once you do, you can’t move, grab your spot and hold your ground.
The Shacklewell is bursting at the seams tonight, there’s lines outside and once you’re in the back room venue bit you haven’t a hope in hell of slipping out to grab a cold beer mid set! Did it get too hot for the band? Was it, in true UFO style, too hot to handle? Did you have to be there to really feel it, all the dodgy phone-filmed footage in the world isn’t going to convey the electricity this band transmit around a room and rather like looking at images of paintings on-line, it just doesn’t work. You really had to be there getting your futurephobic toes stomped on, you had to be there dancing while keeping an eye out for a crowd surfer coming from the left or a beer coming from the right, you had to be there taking a punch in the kidneys ’cause the crowd serge took you backwards, not that it was a bad crowd – you always get one arsehole (who doesn’t have the balls to stick around) – pretty much everyone here is surfing the buzz of it all, there’s shit-eating grins being shared all around as the whole room moves as one with it, as the whole room takes a gulp of that locked-on cocktail they’re liberally dishing out. Man, I love being in dark rooms with this band!
And what is in that cocktail that Frankie and The Witch Fingers serve up so damn well? Well the defiantly spiky Devo bits stand out, those bits of groove they get into that could only really come from their part of of the world, if we want to get obscure about it then those who know are in dark corners whispering of names like Poisoned Electrick Head, suggesting there maybe just a hint of that early Cardiacs electricity in there, or is it more Ring or maybe the more punky Ring/Cardiacs hybrid that was (and still is in some form or other) Panixphere sparing with bits of American hard rock and cheap tricks getting kissed. There’s no Stooges cover to blow the place completely away like there was last time, did it get to hot or did they just run out of time? It did come to a slightly strange end and no declaring anyone want to be be anyone’s dog tonight! C’mon!
Can’t complain about the end, they played a full set, they were relentlessly good, they were perpetual, it was stupidly hot, there was no air to feed their electric eye and the new material from the new album that we haven’t heard yet – save for the tracks that have been let loose upfront – sounded as good as the tunes we already knew. That way they do keep it relentlessly locked-on, the economy of it all, the big riff that kicks of Empire before the dirty version of the same riff kicks back at it and off they go again. The way it keeps on going where it needs to, the way it gets all wirey when it needs to, that shuffle that you want to know, the way they repeat things so positively, they way they keep coming back for more, the way that they sometimes sound like a West Coast Hard Rock Band who probably know where Space Station Number Five might be, the way they shiftstick while that electric eye disrupts and that brain telephone they keep calling you on song after song, oh I do like this band!
They did it again, Frankie and The Witch Fingers came back to London and they did it again. They’re on it again, you really had to be their in the room, the footage doesn’t tell you, you had to be there tasting it, grabbing big lumps of it, feeling the mass movement, the anticipatory jolt of it all, their system that constantly finds a way to connect. The Witch Fingers came back to London on another hot hot night and did it all again, next time they’re really gonna need a bigger boat, this old building couldn’t take that again… I love being in dark rooms with this band! (sw)
Previous Frankie coverage on these pages
as always do click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the small slide show..
THE ORGAN 
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