By Jase Walker
How spoiled I am to have a show like Hot Mulligan hit Amsterdam on a Saturday night with a band like Delta Sleep in tow? How unbelievably fortunate it is to have such a fantastic Saturday evening of damn fun music more or less right in my backyard with a huge chunk of friends of mine all here for the same reason. How very, very fortunate. Not that I’ve been literally looking at my calendar several times over the past few months and wondering how tonight is going to play out or anything. I should also mention tonight’s show has local lads Bony Macaroni on there too in support, so, as always, I’m keen to check a new band out!
Bony Macaroni get themselves started with Ke$ha’s ‘Die Young’ by using it as a key lead in for their opening song, works pretty well too actually!
Considering how pop punk the first song was I was somewhat expecting it to continue as such but they’ve actually got a fairly decent variety of sounds that cross boundaries to grungey and alt rock and echoing a bit of Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana at times. There’s a solid streak of the similar emo vibes that their headliner has throughout their set though.
These guys could have easily said they’re from Bumfuck Nowhere in the ÜS rather than Dutch I would have believed them. I’m genuinely caught by surprise by this as I’ve never heard them before but this is damn good fun and super upbeat music which has got me fully engrossed.
This is a band that I genuinely think has that spark that will see them going far and I’ll be seeing them doing crowds this size as headliner before long. It’s catchy as fuck and super easy to get stuck into and I can appreciate why there’s already a storm of a pit in the middle of the crowd as an opener to a band like Hot Mulligan. A build up to a wall of death sees the first pit jousting I’ve seen in quite a while and several pints end up ejected into the air in the process.
I think these guys can say their opener set was a roaring success to say the least.
Delta Sleep time and I am unreasonably excited to see these again, I fucking love them so much. Maybe not as much as the guy with the “I’m just here for Delta Sleep” shirt on that I’ve spotted but I’m not far off.
A funny moment at the start with a solo guitar focused moment that was quite out of tune but some quick action sorts it out before moving on with the rest of the song, whoops. As it turns out following the end of it, it was a fully snapped string so one of the techs quickly jumps on with a new guitar to keep things moving.
Obviously they’re never going to skip ‘Lake Sprinkle Sprankle’ as their token old song on a set list but I am somewhat just holding out for more Spring Island songs. Also as expected being opening for a headliner, you can sometimes experiment a bit and we’re getting a treat of a brand new and somewhat unfinished song which for me as a massive fan is a rare treat.
We get through a string of Spring Island songs so close off the set in the form of ‘Planet Fantastic’, ‘Old Soul’ and finally ‘The Detail’ to finish things off. Of course I spend the entirety of that time screaming the words out because they should know they’ve got at least one big fan in the crowd!
And to close things off, the headliner for the evening, Hot Mulligan. It’s no secret that I’ve been waiting for this show since the hint about it at the Pierce The Veil show last year. It’s quite a privilege to see this sort of show in the smaller room at Melkweg due to the close proximity to the band.
We’ve barely even started and the vibe is already totally off the charts with crowd surfers getting up on stage and diving off right from the start of the show. The atmosphere at the show is electric and filled with pure joy of having a great time on a Saturday night with a fantastic band like Hot Mulligan providing the soundtrack. Their singer is a good sport as some of the people who end up on stage sometimes have doubts about diving back in and he guides them a bit back onto a welcoming sea of hands to surf back into the action, clearly far from their first rodeo. I see a lot of shows but seeing this much of a constant stream of crowd surfers that continually get to the stage, jump off and surf back around again is quite rare overall.
Hot Mulligan themselves are barely having to do much other than just smash out song after song of incredible energy and the crowd is just going apeshit without any provocation. The singer remarks on it a couple of times that implies even he’s completely astonished at how mental the room is.
One guy crowd surfs to the front just at the end of the song and dives off immediately and catches the singer’s attention and he demands he come right back “because I’m gonna make it weird now!” and makes him wait until the start of the next song, poor guy looked mortified! One fella stood up there a bit too long and seemingly didn’t get the hint until the stage hand gave him a bit of physical encouragement to get the fuck off the stage. I’m genuinely more distracted by the weird behaviour from the crowd than I am paying attention to the band. I cannot fathom how they handle this sort of behaviour but the singer seems to be taking it in a good stride.
To say that Hot Mulligan popped off in Melkweg this Saturday night would be a gross understatement, the entire crowd wanted a piece of the action and I even saw people coming down from the balcony to get stuck into the action. That along with a crazy big setlist with the crowd screaming the words back at the back from start to finish has left an incredible impact on me about where the bar is for a fantastic live show. I think it’s unlikely that I’ll ever see Hot Mulligan playing a venue of this size again when they crush it like this and will no doubt be selling out a big jump the next time they return.
A show like this sets a new standard for live shows, the rest of 2026 has its work cut out for it to beat this.
- The tour continues:
- © Über Röck 2026.