By Jim Rowland
It’s great when you hear an album at the start of January that is so good, you just know it’ll be up there in your top 20 at the end of the year. Such is the case for me with the debut album from punk supergroup Wingmen. Their nine date ÜK tour reaches a climax in Brighton tonight with the whole gig broadcasting on a live stream.
In case you didn’t know Wingmen consists of Baz Warne (The Stranglers), Paul Gray (The Damned), Leigh Heggarty (Ruts DC) and Marty Love (Johnny Moped), who recorded the just-released self-titled album. For the tour they’ve now expanded to a five piece with the addition of none other than Rob Coombes from Supergrass on keyboards, keeping it in the ‘supergroup’ tradition.
With only the one album under their belts, Wingmen don’t have a huge catalogue to choose from so they play the whole album in sequence through the course of the gig, punctuating it along the way with various well-chosen covers. Album tracks like ‘The Last Cigarette’, ‘Louis Smoked The Bible’, ‘I Would If I Could’, ‘Down In the Hole’ and the excellent ‘Brits’ pack an even bigger punch than the album versions, and the contribution of Rob Coombes adds another dimension to the band’s sound.
With the album only lasting 40ish minutes, the addition of several covers into the set to bolster it to full gig length is inevitable and essential and, as mentioned, the choice of other songs to use is inspired. Perhaps the easy choice would have been to pad the set out with Stranglers and Damned songs, and aside from the Stranglers’ ‘Long Black Veil’, which sounds great, that’s certainly not the case. Bowie’s ‘Hang On To Yourself’, The Stooges’ ‘I Got A Right’, Eddie & the Hot Rods’ ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’ and T-Rex’s ‘Solid Gold Easy Action’ all sound great and get a great response. For me, the most inspired choice is a cracking version of Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’, obviously sounding very different to the original in the context of a traditional rock band line-up, but very cleverly arranged and executed. They do also throw in a very decent original in the shape of ‘Don’t Look Back’, which for whatever reason didn’t make the album.
My only gripe about this gig, which has nothing to do with the band, is the constant childish heckling that some twat in the audience found amusing, but then again if you’re going to heckle, Baz Warne probably isn’t the man to pick on, and he gives as good as he gets.
As I mentioned in the album review a couple of weeks back, Wingmen is certainly more than a lockdown-induced, throwaway side project. It’s clear from tonight’s show that each member of the band is thoroughly enjoying this collaboration, and Baz indicates that come the autumn the plan is to reconvene for another tour. Hopefully they will hit some parts of the country that they didn’t make it to this time, but for those of that that applies to, at least we had this excellently produced live stream as a consolation. Further down the line, a follow-up album would be most welcome too.
- ‘Wingmen’ is out now. You can get your copy HERE.
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