When the Lovely Eggs’ married duo of Holly Ross and David Blackwell took to the stage at the recently rebranded XOYO in Birmingham on Bank Holiday Monday, they looked like they should be playing for two completely separate bands. She was looking glam, dressed like a guitar wielding Rόisín Murphy, with a blonde bob and orange and black tiger print dress, while he slid behind his drum kit in a washed-out tour t-shirt and a Johnny Ramone haircut.
Once they burst into the speedy, buzz saw guitar powered “Death Grip Kids”, however, any ideas of a musical mismatch were immediately dispelled. The chanted refrain of “We’re gonna die of boredom”, heavily flavoured with Lancashire vowels, was no reflection of what was taking place on stage though – especially once the early feedback issues were corrected – as David battered his drum kit into submission and Holly summoned some serious rock’n’roll from her six-string guitar. From there it was on to the howling “Witchcraft”, which even had a few of the BBC Radio 6 Dad-heavy crowd bouncing around as Holly encouraged them further by throwing herself around the stage, banging her head furiously and pulling the odd exaggerated guitar hero shape.
Dropping the tempo somewhat for the beautiful, anthemic indie pop of “Nothing / Everything”, more bodies picked up on the groove and started moving around, before the Lovely Eggs again injected some serious adrenaline with the driving “Memory Man”. As the spacey drone of “I am Gaia” came to an end, Holly announced “we don’t feel any obligation to entertain you”, while doing precisely that and motoring into the dynamic power pop of “My Mood Wave”.
“Fuck It” was appropriately introduced as being “for anyone going through shit at the moment” and encouraged plenty of crowd participation by singing along with the chorus. However, this promptly sent Holly off to find the toilet, for an unplanned couple of minutes, while David extolled the joys of DIY from behind his kit. This, in turn, had a goodly chunk of the crowd singing an impromptu laugh-along chorus of “Chuck It” in response to a question about what to do with piles of “useful” but as-yet unused scrap metal.
The final strait of Birmingham’s raucous Lovely Eggs’ Bank Holiday hit the asphalt with spinning wheels and a snarky Buzzcocks-like “Don’t Look at Me (I Don’t Like It)”, which had Holly singing “look at the fucking state of it all”, and the Ramones-worshipping “I Don’t Fucking Know What I’m Gunna Do”, which both all but left skid marks on the XOYO’s stage. After that, things wound down comparatively with a brace of the reverb-heavy glam rock stomp of “Dickhead” and the psychedelic indie freak out of “Meeting Friends at Night” before the house lights came on again.
No encore, no extended bowing to the audience. Just unplugging the instruments and getting off the stage.
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