Babes in Toyland, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London

As far as big deals go, this week measures up pretty high on the scale for Babes in Toyland. After years of ignoring phone calls and trying to sue each other for rights to the band name, Kat Bjelland, Lori Barbero and Maureen Herman are back together playing live shows for the first time in 18 years. For original fans, that’s a hell of a long time to wait for another show. For newcomer Babes fanatics, their reunion is an unlikely bucket-list dream come true.

Within one beat of the frantic drum fill that kicks off ‘He’s My Thing’ - incidentally the first song that Babes in Toyland played together again after all those years apart - Shepherd’s Bush is in a frenzy. Anybody with poor planning skills and still holding a pint has it promptly thrown over their own face by the surging room. People are pelting Tampax at each other in the moshpit, and grabbing each other’s shoulders to form one swirling, jumping force. While Kathleen Hanna is otherwise occupied playing with The Julie Ruin on the other side of London, the crowd are yelling “girls to the front!” on her behalf, and shoving people aside accordingly.

In the run up to these shows, Kat Bjelland told DIY, “I feel like we’re better than we were before, for some reason, we’re a little bit more solid.” She’s right - and solid, unstoppable physicality is what makes Babes in Toyland’s live show hit like a winding gut-punch. It’s certainly helped immensely by Lori Barbero and Maureen Herman’s tetris-locked rhythm section, which is solid as a ten-metre thick bunker wall. Without such unflappable foundations, Babes in Toyland could sound directionless, messy and blurry, but despite the relentless chaos, they’re still crisp. With such an unmovable base to return to, Kat Bjelland has all the room she could ever need to completely unleash in a rally of screams and snarls.

Much of Babes in Toyland’s music on record is angry and malevolent. ‘Swamp Pussy’ makes the snarled demand “cease to exist,” while ‘Bruise Violet‘ - which is, ahem, definitely not about Courtney Love in the slightest - spits out the charming line “you fucking bitch well, I hope your insides rot.” Live, all that caged-in rage seems to break out of its flimsy glass casing and fling itself across the room, and, somewhere along the way, the mood shifts. As the crowd punches thin air and screams along to ‘Handsome Gretel,’ all that angst morphs into something weirdly, constructive, and positive. 18 years might be a fairly drawn-out hiatus, but judging by tonight, Babes never really left at all.