Live Review

Tall Ships, The Old Blue Last, London

10th October 2014

With the band free of the pedal-board shackles they once placed on themselves, the group’s more bombastic efforts to date sound positively gargantuan.

Words: Tom Connick
Photos: Nathan Barnes
14th October 2014

“We all know nostalgia is toxic and dangerous,” croons Tall Ships frontman Ric Phethean on one of the two new songs they open tonight’s set with. It’s an interesting sentiment to hear from a group who have tonight sold out The Old Blue Last without having released even a scrap of new material in over two years.

Nostalgia be damned, though, as the Tall Ships of 2014 are a very different beast. Former Tubelord man Jamie Field is now a permanent addition on keys, and another new live guitarist further bolsters the line-up, pitching the band even further from their original outings as a three-piece tangled up in loop pedals and instrument swapping. Tall Ships have never been ones to rush anything, and while their line-up expansion has been gradual, it reaps enormous benefits. With the band free of the pedal-board shackles they once placed on themselves, the group’s more bombastic efforts to date - such as ‘Gallop’ and the loop-twisting ‘T=0’ - sound positively gargantuan.

Tonight has been billed as something of a sneak peek at the future, with a set comprised almost exclusively of new material, fresh out of the studio in which they are currently holed up. However, it’s the idiosyncrasies of Tall Ships’ older work that have really brought the majority here. From the impassioned singalongs of ‘Phosphorescence’ and the twinkling ‘Ode To Ancestors’, to Ric's dedication of ‘Books’ to anyone who was “looking for some lad chanting”, these are tracks that have formed clear identities over their last five years as mainstays of Tall Ships’ set.

By comparison, the newer material seems stiffer and less developed, in need of some more tinkering. There’s less of a thoughtful complexity to the new tracks, and the band themselves seem nervous to be letting them loose, each track flying past in a whirlwind of swelling guitars and overzealous thrashing.

But that’s exactly the point of this evening, Ric openly declaring tonight’s crowd “guinea pigs” upon which to test out their new work within minutes of taking to the stage. With the notable exception of this summer’s festival mainstay ‘Meditations On Loss’ – which sounds every bit as huge in this tiny sweatbox as it did blaring out of main stage speakers - the majority of these new tracks have never been aired outside of a rehearsal room, and as a bare bones hint at the future at least show that the group’s euphoric take on indie-pop is far from lost. Debut full-length ‘Everything Touching was released after three years on the road honed each track into its purest form – by contrast, these song are fresh out the oven, Tall Ships’ typically ‘slow and steady’ work ethic unable to work its magic as of yet.

“We’ve been laying patios,” Ric later admits, stating that “real life got in the way” of their work on a second record. As the band tiptoe back to the studio, they just need to channel this this time away from “real life” into the shimmering otherworldliness that made ‘Everything Touching' such a captivating debut. Toxic though nostalgia may be, it’s keeping Tall Ships afloat right now. The potential is there; if they can return with a follow-up that fine-tunes what we’ve been treated to this evening, it’ll be their astronomic future that everyone finally turns their attention to.