Straight To The Point: The Needles

Despite on-stage boasts of having “lots of pounds” in return for audience enthusiasm, The Needles frantically scrounge each other’s pockets for money for beer and baccy.  Clearly, it’s the least they need to prepare themselves for an interview.  A tangled fog of abstract theories and musings ensues: shunning the dull conventions of self-promoting question and answer sessions, The Needles take a much more, well, interesting approach. Dave Dixon (vocals) elaborates on Paul Curtis’s (bass) band-as-“living theatre” concept: “maybe you are writing a play about us and we don’t exist.  You’re writing a play, you’ve invented us, I don’t know why, it’s a cool idea, it might go well.  I’d probably snap out of it and think the idea was shit and start again.”

Whatever the charming yet baffling bespectacled Scot is on about, the idea of The Needles is absolutely, categorically, not shit.   Their performance tonight spectacularly showcases everything that’s great about this band: each member appears to be in a pop-fuelled joust of the deranged.  Tambourines are thrashed to within inches of their jangly little lives, guitars brandished with sparkle-eyed evil intent, and banter delivered sharper and more piercing than their collective namesake.  There are few bands that can unfold cynical London arms and induce foot-tapping and hip wiggling as The Needles can.  Their perfect slabs of pop delight, despite apparently delivered by a bass player introduced as a “giant, fuzzy, genocidal maniac” are extraordinarily tight and head-thumpingly catchy.

 Reclining in the tumbledown shack behind the endearingly ramshackle Brixton Windmill, in all fairness, an interview is probably the last thing The Needles want to be doing.  Basking in a haze of well earned sweat, blistering is an understatement for the show they’ve just put on.  Dave explains their exceptional live dynamic:  “I don’t think its soemtrhing you can come up for a formula with.  I suppose its coz we’ve been playing for so many years together, with all this pent up hate and inconvenience, beards and whatever the hell else it is.  I want to perform as a musician, in the way that someone like Maradonna plays football.” 

Richey Wolfe (keys), having just performed an extraordinary feat of actually keeping his keyboard intact throughout the unhinged affectionate on-stage abuse it receives, has a different suggestion: “Lack of comfort I think is crucial to success. That’s what gives us the edge on stage, the fact we’ve had 9 hours on a bus and our arses are really sore.”  He has a point.  Anger release and discomfort is clearly somewhat of a bugbear for the band, as Dave explains: “you’ve got Elton John up there, poncing about on a piano; ****ing ploughing through his hits and you knows he’s got there in a luxury cruise liner or whatnot.  For us, we have had a hell of a time getting anywhere, were hopeless. Finally, were on the stage an hour late, without even the right strings on our guitars or whatever, and broken leads, and were pissed off!   We’ve got something to kick against! Maybe it’s because of that that people take it to be some sort of musical genius.  I’m very deluded.”