The Vines & You Am I at Heineken Green Energy

As if ’72-era Pete Townshend had been quadrasected, and earthworm-like the severed limbs had grown into full humans, You Am I are the duckwalking Todd Rundgren songbook played by students of the AC/DC school of guitar. Thus do we get a disembodied scissors kick here, a severed windmill power chord there, Steve Marriot’s hair on Keef’s shrugging shoulders, Joe Perry’s pretty face on Frampton’s body and ’70s power cock-rock essence stage centre, heralding swaggering ass-shaking manifestations of awesome baseness and staggering, ahem, grooviness.

Bye bye, You Am I – no doubt we will see you again round these parts. And now, it’s headline time…
The Vines live up to several of their reputations. Maybe it’s Craig Nichol’s need to frazzle the John Peel-alike guitar Tech by attempting to auto-destruct two guitars, a mike stand and half the drum kit, but the rest of the band seem to have a layer of egg-shell crinkling just beneath their toes. Slower strung-out tunes like ‘Mary Jane’ and ‘Autumn Shade’ are tense, nervous, headfucks, with all the giddy desire and revulsion of car crash rubbernecking.

There’s a visceral thrill to the netless trapeze act of it all. On ‘Ain’t No Room’ and a malevolently handsome ‘Get Free’, the band glow with angry relief, hurling the songs at the spectators to the best responses of the night.
Don’t the Rules of Rock state that you must have the crowd’s backing to do an encore? Four guys to my left are the only ones I hear who are eager to prolong the high-wire act. Back The Vines come nonetheless, sulkier, a little more careless, but also more unsettlingly bewitching.

Then, it’s Goodnight Olympia-on-steroids aka Ambassador Theatre. Goodnight 1973. Goodnight splendid neurotics.