This was a good three act bill at the Night Owl in Finsbury Park that had been switched from what used to be a super dodgy pub in Leytonstone, the show was part of Frenchy And The Punks current UK tour to promote last years Zen Ghosts album. It was also a preview show for Andrew O'Neill's shows at this year's Edinburgh festival.
First on was Laurie Black who I last saw opening for Rachel Stamp at the Underworld in 2020 at what I believe was the last show I saw before the pandemic. Tonight's set was completely different to that one.
Laurie plays solo with a Synth, sequencer, drum machine set up and opened with the new song Content Warning that had some cool synth lines, as Laurie made sure through her cheeky lyrics that she will never be Content to be just a Content creator.
She then gave a very funny and on point intro to Majora Tom about how no women have ever been to the moon, how she wants to be the first one, also having a go at the idiotic billionaires in the space race, as the space bleep synths and minimal drum machine accented her attempts to become a 21st century Valentina Tereshkova. The theme was continued on Space Junk as her antique sequencer did it's best to add its own flavor to her minimal synthpop.
Laurie then told us all about her own and everyone else's insecurities as part of a very funny intro to Body Mod her song about the current body modification craze, as she stated she wanted everything all done at once, although to be honest she looks perfectly fine as a cyber punk goddess as it is.
She closed with the sign along fun of The Future Is Now that asked some good questions about the state of the world we are now navigating and if it really is a better place than it was.
Next on was Andrew O'Neill who used to be Guitarist in The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing and was previewing his set for the Edinburgh festival and it seems in the grand tradition of the similar sets I've seen over the years they were almost as dolled up as The Joan Collins Fan Club were a few decades ago at the first of such preview shows I attended, although Andrew lacked a stunt dog, but more than made up for it, as his routine opened with some thoughts on Paint It Black era Rolling Stones and the links he's found between them and Gabara the mutant amphibian. The anecdotes were liberally interspersed with many greetings.
As Andrews schpiel about the Gods Of War somehow mutated into talk about the man with 20 bollocks and how that might hamper him in certain situations such as singing along to the latest songs in the top ten as we were asked if we knew who any of the current acts in the singles charts were, umm No I don't.
Our current love of AI and similar fake creations was well covered in cake as the need for putting the brakes on the Propaganda kleptocracy of old Macdonald and his surrealist farm played on his mind. By way of discussing Andrew's gender fluidity he told us about his allegedly gay brother David who may or may not exist and how he had a moment in the gents with Richard Madeley's penis that was very funny indeed without need of any cottage cheese references.
As this moved onto discussion of the Dracula myth and how Andrew confuses Johnathan Miller for Johnathan Harker with inevitable consequences, before listing the things he hates most in life such as Rupert Murdoch and his evil empire as he left us with a song about what our new king dreams of at night. This was a cool set that obviously needs a few tweaks and more rehearsals but will hopefully go down well in Edinburgh.
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Then it was time for Frenchy And the Punk the New York based duo of Samantha Stephenson and Scott Helland who had a synth drum, drum machine loops, Tambourine, maracas and guitar set up as they opened with Wah that wasn't a tribute to Pete Wylie but was a fun introduction to the bands core cabaret Steam goth sound.
They then played what may have been Gear Geist either way Frenchy was hitting the synth drums with her tambourine that gave this a dark dance edge to it. Mon Souvenir stood out live as much as it did on the Zen Ghosts album with some stunning guitar from Scott that worked on top of the looped riff he set up at the start of the song.
I guess the next song was called Dark it certainly had the Dark hues the band favor with some very Siouxsie sounding vocals leading us towards a Bonfire as they summoned up Beltane.
Samantha then told us about her childhood growing up in England where we didn't do Halloween before moving to America where Halloween was in overdrive and how happy she was to Come In And Play. The Creatures style sound worked really well and was made clearer on A Siouxsie and The Banshees cover that had a cool dark groove to it.
The bands 21st century love song If The World Doesn't End First was one of the songs I easily remembered from Zen Ghosts and was a stand out live with some cool interplay as the vocals went back and forth. The Kids On The Floor or whatever it was I think the song that had to start again after Scott's first loops were a bit off, when it got going properly it had more than enough twists in the guitar to really sound cool.
They closed with Don't Fear The Rabbit that takes them into a world in which Rabbits have taken over, this song could be descended from Kevin Coyne's Rabbits more than Bo Hannson's Watership Down.
Soon enough they were back for an encore and treated us to a song I usually only hear on New Years Eve on one side or the other of Midnight as they sang the Mary Hopkins classic Those Were The Days that got everyone singing along with them, as usual I still have the song stuck in my head, even if I can hear The Urban Voodoo Machines take on it as much as Frenchy And The Punks version it was a good way to make sure we left the show smiling.
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