Things didn’t look good for The Burn. From outside the venue appeared to be closed, and once in you could count the number of punters on both hands. It got even worse when the support band walked on stage to the sound of dropping pins. Yet they turned out to be pretty good, a kind of country heavy, Preston School Of Industry outfit featuring a drummer who had had his drumsticks confiscated that morning by Dublin Airport on the grounds that they could be used as lethal weapons. As they worked through their set, (one song featuring the bad-ass line: “I need to smile like I’m pissing in your swimming pool”), more and more people filtered in and by the time The Burn stepped up, the place was respectable.
Blackburn five-piece The Burn play a mixture of Urban Hymns-ish rock and grimy blues, and despite a few sound problems, they boom it out over the heads of their audience. The Burn were no chancers either, their set was played skilfully and passionately with lead vocalist Mick Spencer jittering around the stage whacking away at a top-of-the-range air guitar, but it couldn’t disguise the fact that some of the tunes were more than a little dull. ‘Big Blue Sky’ and ‘Facing The Music’ both sounded like they’d belonged to some long-forgotten britrock band in a former life; yet all were received with thundering applause from the dedicated audience. However, The Burn really came alive when they tore into the blues. “The Devils Work” was a battered and bruised chunk of the delta, while standout song “Steel Kneel” dripped bitter poison, (lyrics: ‘Hey, look what you settled for / Rooms full but you’re all alone’) descending into a menacing tribal-drum, voodoo slide, swamp-rock stomper that sounded a little like The Coral. Which is no bad thing.
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A special mention must go to impressively bearded guitarist Rod Rodgerson. Perched on a stool at the side of the stage, he used his slide guitar to create weird and haunting reverberation, wails and drones, giving The Burn that much needed edge. And without the broken-down beauty of his harmonica on ‘Drunken Fool’ the song would have dropped into mediocrity.
But you kinda got the feeling that The Burn could have sat on stage for 40 minutes armpit farting and the crowd would have loved it. This is the advantages of a loyal and appreciative fan base and you can’t bag yourself one of those without some half-decent tunes. Luckily The Burn have enough dirty, pounding, back-porch blues to sink their sub-Ashcroft efforts into the swamp.
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