A former colleague living in the Calder Valley town of Todmorden once bemoaned ‘Everywhere’s an hour from Tod’. Roughly halfway between Leeds and Manchester, that part of the world really does feel like the back end of nowhere, but in a good way. The Pennine bosom isolation means a number of local bands, including The Goa Express, have absorbed influences from the nearby city lights whilst exploiting their relative remoteness to retain their own individuality.
Like many peers, this tight-knit quintet are trying to make up for lost time. Prior to covid, the band were going places with the right DJs in the right places singing their praises. Now that life’s giant Wuhan pause button is retreating into the distance, tonight’s packed basement venue, a stone’s throw from the University of Leeds provides a perfectly intimate setting for the lads to continue reconnecting with their hardcore fans and more besides.
Emerging to the fading outro of ‘Ça Plane Pour Moi’ with everyone in the know singing back in the right places, our headliners deliver 30-odd frenetic minutes of quintessential Northern English indie. Don’t let that put you off though, despite borrowing so completely from this considerably overworked musical seam, The Goa Express manage to raise themselves above the parapet in a way I’ve not experienced since first hearing Milltown Brothers’ Slinky.
Perhaps it’s the absence of trying too hard, but the warmly received ‘Everybody in the UK’, their recent single, first premiered on 6music by Steve Lamacq, perfectly encapsulates the superior quality that may set Goa Express apart. Is it James Clarke’s youthfully exuberant yet deceptively sophisticated songwriting, or tonight’s tight yet loose delivery from him and his bandmates including brother Joe on keys, Joey Stein on guitars, Naham Muzaffar on bass and Sam Launder on drums? To be honest, I stopped trying to figure it out, instead getting swept away in the moment with everyone else, clear in the knowledge that what I was watching could also go down a storm in front of a festival crowd of thousands as well as tonight’s sweaty throng of a few dozen.
The show’s undisputed highlight is the joyously innocent ode to young love and youthful exuberance ‘Second Time’. With its jangly intro, it sounds like a thousand other songs of the same ilk yet simultaneously manages to be miles better than every single one of them. What’s really clever here is the line “Everything looks better when you’re high”, a possible reference to drugs, love, both or neither. Whatever it is, Ted Hughes would certainly approve of the mystery
The blur of ‘The Day’ and closer ‘Overpass’ pull off similar feats. The breathless finale sees James swapping his trusty 12 string for harmonica with bassist Naham narrowly avoiding stepping on James’s prostrate axe whilst doing his thing. That looked like a close call.
Words by Michael Price
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