Finishing a Dream: Teenage Waitress live in Southampton
Daniel Ash brought his new album to the city’s Heartbreakers bar for the first full band show since its release.
Photo: Jacob Wingate-Bishop
On a predictably drizzly, British Saturday night, a group of five men — each clad in boiler suits — stood in the cramped, backstage room of a Southampton bar. In the next room, people were beginning to spill into the dim stagelight. This isn’t some weird set-up for a Danny Ocean caper; it’s the full band launch party for Teenage Waitress’ third album, Upstairs to Finish a Dream. Frontman, songwriter and occasional solo member Daniel Ash has spent the better part of a year trying to get the album out, and Southampton is the proving ground for this selection of indie rock offerings.
Opening for Teenage Waitress was experimental pop-cum-computer-rock group Shoes On, Now!. Tongue-in-cheek odes to ‘90s video games (Waluigi, New Red Shoes) and tracks about the woes of weed killing were put to old-fashioned punk riffs and sneering, half-polished choruses. The result? A room full of friends, fans and the unconverted were loosened up for a night of the odd and introspective.
When the full band took to the stage in their spotless boiler suits, under cramped stage lighting and already-outdated seasonal decoration, the whole scene was something from a fever dream; retro-futuristic cosmic fiction in the engine rooms of some vast, colossal starship.
And it was strangely fitting, given the homage-to-sci-fi interludes performed from the band’s third album, and frequent, low-level thrums and warblings which punctuated pauses between set pieces. We were with Scotty and his pals, amidst the intergalactic boilers, dancing and tapping to strange, bedroom-pop rhythms; suddenly ‘Upstairs’ meant the captain’s bridge, and ‘a Dream’ was voyaging into the musical unknown.
There were a few notable absences from the final setlist (Popcorn, Disconnect, Maybe It’s Love — the seven-minute, two-act powerhouse that’s undoubtedly one of Waitress’ best), but the vast majority of Upstairs to Finish a Dream came to life in full, unshackled glory. Blue Tick Burning, the album’s lead single, was met with unanimous praise, while album tracks like Times Square Kiss and Best of Me let the band play at their most alchemical; fusing genres and soundscapes on the fly with wondrous results — the horror movie score in Best of Me, introspective lullaby Stupid and Strange, proto-gospel of Times Square Kiss, lounge lizard cynicism on both interludes. Live and upfront, the record’s nuances and musical branchings were given the space to breathe they deserved, while feeling more thematically concise than ever before.
A full Teenage Waitress show also let the band play some of their more electric material, like Baby Blue — the opener off Ash’s previous release, Your Cuckoo. Baby Blue derails at its halfway mark into a quasi-Gizzard jam sesh, with the band at their most animated, under the hair-obscured eye of a twitchy Captain Dan. Ash’s self-professed ‘favourite child’, TRAK! TRAK! TRAK!, was especially punchy, while standalone singles Magic and Cry, Cry, Cry made for some unexpected — and fiendishly catchy — closers.
Daniel Ash and the rest of Waitress were our experienced, musical mentors for the night, guiding us around this strange new world of indie pop and electro-rock. We, the audience, didn’t have the same, regulation-grade uniform, but we were right there with them, exploring the rhythms of this mad, dark, delicious beast’s gut. Like magic.
Onstage, Teenage Waitress are: Daniel Ash (guitar/lead vocals), Bill Carr (vocals), Drew Nicolls (Bass/vocals), Alex Brackley (guitar/vocals), Chris Hann (keyboard) and Jim Rogers (drums).