Arson / Poets Corner / The Falls @ Corporation, Sheffield

The latest EchoSound Saturday – a regular showcase of everything up-and-coming, and occasionally already here, in the Steel City – throws punk disruptors Arson into the mix.

The place is thronging with the assembled youth of Sheffield and there’s a genuine frisson of excitement around the evening’s activities.

Unfortunately, nobody seems particularly interested in treating it like a gig.

Everyone is running around and larking about like it’s the end-of-term school disco. Attention towards the stage is sporadic at best, leaving the bands to fight against a general atmosphere of cheerful antipathy.

Manchester-based The Falls enter the fray and do their damnedest to bring some sense of order.
Their slick, festival-ready indie rock is present and correct: tight, well-crafted songs fired out in an attempt to punch a hole through the prevailing chaos. Nothing seems to be getting through. Between the Lines and Overdrinking are dispatched with conviction but struggle to make an impact on a room determined to conduct several hundred other conversations simultaneously.

Charismatic frontman Harrison glares out across the wreckage in a manner probably not witnessed since a frustrated Johnny Rotten surveyed the remains of the Sex Pistols from the stage of San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom.

He pointedly thanks everyone for their support over the previous twelve months and reels off the band’s not inconsiderable achievements in streaming, gigs and actual physical record sales.

It’s lost on almost everyone.

They depart.

They deserve better.

They’ll get it on other stages.

Poets Corner are next to be thrown before the throng, but their local base means there are at least a few friends and family providing a small pocket of resistance.

Then, within seconds, their keyboard gives up.

One of the band’s principal aural weapons has apparently decided it wants no part in any of this.

Curiously, this seems to fire them up.

Poets Corner power into an astonishingly mature and vibrant set, embracing the chaos and throwing out bar-room-boogie rock ’n’ roll swirled with punk distortion and glam power beats. Close your eyes and you could be encountering the New York Dolls tottering around some Lower Manhattan dive bar.

In their keyboardist and occasional frontman Oliver, they even have their own David Johansen, pouting and flouncing across the stage as he delivers his lines. He’d be the spitting image if Johansen had favoured baggy jeans and a long-sleeved Ride T-shirt circa 1991.

By the end he’s gleefully miming the broken keyboards while his bandmates sprint towards the finish.

Ramshackle.

But ramshackle in a good way.

Just like with the Dolls, there is a difference.

And so we reach Arson.

Finally, everybody is paying attention.

Their monumental debut single has been out only days and the response awaiting them is intense. Suddenly the disparate groups coalesce towards the stage. The room changes shape.

Arson have arrived.

They pile immediately into the ubiquitous Oasis cover, Rock ’n’ Roll Star, as the crowd begins to surge. It’s a song about imagining yourself escaping your surroundings and becoming exactly what the title promises, which seems appropriate enough for four young lads standing in front of a suddenly adoring hometown crowd.

They get a pass for pressing the Oasis button this early.

“That’s probably the worst we’ve ever played that,” laughs frontman Blake.

That isn’t a good sign.

Nobody cares.

Yet.

Arson begin growing into the set as they fire through their own material. For a while you can see exactly why there’s excitement around them. They’re abrasive and young and thrillingly unconcerned with sanding off the rough edges.

Then everything begins to unravel.

“Does anyone know the lyrics to I Predict A Riot?” enquires Blake as they prepare to launch into the Kaiser Chiefs track.

“Cos I don’t.”

Several members of the audience are duly hauled onto the stage, where they conclusively demonstrate that they don’t know the lyrics either.

What follows is a tepid stumble through a song specifically engineered to make large groups of people lose their minds.

The momentum disappears.

Then comes an interminable pause while the band swap instruments around. Seconds become minutes. The atmosphere leaks out of the room while everyone waits for whatever is supposed to happen next. Eventually the bassist takes centre stage for a semi-rap excursion, stumbling around while the rest of the band occupy unfamiliar positions.

It doesn’t land.

The crowd begins drifting.

And this is the problem.

Chaos is not the enemy of punk rock. Chaos is frequently the entire point.

But good chaos requires control.

The Sex Pistols sounded as though the wheels might fall off at any second. The important bit was that, for a while at least, they usually didn’t.

Arson have temporarily misplaced the steering wheel.

Then they play Wannabe.

And suddenly everything makes sense again.

It is genuinely ferocious. A short, abrasive blast of teenage anger that hits exactly as hard as it should, Blake machine-gunning the lyrics with throat-wrenching intensity while the band pile in behind him.

No gimmicks.

No instrument swapping or stand-in front men.

No volunteers from the audience.

Just Arson being Arson.

And they are fucking good at it.

Which makes everything surrounding it considerably more frustrating.

The other songs begin collapsing in on themselves, occasionally sounding almost perfunctory as the earlier electricity dissipates.

Towards the close, the band largely withdraw and drummer Austin steps forward with an acoustic guitar.

In another set this could be fascinating: a moment of vulnerability cutting through the punk swagger and abrasive noise.

Instead, somehow, another member of the crowd clambers onto the stage and acquires a microphone.

Whether this is planned is difficult to establish. He proceeds to slur and mumble his way through whatever song they are attempting before wandering back into the audience to collect a couple of high-fives from his mates.

It adds precisely nothing.

“We need to pick the energy back up after that,” pleads Blake as the rest of Arson return.

He’s right.

Unfortunately, a sizeable proportion of the audience has already retreated to the bar to resume the evening’s youth-club activities.

The band’s self-titled anthem Arson is dispatched with abandon, briefly reminding everyone what we came for.

Then things simply peter out.

Which is infuriating.

Because Arson could be a genuine punk powerhouse.

The songs are there. The attitude is there. The anger is definitely there. Wannabe proves they already possess the ability to take all that adolescent frustration and compress it into something visceral, exciting and potentially dangerous.

But anger needs direction.

Chaos needs control.

And great bands learn surprisingly quickly what to leave out.

Arson don’t need stage theatrics yet. They don’t need to mix things up for the sake of mixing things up. They don’t need people wandering out of the audience to become temporary members of the band.

They need to trust their songs.

Plug in.

Turn up.

Play like their lives depend upon it.

Because when Arson concentrate on what they’re good at, they’re damn good.

This is a young band. Messy gigs happen. In fact, messy gigs should happen. This is where bands discover what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t.

Tonight, Arson hopefully discovered quite a lot.

There are enough sparks here to start an inferno.

First they need to learn how to control the fire.

Main Arson pic by Max Bramley Photos

The Falls are currently on tour around the UK having recently released their second physical EP. Poets Corner are growing their audience via shows around Yorkshire and beyond. Arson have just released their debut singles Wannabe and play gigs around the Sheffield region. Echosound promote regular nights in Sheffield and sometimes further afield and have an all day event coming up in November.