Canned Pineapple / Orchidelia: Forty people and a tin of beans

You wait months for an Orchidelia gig and then two come along in the space of a week.

Following their triumphant headline show at Yellow Arch, it’s back to the indie circuit, supporting their contemporaries, winning over unfamiliar faces and continuing the slow business of building an audience.

Nobody ever said rock ’n’ roll wasn’t hard work.

It’s interesting watching a band in this position. Playing a truncated set to a borrowed audience, squeezing their musical ambitions into the allotted time and hoping that a few more people leave the room knowing their name.

Although, increasingly, Orchidelia seem to be bringing a fair proportion of the audience themselves.

And so it’s business as usual as the Sheffield five-piece rattle through a condensed collection of their greatest hits.

Interestingly, Who Is She, recently unearthed from their back catalogue, retains its place in the starting line up and is rapidly becoming a favourite with both band and audience.

It’s a wonderfully peculiar song, beginning with a haunting piano melody that accompanies the tale of a one-night stand with a stranger. Then, without much warning, it springs into life as the sort of music-hall confection The Beatles used to produce when Paul McCartney was feeling particularly Edwardian, before sinking back into a blissful swirl of organ harmonics and aching vocals.

And this was apparently just an album track.

But it’s Forget Me Not that everybody really wants to hear.

All George Harrison-esque guitar lines and plaintive reflections on lost love, it gradually gives way to a burst of Monkees-like exuberance as Miles takes over vocal duties.

I’ve waxed lyrical about this song before.

I’ll probably do it again.

The set concludes with the irresistible foot-stompers You’ll Never Know and It’s Alright, sending the room into another bout of enthusiastic singing and providing a few newcomers with their first proper introduction to the peculiar pleasures of Orchidelia pop.

Another gig. A few more converts.

The congregation grows.

Headliners Canned Pineapple have made the journey north from Brighton, which is no small undertaking for an independent band in the current climate.

Touring is expensive, exhausting and increasingly difficult to justify financially, particularly when the potential reward is a Wednesday-night audience in a city several hundred miles from home.

And tonight’s crowd is relatively modest.

But the band are hardly dispirited.

Frontman Seán Drury recalls that the last time they played Sheffield, the gig was downgraded to a free show and precisely one person turned up.

One.

So thirty or forty people on a wet Wednesday evening suddenly looks like a considerable improvement.

Progress comes in many forms.

Musically, Canned Pineapple deal in a fuzzy strain of alternative rock, drawing on the slacker sensibilities of Pavement, the melodic instincts of Teenage Fanclub and the distorted guitar adventures of Dinosaur Jr.

It’s the sort of music that once seemed destined to conquer American college radio, although finding an audience for it in Britain’s more pop-obsessed indie landscape can sometimes be a rather different proposition.

But the people who have turned up tonight are clearly here for a good time.

And Canned Pineapple are more than happy to oblige.

Fuzzed guitars collide with pounding rhythms and surreal lyrical imagery as the band launch into a succession of infectious numbers that gradually draw the audience towards the stage.

Recent single Done With Everything is a particularly satisfying collision of distortion and melody, the guitars crashing against an insistent beat before retreating into moments of relative calm.

The song ebbs and flows, shifting between walls of noise and quieter passages that give the melodies room to emerge.

Elsewhere, the band seem determined to fill every available inch of the room with sound, compensating for the empty spaces on the floor through sheer enthusiasm.

Seán, apparently mindful of the perils of modern audience relations, decides to ask the crowd which songs they’d like to hear.

Better that, he reasons, than discovering afterwards that somebody has complained about the setlist in the Instagram comments.

Early single Shubadooba gets the nod.

And what a gloriously ridiculous little number it is.

A bounding, funky concoction built around an infectious nonsense refrain, it somehow manages to wander into a lyrical universe where James Bond is hanging around with Charles Manson.

I’m not entirely sure what they’d have talked about.

Probably best not to ask.

But it’s Jessie Met Jane that provides the evening’s standout moment.

A glorious blast of power-pop guitars and bounding rhythms, it occupies that sweet spot somewhere between Weezer’s more exuberant moments and the melodic chaos of American alternative rock.

The band throw themselves into it with considerable abandon, the audience bouncing along as the whole performance gathers momentum towards its conclusion.

And then, almost before you know it, they’re done.

The guitars fall silent, the applause rises and the band can reasonably conclude that the journey north has been worth the effort.

But there’s one final detail that makes the evening rather more satisfying.

In tribute to their name, Canned Pineapple had asked attendees to bring along tinned food to donate to local foodbanks.

And people have duly obliged.

As the audience disperses, their contributions are deposited into the designated collection point, ensuring that the evening has achieved something beyond the usual exchange of loud music, warm beer and enthusiastic applause.

It’s a small gesture, perhaps.

But it’s precisely the sort of thing that reminds you why independent music scenes matter.

A few bands. A few dozen more people. Some excellent songs and a little collective goodwill.

Not every gig needs to change the world.

Sometimes it’s enough to make one small corner of it a little better.

And that’s considerably more than one bloke turning up to a free show.

Canned Pineapple are currently on their UK tour. Orchidelia are rounding off the year and then getting straight back at it with shows in 2027.