Friends, there is much about this evening, and this band, that is unlikely. Unsanitary and unnecessary too, but mostly unlikely. Having made a visionary but widely misunderstood debut with Exile on Coldharbour Lane, they encountered the destabilising mixed blessing of soundtracking a legendary TV show, ensuring that song was also tacked onto the end of their bleaker second record. Rather than imploding beneath the weight of their own heavy concept/drug problems/ego/weird one-hit-wonder status, they somehow wriggled loose as one of the best live acts in the country instead. Live drums and programmed beats, roots traditions and futurist electronics, silliness and sincerity, sin and salvation – they not only made these unstable elements work smoothly together, they did it all while giving the outward appearance of being chaotic drunkards with a less than 50% chance of correctly being able to name the day.
While Alabama 3 have always drawn from the deep well of older music they’ve not really been a band to look over their own shoulders that much. The idea for a tour celebrating twenty five years of their debut, Exile on Coldharbour Lane, was scuppered by the pandemic and so now they’re touring it along with their second album La Peste which seems a typically messy bundle of celebrations. The appeal is obvious, these are unmistakably their best couple of records, and while a handful of the tunes have been the mainstays of their set forever, a lot of them have been sat in the cupboard for years. Their later records lost some of that initial lustre, but usually had at least a couple of winners to stir into the live show and on they went. Somewhere there our paths just turned away I guess.
So brothers and sisters, I have a confession to make: it’s been a number of years since I last heard Brother Larry Love testify, a decade or more, and that’s a mighty long time. I find myself feeling some trepidation as I head on through the door tonight. Are they still gonna have it? At least some of it? Or are things about to get all cruise ship and heartbreaking? Surely I am not alone in finding it improbable, bordering on the miraculous, that this ramshackle travelling circus of disreputable wasters is rolling into its thirtieth year and the wheels still ain’t come off of the wagon? It ain’t clean living I can tell you that, so I guess it has to be the purifying light of all that sweet pretty country acid-house music. Elvis himself must be smiling down on Larry Love as he takes the stage in a sparkly gold lamé jacket and black Stetson hat.
You know they ain’t about to be respectfully recreating those two records in order, no sir. All the same, not starting with ‘Converted’, the first track off Exile. . . and it’s perfect “so damn long since we sang this song, let’s go back to church” lyric is a puzzling choice. All the more since they go with their pointless cover of ‘Hotel California’ instead. (Regarding the Eagles I am of similar mind to brother Lebowski and unshakable in that conviction.) Moving on, they play a couple from La Peste, then ‘Woke Up This Morning’ and things really get cooking. ‘U Don’t Dans 2 Tekno’ is joyous and of the more obscure numbers ‘2129’ sounds particularly great. The crowd knows them all, there is much singing along, call and response, hand waving and fist raising as the night progresses. Larry is still a restless and unstoppable showman, but there’s no doubt the return of powerhouse vocalist Zoe Devlin Love to the fold elevates proceedings. Just to hear her sing ‘Speed of the Sound of Loneliness’ makes the whole caper worthwhile.
Having been fortunate to see the Alabamas tear the roof off a few festival tents in their acoustic form, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen them play without the Rev. D Wayne Love; but it is the first since his untimely passing, and his gleeful absurdist presence is missed. ‘The Old Purple Tin’ is the evening’s most cabaret moment, they know it, they revel in it, but you know D Wayne would have taken it to another level. On ‘Hypo Full Of Love’ he joins the choir of sampled voices that he gathered together in the band’s music. Initially one of my least favoured tunes on the album, on stage ‘Hypo…’ grew into a giant, unstoppable beast of a thing. Without D Wayne that beast is a little wounded, but I’d have felt cheated if they hadn’t done it; still a perfect, thumping, set-closer.
The short history lesson on street drinking for the younger members of the crowd with which Larry introduces ‘The Old Purple Tin’ is perhaps the clearest sign that the Brixton captured on Exile On Coldharbour Lane, even its hallucinatory side, has been almost completely gentrified out of existence by the grind of the last two decades. Alabama 3 are still there though, mutating and surviving. Over at the well-stocked merch stand they have T-shirts featuring NME’s curt appraisal of La Peste as “an almost monumental waste of time”. A review that made the common mistake of assuming they were insincere, some kind of sarcastic, hipster novelty act. The thing is, Alabama 3 are true believers, in their radical politics and loose outsider stance but most of all in the healing and transcendent power of music. Cynicism just doesn’t get you this far down the road, they’re just not earnest, or solemn. Because acid-house and country music aren’t either. We’re engaged here in the universal human act of shaking the shit of the world off our shoes, and getting on the good foot.
Having addressed us all night as “Birmingham, capital of Alabama” with a grin, Larry Love comes out for the encore with his shades in his hand and allows a brief moment of getting earnest and solemn. He talks softly, in his own voice as Robb Spragg, about a link we share, acknowledging the death a couple of months back of Paddy Hill (one of the falsely imprisoned Birmingham Six, whose Miscarriages Of Justice Organisation the band worked with) and D Wayne too. He doesn’t invite us to cheer them, and a silence falls. They play burn-out ballad ‘The Thrills Have Gone’ which features tapes of Hill talking about his family. Genuinely affecting, it stops the room. They bring us back up again with the full on beats and strobes mania of ‘Mao Tse Tung Said’ and close out on the warm rush and eternal hope for a better tomorrow of ‘Peace in the Valley’. Come that bright morning, comrade.
Anyway, you were asking whether or not they’ve still got it. I’d say that, undeniably, they still got most of it.
