(((O))) Live: The Lovely Eggs – The Castle and Falcon, Birmingham

Twenty years of The Lovely Eggs seems ridiculous doesn’t it? I remember 2005 like it was, erm, well, I kinda do. Not that long ago was it? The longer they go, the more impressive it is. Maximum DIY. For Dave and Holly this band is their life; they have struggled and fought doing everything themselves for two full decades now, and weirdly it does not seem to have ground them down. They remain open hearted and creative, moving forwards, happy to have us along for the ride.

This might seem an ideal point for a career retrospective Best Of release, but typically The Lovely Eggs can’t be doing with that nonsense. As far as looking over their own shoulders goes, an anniversary tour with an appropriately wide-ranging set list is the closest you’re getting to a Greatest Hits for now. Instead, they have a new release of material that was unfinished or otherwise left off their last album – Bin Juice.

First up Polite Bureaux have a pun for a name that’s probably older than all three of them put together, and as their just-released debut album is called Skint Cunt possibly the polite bit should be taken with a pinch of salt. On ‘Cunt Monday’ they do the angry, wordy, electro-punk type thing but get more introspective and melodic elsewhere. I didn’t get to see their whole set but thought I’d give ’em the nod anyway. After all, I wouldn’t want to be impolite.

With Stewart Lee and Eric Rushton also doing spots, Brummie comics are well represented on this tour. I guess Frank Skinner fully represents the light-entertainment establishment these days, but if you’ve seen Lee’s excellent King Rocker documentary you might recall that his ties to Birmingham’s musical underground are legit. Rob Lloyd is in the crowd. Frank wisely chooses not to talk about any of that though (and has the sense not to sing either, save a brief few lines during a bit about a failed attempt to work clean). Slightly out of his comfort zone, but also on home turf, he gets a warm reception and ambles through an amiable mix of local gags, old bits, and crowd work. Ultimately, he confesses he’s only doing these shows because he loves to watch The Lovely Eggs – and who can argue with that?

“Have you ever travelled time in a DeLorean? Travelled time in a DeLorean?” As the Eggs zip back and forth through their songbook tonight, ‘Have You Ever Heard A Digital Accordion?’, with its playfully absurd rhyme scheme, really hits the communal singing and general goodwill you’ve come to expect at their shows; but they play all your favourites: ‘People Are Twats’, ‘Magic Onion’, ‘Don’t Look At Me (I Don’t Like It)’, ‘I Just Want Someone To Fall In Love With’ interspersed with more random selections like the ten whimsical seconds of ‘Muhammad Ali and All his Friends’.

Lead track from Bin Juice, ‘The Grind’ comes hard on the heels of ‘Memory Man’, making a strong case that it should maybe have been included on Eggsistentialism instead. I think they draw on every record with the notable absence of anything from I Am Moron; I guess those songs have dominated recent tours and they needed a break to let some of the older tunes out to play. The growth in their music and approach is notable on the more recent tunes; the one-two hit of ‘Nothing/Everything’ and ‘People TV’ is incredibly lovely and brings a subtle shift of mood.

A couple of times tonight Holly jokes about the ‘Wheel Of Death’ last time they played here and, before consenting to play ‘Fuck It’, “the national anthem of Eggland”, insists it’s time to give it another go – the idea being that everyone shuffles around passing the stage as if the band were a corpse at a funeral. We give it a go and it sort of works – the whole business adding an odd ritual sense to the already cathartic joy of singing ‘Fuck It’ with a room full of people. Then they smash through an ecstatic ‘Wiggy Giggy’ and ‘Meeting Friends at Night’ and are gone. Long may they continue.