The Lottery Winners: Moles, Bath – live review

The Lottery Winners
Moles, Bath
8th December 2022

The most strangely complimentary thing about reviewing The Lottery Winners is that there’s at least as much to say that’s not about the music as about the songs themselves. For the record, the music was spot on, but more of that anon.

Peter Kay made a well-publicised comeback recently. It sounded like it’s gone rather well. No surprise – he’s a hilarious fellow. It’s only eight miles from Bolton to Leigh, from whence The Lottery Winners hail, and the quick-witted, observational humour that has driven Kay’s career was very much in evidence at Moles. Seeing Thom Rylance, Katie Lloyd, Rob Lally and Joe Singleton on stage felt very much like looking in from the windscreen at Kay and Sian Gibson in Car Share, with enormously feel-good tunes thrown in for good measure.

Having ordered a takeaway after their sound check and seen it arrive two minutes before they were due on stage, the show began with a sense of hangry discombobulation. The few chips that Thom had snaffled before heading onstage (whilst leaving Rob to wander on alone and stare back at his bandmates for making him look like a right billy nomates) were apparently the spiciest chips he had ever eaten. Despite Thom’s long-awaited dinner going cold and the bit he’d eaten giving him the sweats like some kind of disconcerting, deep-fried hallucinogen, he greeted us as if it was party time. “We’re all having a bath together,” he punned as they launched into Times Are Changing. The Lottery Winners’ bath has room for everyone. It’s intimate, warm and indulgently bubbly.

In that same ‘sharing is caring’ mentality, the chips (Rob’s – as we learned from his forlorn objection to seeing his food being handed out) were shared around the audience to confirm their unpalatability. “Are there any St John’s Ambulance here? Don’t touch your eyes or willy.” Equally, Shirley in the front row had an 80th birthday shout-out and the song Sunshine dedicated to her. Not sure it was her 80th, to be fair, but she seemed delighted and amused in equal measures: “We’ve been on tour with The Reytons and the front row looks very different.”

There was so much stand-up between Sunshine and Favourite Flavour (both titles ironic for a band whose taste buds had been just been nuked) that Joe on drums ate his entire portion of nasty chips. It was as much about refuelling as making sure Thom didn’t give those away as well. The Lottery Winners’ genuine variety show also brought us a spontaneous Let’s Get It On-style Slimming World improv song from Thom and Rob, and a Stars In Their Eyes George Michaelmas turn from Rob singing Last Christmas, the band lurching from the original into jazz, punk and reggae on Thom’s command.

Let it not seem like an afterthought to mention the songs. Arguably, they were the essence of why we were there on a freezing December night when even Thom admitted he wouldn’t have been bothered to leave the house. Songs by The Lottery Winners align perfectly with how they come across. There’s introspection and empathy. There’s playfulness and optimism. There’s a metric shit-tonne of fun. They can out-spice even the most adversarial chip.

Much Better, That’s Not Entertainment, Meaning Of Life, Headlock and Start Again were all bouncing team songs. Katie Lloyd’s immaculate vocals on 85 Trips (renamed 85 Chips for the night) highlighted the band’s versatile vocal talents and the beauty of her duet with Thom on Overthink Everything cut through the daftness-drenched delirium, earning the attentive audience silence that it warranted. Emerald City took it a step further, with Thom, Katie and Rob combining all three voices to the point where one audience member seemed to question who the lead vocalist was, allowing Thom to have a self-aware, comedy diva strop.

We’d sung, “I already feel much better” earlier in the set and definitely meant it. When we sang, “I don’t wanna go home” on set-closer, 21, we meant it even more. Thom described being in The Lottery Winners as a privilege: “We’re six idiots and no adults ever get to check over our work.” Anyone adulting their sorry carcass through the pre-Christmas schlep, with levels of festive cheer mirroring the festive temperatures in the minus numbers, would have left Moles without an iota of humbug on Thursday night.

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All words by Jon Kean. More writing by Jon on Louder Than War can be found at his author’s archive. He tweets as @keanotherapy.

All photos by Jake Stride of Soul Media. Find him on Instagram.

Source: louderthanwar.com