The Sherlocks: Manchester O2 Ritz – live review

The Sherlocks
Manchester O2 Ritz
10 Sept 2022

It’s packed in here.

While the mums and dads are glued to the TV for the Queen stuff the wild youth are out on town making sense of their own lives either on the packed streets of Manchester are sold out gigs like tonight at 1300 capacity Ritz – just one of the many packed gigs in the city tonight. 

Live Sherlocks is like entering a secret society – a seething mass of an audience going wild to a band outside the narrative and it’s one of those nights that feels very northern. This is a northern soul, a very North sound and style as the five-piece guitar band (with keyboards!) cranks the high octane and the audience goes wild with beer and testosterone flying.

The sniffed at so-called lad band genre is certainly not the London music media’s favourite but its powerfully entwined with the consciousness of the north of England and beyond. Up here there seems to be a conveyer belt of these bands. It seems like on every council estate or every far-flung forgotten suburb of a northern city a group of skinny lads in sports casual is cranking the electricity and coming up with another set of heartfelt anthems to make sense of the world. A set of anthems that transcends the geography and are sung along to at gigs like these across the UK. 

The Sherlocks are one of the bigger bands in this hugely popular scene and are part of the Sheffield chapter. Of course, being from the former steel city you can hear The Arctic Monkeys in their muse. They have the same urgent twitching guitars riffs and poetic paintings of the rainswept towns and grey sky lives somehow turned magical in song but there is much more than this going on under the bonnet.

The band have an added punky power with an added Clash-style urgency to their songs and they like their huge choruses. This only cranks the I Wanna Be Adored adoration of the audience which is pretty intense. The wild dancing and endless singalongs are only interrupted by sporadic chants of ‘Yorkshire’ as the away days crew celebrate the north’s second best-known county whilst in Manchester. This sort of jovial life-affirming celebration chimes with the band and is the sort of band and audience bond that harks back to the punk days and the early days of Madchester. It’s that resolute outsider spirit that rock n roll is so good at.

The Sherlocks know their way around melody and sing songs that connect directly with their audience. They tell us their stories, they sing of their lives and they deliver with their heart and soul and they add an emotional urgency and a melodic magic dust. It’s communal and it’s devotional and etched into their audience like a tattoo.  

They don’t break new ground. This is not what they are here for. This is modern electric folk music for the now. The north will rise again to a new soundtrack, it’s no longer brass bands and colliery bands, it has its own modern soundtrack that transcends the geographical that has bands like The Sherlocks big actress the UK. This love of guitar anthems saw The Sherlocks hit the top ten albums with their World I Understand third album with ease.

Their live intensity and keen sense of melody make the Ritz erupt with mayhem – beer is flying and hands flail in the air and the famous sprung dance floor is bouncing to the max. Kiaran Crook sings his heart out whilst his brother pounds the drums and the new-ish line up inhabit these much-loved songs perfectly. 

The gig is a reaffirmation of the band’s power – where do they go from here? 

Is the ceiling for the band the Courteeners brilliant ability to sell 40 000 tickets in an hour for a Manchester show? Is there going to be a new Roses moment where the northern hordes dominate pop culture again or is this huge scene happy to continue its top-end cult status documenting the world it inhabits – the sound of young North soundtracked with guitars and in song?

The Sherlocks are already the young blades soundtracking their now. 

They get on with it. 

Sheffield style.

Reyt.

Source: louderthanwar.com