Press
Islington Academy
David Sinclair, The Times 4/5
A group with a great future behind them, Shack have carved out an erratic trail on the margins of British pop for 20 years. A succession of setbacks — such as the studio fire which somehow delayed the release of their album, Waterpistol (recorded in 1991), by four years — have been ascribed to bad luck. But bands, like anyone else, create their own luck, and the Liverpool quartet led by the singer Mick Head, together with his younger brother, the guitarist John Head, have often been their own worst enemies.
“Mick could never finish anything,” said one of his producers. “I’ve never worked with anyone like him, and I hope I never do again. But he’s a songwriting genius.”
The singer’s widely reported addiction to heroin did not help matters. But while buses have been missed and bridges burnt on a scale that would make even Pete Doherty wince, the music, when it came, was always brilliant
And still is. Returning to test the water once again, the band played a set of quiet, unfussy excellence on Tuesday. Speaking between songs in a Liverpool accent you could have cut with a knife, Head revealed that a new album has been completed and will be released in January 2006. “Yeah, right,” yelled someone from the crowd.
There were no visual gimmicks or theatrical distractions as Head stood centre stage in a plain Ramones T-shirt, strumming an acoustic guitar and singing songs that spoke of happiness and heartbreak in a voice that plainly still touches his fans. “I know, I know, I know I messed up again,” he sang in Pull Together, a song of effortless beauty from the group’s album, H. M. S. Fable, released in 1999, shortly before the record company folded.
As the show progressed you could trace a musical lineage that stretches from Sixties stars such as Arthur Lee’s Love and Nick Drake all the way forward to current bands such as the Coral and the Magic Numbers. Meant to Be, with its mock flamenco passage at the end, was a tour de force of progressive pop, while On the Streets Tonight had a wonderfully loose psychedelic feel to it. There were one or two songs in odd time signatures and some outstanding guitar passages from John Head, although you could never accuse him, let alone any of the others in the group, of showboating.
The crowd sang along to Comedy and other numbers as if they were big, familiar hits, which in Shackland they evidently still are. As pop fans go, their faith has been tested more rigorously than most, and yet still it seems worth preserving.
Brixton Academy
David Cheal, Daily telegraph
It's not often that I make my way home from a concert thinking about the support act, but that's exactly what happened after this show.
The night's main attraction were the Coral, the ridiculously youthful seven-piece band from the Wirral who have been together since their early teens and have already released four albums, and during their hour and a bit on stage they did a first-rate job of recreating their utterly distinctive, clangy, echoey, weird and dystopian sound-world.
But what was more firmly lodged in my memory at the end of the night was a rare and all-too-brief supporting slot from Shack, the perennially under-achieving Liverpool band based around the songwriting partnership of brothers Mick and John Head.
Compared with the main attraction, in terms of musicianship, stage presence and sheer firepower, Shack were bumbling amateurs. They didn't upstage the Coral; they didn't even grab the attention of all of the audience, many of whom carried on talking through their set.
Indeed, Shack reminded us why, despite having made what is regarded by many (well, me, anyway) as one of the finest albums ever released (HMS Fable), they have never caught on with the wider public: they were a bit of a shambles.
But what they lacked in "professionalism" they more than made up for with the sheer emotional impact of their music, with its rich, potent conflation of sadness and joy, nostalgia and possibility. And, as well as old tunes such as Comedy and Pull Together, they played a bunch of fab-sounding new songs from a forthcoming album which, if all goes well (though it seldom does in Shackland), will be released early next year. Lovely.
The Coral, in comparison, were a thousand times more switched-on, more together, more presentable - and almost completely cold. Their jumpy changes in tempo, their weird time signatures, their strange harmonies left barely a trace of an emotional impression, other than one of looming fear.
Lead singer James Skelly, with his cardigan and his Peter Noone haircut, is a fine vocalist, and songs such as She Sings the Mourning, with its refrain chanted over a hypnotic rhythm, had a sort of thrilling menace. A screen behind them reinforced this mood with its strange images of beaked creatures pursuing each other through forests.
Impressive stuff. But, for me, the night belonged to four shabby blokes from Liverpool: the sloppy, the bedraggled, the mercurial, the mighty Shack.