As a 2003 baby, I’m just about old enough for the majority of my live music experience to have been pre-Covid, and after the last few I’ve been to, I was beginning to worry that a few years without gigs had caused us all to collectively forget how to have fun at them; a worry that peaked when I heard a teenage boy complaining about his personal space being invaded while standing at the barrier for The Pigeon Detectives. Thankfully, I can now put that down to a string of bad luck: Black Honey’s Valentine’s Day gig at the Kentish Town Forum was electrifying. Some of the biggest pits I’ve ever seen grew out of a combination of frontwoman Izzy Baxter Phillips’ formidable stage presence, and a crowd consisting of a healthy mixture of angry women, football-shirt-adidas-trackies outfits and enthusiastic dads who heard ‘I Like the Way You Die’ on Absolute Radio.
Formed in Brighton in 2014, Black Honey have long been making their mark on the indie music scene. Since their debut track ‘Spinning Wheel,’ which sounds like it was plucked straight from a Tarantino film (in the best way), they have released a consistent stream of anthemic singles and three impressively diverse albums. The Forum is their biggest headline gig to date, but they are no stranger to big crowds, having been a regular name on festival line ups for years, including an appearance on the Readings and Leeds main stage in 2022.
For a show advertised as an ‘All-Inclusive Extravaganza,’ the support acts are suitably brilliant. The night is kicked off by Kynsy (real name Ciara Lindsey), a genre-jumping powerhouse from Dublin who puts on a show impressive enough to believe that she could have been the headliner. She is followed by Manchester-based band Picture Parlour, who, despite frequent comparisons to Arctic Monkeys, immediately remind me of The Last Dinner Party, although I would dare to say that lead singer Katherine Parlour’s vocals push their music above the latter’s. After the usual between-acts pause, the lights dim, and the crowd cheers, expecting Black Honey to appear on stage, but they’re still standing next to us in the photo pit. Instead, on comes Snookie Mono, a Glaswegian circus artist who sets the mood with a sexually-charged display of sword-swallowing, because why not?
When the band do eventually take to the stage, it’s to ‘OK,’ one of the catchiest tracks from 2023’s ‘A Fistful of Peaches,’ which strikes me as more of a closing song, but it gets the crowd going nonetheless. They follow it with ‘Beaches’ and ‘Charlie Bronson,’ two of my personal favourites from their discography, before taking it back to 2017 with ‘Somebody Better.’ Interestingly positioned mid-gig, their most popular tune ‘I Like the Way You Die’ comes next, with Snookie Mono joining them on stage for some more sword-swallowing. While it’s entertaining, it seems an odd choice to give the crowd an on-stage distraction during a head-banging hit which needs no supplementary entertainment, and it dulls the crowd a little, but they regain their mojo immediately with ‘Spinning Wheel.’
As Phillips’ voice fills the room with the song’s melodic introduction, a pit begins to form, until a ring of football shirts almost takes up the entire floor. On the cusp of the drop, the remaining corners are filled by Phillips pausing her singing with one word: ‘wider.’ On the topic of football shirts, a side note - the gender split of the gig is pleasantly surprising given the band’s frequent use of feminist themes in tracks such as ‘I’m a Man’ and ‘Fire,’ and I initially assumed that a good proportion of the men in the room were taking their girlfriends out for Valentine’s, but their reaction to ‘Spinning Wheel’ proves otherwise. The pit collapses into chaos for the entirety of the lengthy instrumental, and the room stays buzzing for the rest of the gig.
After a string of tracks spanning the band’s entire discography, Phillips pauses to introduce their first ever attempt at a live cover, launching into a rendition of The Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing,’ which feels like it was made for them despite predating the band’s formation by half a century. As the show creeps towards a close, the energy is kept sky-high by their most recent single, ‘Lemonade’ - an unabashedly pessimistic, guitar-heavy contemplation of life’s unfairness - and ‘Run for Cover,’ possibly their most solid, straight-forward rock song. Before closing the show with ‘Corinne,’ Phillips takes a second to thank the ‘gents’ in the room before inviting ‘all the women and non-binary identifying people’ to the front, joining them on the floor for the entirety of the song. As one of the band’s earliest hits, it provides a wistful conclusion to a phenomenal gig; one that won’t soon be forgotten by the swathes of bleached hair and Doc Martens pouring onto the streets outside the Forum.
Images by Lucy Evanson.
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