Live Review : Anvil + Ragdoll Sunday + Electus @ The Tivoli, Buckley on March 6th 2020

Anvil. Could a band name actually be more heavy metal than Anvil? A band from Canada that have been going for some 40 years through good times and bad. Some times so bad in fact that someone made a documentary about them. Yeah, this band is special alright. But more about them later, first let’s have a quick look at the two supports.

Traffic woes mean that I see little of Electus. What I do see is a weird fusion of heavy blues with funk, sort of Living Colour with fuzzboxes. It’s different, and I can’t decide if I like it or not, but it’s certainly done fairly well and if that sounds like your “thing” they might be worth checking out.

Ragdoll Sunday unfortunately I know I don’t like much. Not because there’s anything wrong with them, far from it, just because my personal taste doesn’t really encompass what they do. They are based in Switzerland apparently, with a guitarist from Greece, and this is their first time in the UK. Kudos to them for travelling in these dark days of corona virus scares, but their brand of gurning alt. prog rock (with added mask) just leaves me cold. Musically they are technical, and there are a lot of time changes. Vocally there is a fair bit of shouting. Overall they remind me very much of SOAD, and I’m not a fan of them either. Take note guys, shouting and complicated time changes don’t necessarily make you edgy and in fact can make your music quite difficult to follow on first listen. I wish them all the best, but they really weren’t for me.

Anvil on the other hand….. I remember Anvil from the very early 80s, I remember enjoying their straightforward Metal sound and eye-wateringly tight jeans fondly. A lot of time has passed since then though, and if I’m honest until a couple of years ago I’d pretty much assumed they had split up years ago. Idly browsing late-night TV one night however I came across “Anvil! The Story Of Anvil”, a fly-on-the-wall documentary made in 2008 that not only followed them in their now mundane day jobs (whilst still being Anvil on the side) but also featured some guest appearances from some very famous names in rock who had nothing but praise for them. Let’s face it, who am I to argue with Lemmy, Tom Araya, Slash, Lars Ulrich et al?

So here I am, along with several other grey heads, about to re-live my youth. Sure enough singer/guitarist Lips starts the night on a high note by walking onto the stage and straight off it into the crowd. He them proceeds to stay there for the whole duration of the first song, noodling away, basking in the admiration of the crowd and the wavering light from their cellphones. Said song is a glorious instrumental with howling guitar and super-fast double kick drums from Lips’ long-term sidekick Robb Reiner. New boy Chris on bass completes the power trio, and off they go into an absolute feast of classic metal. They start with a song from 1981, from their first album “Hard N Heavy”, and follow it with a song from their most recent 2019 release “Legal At Last”. There’s not a lot to choose between the two, the old songs sound fresh and the new ones sound classic. It’s a fine line to balance on and Anvil manage it really well. Their style remains the same without their songs sounding too much the same, which is a pretty neat trick. Their style is simple, and I note to my surprise that part pf the reason the sound is so basic, so stripped-down, is because Lips doesn’t even have a pedal board on stage. With that in mind the range of sound he coaxes out of his trademark flying V is very impressive indeed. The song titles reflect the style, and “Free As The Wind” is dedicated to the late great Lemmy along with some screamingly funny anecdotes about touring with Motörhead back in the day.

Along with the classic Metal sound there are some on-stage theatrics with Lips and Chris chasing each other round the stage and battling with guitar necks and then we get to the jaw-dropping bit. At first I think Lips is about to play the guitar with his teeth, then I realise that what he’s actually doing is singing into the guitar pickups rather than his microphone. Wow. In over 40 years of going to gigs I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything quite like that before! He then does his “party trick” of playing guitar with a vibrator, and that’s pretty impressive too. He does it both ways (snigger), using the device first like a pick and then on the fretboard. This is some skilful playing! We also get a bass solo (during which I wonder how a gentleman of Chris’s age can bounce quite so high in the air) and a drum solo which isn’t as boring as some drum solos can be even though it doesn’t contain enough cowbell for my taste. They dedicate a song to my fellow rock journo and ex-colleague Dennis Jarman, who is front and centre in the crowd tonight, and the main set closes with the hammer-down of “Metal On Metal” which is probably the closest they ever got to a hit record over here. The encore showcases how well they can go between slow, doomy and riffy and fast and furious, and reminds me that tonight has been a great night. Much heavy. Very metal. A fair bit of nostalgia. It’s great that after all these years Anvil can keep on keeping on, and long may they continue to keep the faith and worship at the altar of the Metal gods.