Live Review : Bang Bang Firecracker + Mystiek + Black Water @ Percy’s Café Bar, Whitchurch on July 20th 2024

First visit to Percy’s tonight and wow, what a venue. It’s small, cosy, quirky and interesting. The band room is out the back and despite being fairly cramped the sound is good so if necessary you can sit in the comfort of an ex-aeroplane seat (with table in the arms and a working recline button) or dentist chair, with your drink on an NHS trolley, and watch proceedings on a video screen. Other tables are made from amusement arcade cast-offs and assorted bric-a-brac. There’s a moose head mounted behind the bar, two full-size stuffed white tigers in the band room and an assortment of motorcycles, juke boxes and skeletons in cages scattered throughout. Posters, plaques, signs and lights made out of unusual items catch the eye, and every now and again you discover something else that makes you smile. But the drinks are reasonably-priced, the staff are friendly, the owner can talk forever about his vision for the place and it’s somewhere you can instantly feel at home in if you too consider yourself to be somewhere outside of the normal. The Friday and Saturday gigs seem to be gathering legs for them – they book a variety of genres and there are some names I recognise amongst the plethora of posters on the walls. It’s pretty much always free entry so yeah, check out their socials and come on down, you’ll like it here!

Tonight’s musical offerings are bands I’m not familiar with, which is always good. Black Water open the proceedings and are a recently-formed 4-piece from Stoke. They have a heavy blues vibe, and run through a set of songs that give a nod towards early Sabbath. There’s a decent cover of Black Stone Cherry’s ‘White Trash Millionaire’ thrown in. The overall sound is quite retro. As well as the Brum influence there seem to be shades of early ZZ Top. It’s not groundbreaking but it’s also not unpleasant, the musicians know their craft and the vocals are good. For a new outfit they put on a decent show.

After a quick changeover they are followed by Mystiek, another fairly new band who are also apparently local. They are very young, and again quite a new band, but they have a bit of an ace up their sleeves in the form of a wunderkind guitarist. The sound is full of crossovers – Nirvana grunge meets Motley Crue glam rock sounds like an odd choice of bedfellows but these lads manage to make it work. The vocals are crisp, the beat is steady and the guitars are just sublime. Will Fernyhough plays like he’s had twice his age to practice, giving us massive riffs, shredding solos and a fine line in guitarface throughout. They own the stage well, with at one stage some synchronised kneeling which is something you don’t see every day. Shapes are thrown, choruses are shouted and the whole thing melds into a thing of both beauty and promise. I even managed to catch a couple of song titles, with both ‘Devil On My Six’ and ‘Bring Me Down’ making significant aural impact. Bravo Mystiek, it was worth the trip down the A49 to watch you!

Finally to Bang Bang Firecracker, who despite their rather sparkly name are a 3-piece trad rock band who are obviously all massive Motorhead fans. It’s hard and uncompromising, with the sort of titles you might expect from a band pursuing this kind of sound. An original song ‘Hellfire’ early in the set made an impact and saw a few heads shake and toes tap. They have a couple of EPs available, so most of the set was original apart from a couple of Motorhead (who else?) covers. ‘No Class’ and ‘Killed By Death’ are a step aside from the usual though, and were both performed with enthusiasm from both band and crowd. They gave it a lot of beans and got some significant audience participation during ‘Go Fuck Yourself’ and also gave us ‘Diamonds and Dirt’ which was a little more boogie and again caused many fingers to unconsciously curl into air guitar chords. Overall it was a solid performance from a solid band and topped off a night of new names nicely.