Gallows

iBar, Bournemouth

When Dom Patience from Chalk Ink Promotions announced that hardcore punk stalwarts Gallows were coming back to Bournemouth, I was bloody ecstatic! An intimate show at the IBar with 99 other fans…this was going to be intense!

We rolled up late and missed the first band 33 but we caught Bastions set. They are a pretty tight outfit with some good songs and they produced an energized set but it’s a shame that there was a bare minimum of punters to witness it! To tell the truth those that were there seemed to be just killing time until Gallows started.

And start they did! When the Londoners took to the stage the IBar was packed and the temperature was rapidly escalating. Kicking off with the frenetic Leeches whose opening lines of ‘Forget yourselves. You’re all going to burn in hell’ couldn’t have been more apt as the crowd explode in a frenzy of slam dancing that pushed the heat up to sauna levels!

Lead singer Frank Carter pushed out into the centre of the crowd and the band kicked in with London Is The Reason, the London lyric was changed to Bournemouth and was the reason the IBar went mental! Two songs in and everybody was sweating buckets but still it was not enough for him and he had kids running laps from the stage to the toilets and back again. Come Friendly Bombs, Abandon Ship and The great Forgiver steamed past in a blur and when Death Voices hit it was like a tidal wave!

Thinking on his feet and devising new ways of crowd interaction Frank decided that Holdenhurst Road was in need of a circle pit and legged it up the stairs out into the street with half the IBar following! God knows what the pedestrians and motorists thought but who cares about them… they were missing all the fun! The rest of the band carried on playing, with guitarists ‘Lags’ Barnard & Steph Carter mixing freely in the throng and on stage keeping the engine going nine to the dozen Stuart Gili-Ross on bass and Lee Barratt smashing the hell out of the drums!

Leading everyone back downstairs like some kind of tattooed psycho pied piper Frank still had one more experiment to perform. Lining up punters front to back he got a band mate to push the first kid in the chest knocking him back into the second and so on…human dominos, I’m pretty sure a first in a Bournemouth venue!
Winding the gig up with In The Belly Of A Shark, Steph’s amp gives up the ghost and commits suicide. Nevertheless he carries on playing and they turn out a stonking rendition of Orchestra Of Wolves in which the speaker stage right decides it had had enough as well and promptly cut out!

All in all possibly the best gig I’ve been to in years! Thanks to Dom and everyone that went, which was an eclectic mix of young and middle age, punk, metal , screamo and Hardcore fans, all getting off on the most exciting and best live band in the UK!

BUT will it ever be the same? Just after I finished writing this review the band announced the departure of front man Frank Carter who is leaving to concentrate on his other project Pure Love (see on his Tee in the pics!) but he will honour the remaining dates on this tour!

The remaining members will carry on with a new singer but whoever he/she may be, they will have some pretty big boots to fill!

Set list
Leeches
London Is the Reason
Come Friendly Bombs
Abandon Ship
Great Forgiver
Death Voices
Gold Dust
Misery
I Dread the Night
In The Belly of A Shark
Orchestra of Wolves