Messed!Up
To tell you the story from the start, I didn’t know shit about Kid Kapichi until their German agency Head of PR contacted us last year and asked if we’d like to cover their gig at Bahnhof Pauli in Hamburg on a cold February night with the brilliant support band SNAYX. From that day I was turned into a massive fan.
Kid Kapichi is one of the reasons that British music has a moment again and has picked up the torch where Britpop and British indie rock left it off. However, today it’s loud, noisy, and filled with punk rage and politically-charged songs that take the best pieces of the ‘70s punk scene and mix it with heavy rock music and, in some cases, post punk pieces. And from that, we got bands like Kid Kapichi, Soft Play, The Reytons and many more.
Tonight, Kid Kapichi popped by Grosse Freiheit 36 in Hamburg to support Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes – can’t get a better support slot than that, right? In fact, the gig was upgraded to Grosse Freiheit because the first venue, Markthalle, wasn’t enough. And Grosse Freiheit for a foreigner (no, I’m not German) feels like entering a gig venue mixed with a Biergarten with its typical wooden interior, but it was to become an electrifying night of raw energy so why bother about the interior.
I just learned that the Hamburg audience is known for being hard to charm (according to our German photographer) and can be a bit boring, but we didn’t see anything of that tonight. People were cheering up as soon as frontman Jack Wilson and the rest of the band entered the stage with the typical cocky British attitude we love. And their music is a lot louder on stage than on record.
Firing off the night with latest album opener and politically-charged ‘Artillery’ and continuing with the second album song ‘Let’s Go To Work’ is the brilliant start the gig needs. And it gets even better when they follow up with the best song of the album, ‘999’. To me, that sets an unprecedented standard for opening songs, sending the audience into a frenzy from the off. Frontman Jack Wilson radiates a likable charm with enough witty banter, and he’s oozing coolness behind a pair of sunglasses and a football jersey. But beneath the quick humor and banter, there’s an anger, especially towards the British government – much visible in the amazing ‘Party at No.10’ and the British government parties during covid – that is transmitted through a much heavier sound on new album Here’s What You Could Have Won than ever before.
For all the political messages, the band have some massive anthems in the bank. Unfortunately, we’re in Germany and people don’t get problems in the UK, that’s why we didn’t hear any ‘Fuck the Tories’ chants like when I saw them on home turf in the UK earlier this year. Songs like ‘Party at No.10’, ‘New England’, and witty Brexit-critical ‘Can EU Hear Me?’ invite that kind of mass hypnosis, but now we’re in Germany and have to rely on their edgy punk sound doing the trick – and it works out really well. Say what you want about Germans being a bit stiff, but when you get them on your side it’s pure love, and I’m quite sure Kid Kapichi hauled in lots of new fans tonight. In fact, I’m sure we’ll see them doing their own headline tour in Germany in the near future.
They also played a new song being released this Friday called ‘Newsnight’ – looking forward to listening to it properly – before the night culminated in a powerful encore that concluded with ‘Get Down’ and the adrenaline-fuelled rollercoaster ride of ‘Smash The Gaff’.
Kid Kapichi’s performance was a masterclass in stage presence and intensity, and it’s been an incredible evening, an electrifying exercise in performance art, which will live long in the memory. It’s not hard to imagine them conquering the mainstream before long and playing bigger venues outside the UK on their own.
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Photographer: Christian Berg
