Now it’s a mighty way down rock ‘n’ roll. Stood as they are on the apron of the Brudenell dance floor watching a possibly drunk or deranged woman pirouette around to the strains of their support band Just Handshakes’ brittle exhumation of all the ghosts of Cardigans and Cranberries past, the three sisters Lieberson and their good friend Jane Herships could well be forgiven for having instead Ian Hunter’s reflections on the sheer ordinariness of a rock musician’s lifestyle rattling around their collective brain. Not quite from Memphis, but three dates into the UK leg of their inaugural European tour and most definitely all the way from Brooklyn, the quartet who collectively go by the name of TEEN’s first experience of being live at Leeds could hardly have appeared more mundane.
Even the traditional Easter Monday’s secular celebrations and its attendant holiday mood felt muted as the allure of free entry had failed to attract too many more than a mere handful of people into the Brudenell this evening. And those who did were all seated and skirted around the circumference of the club’s main concert room leaving a huge void between themselves and the stage. And it was into this sea of emptiness that the good ship TEEN first sailed at a little after 10 o’clock, their self-proclaimed take on psychedelic gospel seemingly cast away on some faraway beach. But in a strange metamorphosis that defied both the time and place, their sound started to coalesce and its amalgam of all things Velvet Underground, Doors, Neu! and Brian Eno began to acquire a woozy hypnotic charm that fired the imagination and warmed the heart.
Suddenly the empty chairs and barren dance floor in front of the stage ceased to be of any concern as Teeny Lieberson’s voice – surely forged in the flames of Kate Bush and Grace Slick’s autosuggestion and a truly inspired instrument in its own right – caught fire. Spinning wildly on an alien axis of keyboards and guitar it lit up the songs taken from last year’s debut album In Limbo to such a point whereby the band’s leaving the stage at a little before eleven suddenly felt like a huge, inconsolable loss. You do sense that TEEN will be forever destined to play to half full bars and clubs such as they had done tonight, but their talent and inspiration is most surely deserving of so much more.
