Performance Space Number One- by Psycho Comedy: Performance Space Number One

There is an air of the circus or a rainy American carnival about this first song, it’s guitar line evocative of a Victorian stage play or a backstreet melodrama. Psycho Comedy wear their influences on their sleeves and it is easy to hear snatches of Glam-era Bowie, Stooges and The Birthday Party in their music. Powell comes across as an Iggy fan while the guitars sound in thrall to the work of early Rowland S Howard. One look at their playlists on Spotify reveals their influences - Suicide, Lydia Lunch, Velvet Underground, Johnny Thunders. It is from this well that Psycho Comedy draw their water. But theirs is a vision that is not only distinctly British but hugely, unmistakably scouse. Still on track one, Matthew Smith delivers a stream of consciousness rant about supermarket meltdowns, dole queue uprisings and 'left-field normality', ending on the repeated phrase 'we won't stop the music' is a voice so scouse that it drips with the infectious attitude of that city. As the opening track Psycho Comedy begins, frontman Shaun Powell screams a full-throated ‘Wooooh’ and thus stamps himself over the music the band make from step one. It is an effect that does not leave for the rest of the album; Powell’s presence in written large over Psycho Comedy, it is his voice, his lyrics and his vision that they bring to life in their music.