Live Review - Ginger Wildheart/Polly & Rags (Huddersfield Parish, 22/4/22)

It’s weird to think that it was only just over six months ago that your correspondent was going to his first post-lockdown gig to see the Wildhearts play. Suffice to say that the last few months feels like much longer in terms of what's gone on with this band with numerous difficulties seeing the group going on hiatus and hence we're seeing the return of Ginger's solo gigs backed up by his long term associate Random Jon Poole at the Parish tonight.

More of which later. First up tonight we've got a new acoustic alliance making its live debut in the form of Polly & Rags featuring Idol Dead/Spangles/Phluid frontman Polly and Digressions/Role Models frontman Rags. The pair give a good account of themselves tonight with various numbers from all of their past bands being given a run through (a heartfelt run through the Role Models' This Eventually Leads Nowhere being the highlight for yours truly) and a new number being given a run-out to good effect as well. Whether this song will appear on a recording by these two or with one of their day bands isn't made clear but hopefully some more gigs will be forthcoming - the pair have a good chemistry onstage and a good handle on their material. Promising stuff.

Ginger's on good form tonight too with him and Random kicking in with their one-time Radio 1 playlisted cover of the Taxi/Cheers theme before the set takes in everything from old Wildhearts classics like 29 x The Pain and Bad Time To Be Having A Bad Time through stuff from the Silver Ginger 5 (the timeless Inside Out), and Hey Hello (an acoustic take on How I Survived The Punk Wars which works much better than you might think) and Ginger's solo career.

The main reason for the tour is that Ginger's 2018 album The Pessimist's Companion (dedicated to his dog Maggie who makes an appearance onstage tonight to upstage Jon during one of the songs he's singing!) has just been rereleased by Little Steven's Wicked Cool label (who also have frequent Ginger collaborator Ryan Hamilton on their books) in a remastered and expanded form (review to come soon here on Nite Songs) and we get the title track, Ginger's cover of John Cooper Clarke's I Wanna Be Yours and the upbeat Why Aye (Oh You) played from the expanded version tonight as well as Paying It Forward from its predecessor Ghost In The Tanglewood and Boxes from its follow-up Headzapoppin'.

Jon Poole is on good form tonight as well and takes vocals for a few songs including the God Damn Whores' Unemployment Man, D'Ya Feel Lucky (which I feel I should apologise for as my dropping my empty beer can distracted him at the song's end - sorry Random!) plus songs about the merit of karate and kung fu and a pastiche of '70s sitcoms which I won't go into here but had most of us in stitches! Random's other current job as bass player for Dr Hook sees Ginger's son Taylor take the stage with the pair for a cover of Cover Of Rolling Stone - the lad definitely has some talent.

Similar to the Therapy? gig a couple of weeks ago, tonight felt like a meet up with old friends who you've not seen for way too long and was quite simply a great and enjoyable hour and a half of music and fun. With talk of a couple of new Ginger albums in the pipeline with his other band the Sinners, hopefully some more dates will be forthcoming soon.

All photos by Andy James Close. All rights reserved.