“You’re on The Hives guest list tomorrow at the Outernet,” says the email. “Band on stage at 8pm sharp - it’ll be a 45 min set.”
Welcome to 45 minutes with The Hives. Tick tick tick boom!
7:50pm: Actually, before we start, a question: Do people even understand how to stand at gigs anymore?
Message to all you tall fuckers: Dudes! No-one is saying stand at the back, but FFS - have some self-awareness! You can edge forward, you’ll always have a great view, BUT STAND AT THE SIDE, you maniacs.
Everyone else: relax.
You know when someone pushes past you? It’s fine. It’s not the same as when someone skips the queue. We’ll take it in turns. It’s hot down there. They’ll be back. Don’t be a noob.
Ok, where were we? Oh yeah...
0:00-1:00: Pelle’s eyeballs bulge. He does a high kick. And. We. Are. Off.
1:10: Chaos.
Ok, so here’s my big theory. There are basically two types of bands. The first type is a “Look At My Cheekbones!” band.
“Look At My Cheekbones!” bands are like: “Look at me! Aren’t I cool? I’m mysterious! Maybe even menacing. Don’t you fucking LOVE me?” LAMC bands act like you caught them off guard. They just happened to be there on that stage, playing your favourite songs, looking cool as fuck, and you disturbed them. Oops. You’re a voyeur. They are a thirst trap. They think they are seducing you. They love themselves. They are 100% ego and vanity.
In short, LAMC bands are dicks.
The other type of band are charmers. Performers. They are not LAMC they are LAMF. These bands are workers, man. They put a shift in. These bands, the great bands, are pure output.
They didn’t turn up with some dry ice and “Look at my cheekbones” songs. Nah. They planned for this.
And now you are truly at their mercy.
3:00: Enough Is Enough, from their new album The Hives Forever, Forever The Hives, is greeted like an old classic. “Everyone’s a little fuckin’ bitch!” it goes. “Went to the doctor, cos I was sick / Sick of everybody’s bullshit.” It is an anthem custom-built for the year of our lord Howlin' Pelle Almqvist, 2025.
6:00: Main Offender sounds like The Kinks before Ray got klever.
8:00: The Hives are the Stooges, AC/DC and the Ramones. Recent single Paint A Picture - and we are four songs in already - is especially Brudda-like.
Like the Ramones, the Hives are an experiment in delivering one idea, taking that idea and playing it straight, playing it weird, playing backwards, and then folding it in on itself.
It’s there in the name of their new album: The Hives Forever, Forever The Hives. Like that title, The Hives’ riffs are a selection of chords played one way, then played in reverse. Their songs are written by Fitzsimmons, Fitzsimmons, Fitzsimmons, Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons. The lyrics for Enough Is Enough go: “Enough is enough, enough is enough, enough is enough is enough is enough, enough is enuh-ooOOOof, enough is enough” (etc).
The Hives are the Ramones redesigned by Escher. They are musical tessellation. They are rock’n’roll as Mondrian art project, and then A&R’d by Mickie Most. They are a dog chasing its own tail - and everyone knows how much fun that is.
10:00: “LON-DONNNN!” says Pelle. “You up and running?” Pelle is James Brown nose-to-nose with Muhammad Ali. All front.
“We wanted to play some small shows to launch our album. This is as small as a Hives show is legally allowed to be!”
11:00: They do that freeze frame thing they do. It is killer, always will be.
12:00: My notes say: Backs to the audience. Bogus Operandi. Hands. Audience. Palm.
I take this picture.
15:00
Pelle’s ranting again.
“We’ve been coming to London for years!” he says. “We came here when it was the Astoria.”
The Outernet is a new building, built across the road from the much-beloved Astoria. They knocked down a load of places Londoners loved and knocked up a concrete-and-steel multi-media, multi-story bus shelter.
“This place looks nice,” he says, unconvincingly. “A bit more German. We will now play our most structurally-demanding song. So if you’re an engineer or an architect, pay attention. The rest of you: tear it the fuck down.”
The song is Hate To Say I Told You So.
The building shakes. Somewhere across town a phone rings in an office at the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Seismology Team are mobilised.
16:00: More chaos. Overhead hand claps. Bass. My beer is flat.
18:00: “This has got to be German place,” he says. “It’s still standing.”
19:00 : Aw, who am I kidding? I did take notes every minute but they say stuff like:
Crowd surfing
Boom!
Hand claps
Bonus!
C’mon
Better than ABBA
If that’s any use to you, be my guest.
“Should we play another one? I don’t know,” Pelle says. “One of the rules of showbiz is ‘Always leave them wanting more.’ Do you WANT more?”
Crowd: “YES!”
“Ooh, you see? It’s complicated, isn’t it?”
They end on Countdown To Shutdown and take a bow to Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better: “Though sometimes I wish someone could.”
Like I said: There are two types of bands. One is shit. The other is The Hives
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