Oh when there's no future
How can there be sin
We're the flowers
In the dustbin
We're the poison
In your human machine
We're the future
Your futureLondon’s Deadletter played the Market Stage of Truck Festival as part of So Young Magazine’s line-up and we were there to check them out.
Atrocious weather dominated proceedings on Saturday. Fields became quagmires, tent entrances like waterfalls, and knee-deep puddles at the urinals were not enough to dampen the spirit of Deadletter or their huge crowd. Their brand of funked-up post-punk psyche blasted out of the traps with ‘The Snitching Hour’. The ‘Pretty Green’-esque bassline and Ian Dury ramshackle party sonic took the good work of Warmduscher in 2022 to another level. The joyous sax coupled with Zac Lawrence’s irrepressible energy had a sodden tent grooving.
Poppy Richler’s sax style lent the set a unique insight into just how fucked the UK is. In the bleaker moments, she lit up the dysfunctional incompetence of the Tories and, on ‘Madge’s Declaration’ and ‘Binge’, she tapped into the audacity of this generation to have a good time in spite of no future.
‘Degenerate Inanimate’ combined the chaotic carnival of The Happy Mondays peak (‘Bummed’) with Lawrence’s poetic mesh of Carl Barat, Alan Donohoe (The Rakes), and Ian Curtis vocal. Together, they created something that went beyond the outsider tag of post-punk. Visions of sun-drenched technicolour main stages emerged. Diehards at the front hanging off every spoken word and families dancing at the back to the jubilant ‘oh ohhhhs’. Not since Pulp, Suede, and Sleeper stormed the charts have misfits produced alternative art this all-encompassing.
As they decree “there’s something in the air, there's a storm coming” only one thought lingers, Deadletter. Their time is coming, sooner rather than later preferably.