The Jesus Lizard – Lice – Bristol – Live Review

The Jesus Lizard – Lice – The Fleece – Bristol – Friday January 10th 2025

The Jesus Lizard, following on from their unexpected and essential new album, are touring the UK. Fighting Boredom are in Bristol on the coldest night of the year to witness the return of one of the best bands ever.

It’s bloody cold outside. I mean it’s minus figures and falling. But every freak from Bristol and beyond are in the Fleece right now. There’s a guy in front of me with a Rebellion shirt and Subhumans beanie. There’s another bloke with a mass of dreadlocks in a baseball hat and there is every underground punk and beyond t shirt you can think of represented somewhere. It’s rammed too, at one point I’m standing behind the merch table as there is nowhere else to be. The photographer is fearing for his life, lens and sanity. It’s intense to say the least.


The support, Lice, are local and have a sizable contingent of the crowd on their side. They create an excellent noise, mashing up rock’n’roll distorted to hell and back. The drummer is off to the side and the guitar and bass players are dapper and moving as they create the sound. The singer dances across the tiny part of the stage he has, moving to the music, accentuating the tunes and words as they emerge around him. It’s messy and it’s ace. The star though is the woman playing the keyboards pretty much in the centre of the stage, she is totally in control and not fazed at all by either the crowd or the shenanigans of the singer, totally, utterly cool. They switch to chunks of hugely echoing noise and then the keyboardist ups the game and pulls out a violin. It’s now full on hardcore noise, with a violin, slabs of concrete falling and then spiraling up into the sky as they go all psych out into a spaced out punk nasty sound. A great set, they finish by announcing their next gig. 

I got an email to tell me that The Jesus Lizard had reformed again, managed to record a new record and they were touring the UK. Within seconds I was on the phone to the Photographer and was trying to tie down a date to get to. Of course they are nowhere near where we are so in the car it was and to The Fleece, which is so full that if you are at the front you better not need the loo because you are going nowhere. 
They come on, David Sims on the bass, Duane Dennison on guitar and Mac McNeilly on drums, Mac in shorts and teeshirt. David and Duane are old guys with silver hair and great shirts. They look like they belong on either side of the stage, holding down their positions and kicking into angular noise, leaving lots of space in the centre for the star of this show. David Yow wanders onstage, boots, jeans and a white shirt, grey hair swept back from a receding hairline, he immediately launches himself into the song and that’s it. The crowd goes bonkers, Yow is hanging onto a pillar at the front of the stage spitting out nastiness at the cameras held up into his face. At this point I have no idea at all where the photographer is, all I can see is a mass of movement around the stage. Yow staggers, dances, fights and boxes with himself as the music hammers on.

You just can’t take your eyes of Yow, the stage is his, spitting, snarling and on occasion moving into what looks like interpretive dance. The brutal slabs of guitar and bass rain down and the drums never stop, it’s perfect. Then, Yow leans forward and he’s in the crowd, well, on the crowd. He’s also on another level, screaming, howling and crooning into the mic as he is face down in the audience being carried back and forth, hands holding up the mic lead as he rolls around. Back onstage he leans on the pillars and is visibly tiring but just does not stop. The crowd also steal his mic stand, stage dive, crowd surf and generally go completely off the wall, the security wisely leave them to it for the most part. The band just carry on, cool and full of attitude, they just play. Apparently the rule is that if Yow hurts himself they finish the song before checking on him.

Yow screams ‘FUCK TRUMP!’ and smiles, the noise turns dirty. They play a monumental ‘Mouth Breather which verges on perfect anarchic sound. He has a stool for one song which after he has sat and sung he just hands into the audience, Christ knows where it ends up. Yow sings howls and gibbers as the music verges on the deep bastard blues of the Birthday Party mixed with an angular nasty punk edge. Yow is extraordinary, he surfs to the back of the crowd, then thanks us for our support, he holds the mic lead in his teeth and worries it like a crazed hound. He stands, white shirt crumpled and open to the waist, one sleeve rolled up and one hanging down and looks at the audience smiling. We are his people, and thank God The Jesus Lizard are still doing this. 
If that’s not the gig of the year there’s going to have to be something really spectacular to beat it.

The Jesus Lizard

Lice

All words by Adrian Bloxham all pictures by Martin Ward

Adrian Bloxham

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