Is there anything as beautiful as a comeback? From this summer’s swaggeringly assured Oasis reunion, also known as Armistice Day for Adidas-wearers, to the slightly more unsteady reappearance of Catfish and The Bottlemen – a very slow-hatching but tardily rewarding cocoon – this last year has been all about musicians returning to the ring. The underbelly of your local indie night has been fighting its way back into the circus of press and performance, musical monkeys still live and kicking.
Although, few fights have left as many weary eyes and bloodied fingertips as that of the band formerly known as Easy Life (the irony of this is almost poetic as the last two years of their career have been anything but that). In fact, based on sheer bloodshed, the fight endured by lead singer Murray Matravers and co was almost comparable to, let’s say, gripping the wing of a well-known commercial airline flight during its active take-off? Best leave it.
But, as the saying goes, the show must go on. Reputational dirt, buried relationships and indeed ‘tears’ soon gave birth to Onion – the first release from the band’s painfully comical rebrand, Hard Life.
Onion was an organically textured exploration of strife and rejuvenation. Of dabbing your eyes with divorce papers and smiling equally at old photographs and present camera lenses. It was, and absolutely still is, a mark of determination in the most dazing of times.
Which is why, as Matravers, Lewis Berry, Olly Cassidy and Jordan Birtles emerge from the dark like Rocky in four men (to raucous chants of “Fuck EasyJet” no less), it wouldn’t be shocking to imagine cartoonish swirls above each of their heads indicative of a Tom and Jerry style knockout.
“It’s a hard life, I can’t lie it’s been a rush.” The opening lyrics to ‘tears’ and the first words sung to the room. Energy is at an all time high. It’s as if two years of legal battles and uncertain futures have been melted down into white-hot adrenaline injected by an aux chord. In response to the chants, which take up almost all of the setlist’s breathing room, Matravers laughs: “You lot are gonna get us sued again, shut the fuck up!”
After being away from the stage since 2023, and against all odds, it feels like old times.
This extension of the past’s hand only continues as the band perform old favourites ‘sunday’ and ‘sangria’ – both of which are recited at decibels so high with such passion and intensity, they could separate you from your spine. It’s also worth noting during these tracks just how many t-shirts in the room still read Easy Life, a little reminder of how many fans survived the ride with all of their enthusiasm and belief intact and just a bit more wear around the collar.
Some favourites from Onion bound seamlessly into tonight’s setlist including ‘y3llow bike’ and ‘crickets!!!’. In the former, wide-eyed newcomer Woody gets the ultimate support act initiation as he’s tossed onto the bed of jostling bodies and passed around the room like a piece of fresh gossip – the kind that’s exciting and innocent and not at all scathing, just for the record. Alternatively, ‘crickets!!!’ is much more subdued as Matravers stands solo at the keyboard. He appears, amongst all the madness, as somebody totally in control, or at the very least, somebody totally fine with not being.
The next layer of Onion to fall to stage is ‘othello’. It’s a fearsome performance matched by a sea of silhouetted hands that seem to puppeteer the energy with Henson-esque expertise. Like twisting a kaleidoscope, this theatrical psychedelia shifts into the crackling radio rhythms of ‘dead celebrities’, extracted from 2019’s Junk Food – when the band were just seedlings who knew nothing of lawsuits and still thought of headlining Ally Pally as visiting Narnia.
Throughout the set, as all the colours of the band’s catalogue, before and after the day of reckoning, combine, it is abundantly clear how much love and how much thought is instilled into every track. The essence of pleasure, curiosity and gratitude for the good and the bad clings to the skin of every song so strikingly, you could consider it a pattern of emotional freckles.
What Hard Life do best, and in fact always have done best, is create tracks that are lethargic and world weary, slumped over and stoned but in no way draining – they’re relatable and actually, uplifting. Like seeing a colour you don’t quite know how to describe but that you’ve definitely seen before somewhere in your house.
It’s this sense of community, of twisted understanding, that sets the room like jelly in the fridge.
The setlist spirals towards a delirious end with ‘pockets’, there’s jazz tickles and spacious production that replace the walls with endless pink air, and ‘skeletons’ in which Cassidy enters the crowd to be tossed like a chip amongst a welcoming pan of hot oil, or, more literally, sticky pint cups and sweat-drenched partygoers whose shoes are gummed to the floor.
Having retrieved all their members from a crowd not dissimilar to the inside of a bag of popping corn, the band launch into the closers. Those songs that make you feel the same every time you hear them. They bring you back to that one moment, or that one place, or even that one person. Beginning with the viciously vulnerable ‘ogre’ and ending, finally, with ‘nightmares’. ‘Nightmares’ is the sonic equivalent of a John Hughes movie to make you feel good. That, ‘everything is kind of a mess but I’m young and my friends are here too and maybe none of it is that bad and there’s a good soundtrack either way’ type of song.
Maybe the most important line of the night, and the last words sung to the room – “But it’s nothing you should worry yourself about.”
It’s a hard life, and sometimes you have to fight to keep the things that once seemed so guaranteed. But, at the end of the day, there’s a sofa cushion awaiting your imprint and there’s beauty to be found in the comeback if, even just for one night, things can seem ‘easy’ again.
Let the ‘end credits’ roll.
