This weekend’s live pick from Team Freshnet’s Manchester correspondent

My recommended gig for last week was unfortunately cancelled, so I’m hoping for Manchester’s sake that the same doesn’t happen to this week’s choice.

It’s been a while since Chew Lips have been up this neck of the woods and I was rather gutted to see that at last week’s London gig they had support from the mighty Fiction. I’ve been fortunate enough to see Chew Lips on three occasions now, once in a venue, once at a festival and even once in a shop (they were playing and not shopping by the way). On each of these times I’ve always watched with a mixture of enjoyment and a small amount of fear too.

Of the two band members vocalist Tigs (the other being multi-instrumentalist James Watkins) is certainly a force to be reckoned with. Not only does she have a cracking voice, but she has attitude too. The first time I saw them a few songs into their set the crowd were rather static, which set Tigs off and she stood dead still on the edge of the stage and eyeballed what seemed to be everyone in attendance and asked “Are you still alive Manchester?”. Now me being a bloke I’m not much of a dancer at gigs and added with that I was probably twice the age of rest of the crowd I decided I would slowly saunter out to the darker edges of the room as not to be caught in her Medusa-esque glare.  All this said, I always make a beeline to see them play live whenever I can as the duo can certainly put on a great show.

I got a press release recently about Chew Lips latest single (free Lieke remix HERE) and phrases such as ‘dance pop duo’ and ‘very now’ were used which did make me cringe a little as their music has a lot more to it than those phrases let on. The term pop is certainly correct for Chew Lips, but I’d put a suffix on this so it reads ‘pop as it should be’. It’s not pop for the kids, its pop for the more discerning customer.

Anyway they will be playing this Friday night in the small basement venue of Soup Kitchen (the same night as 75 thousand folk will be heading out of town and to Heaton Park to see The Stone Roses first Manchester reunion gig).