LAMBRINI GIRLS
Electric, Bristol - 30th November 2025
Support: Shelf Lives
I expected this one to be raucous. It was - and then some!
Firstly though, the support band. Never, in all my years of gig going, have I ever seen a band so obviously fake and unlikeable. The two members of Shelf Lives are clearly desperate for fame, but want to be considered "cooler" than people who go on talent shows. They're not. They were awful, and seeing the female singer cavorting all over the middle-aged men in the front row was so incredibly cringey, it was directly out of sync with the messages the headliners espouse. Even said blokes in the front row looked more than a little awkward with it all.
Lambrini Girls are at pains to inform us that they are "a political band". In fact, that was mentioned more than once. There was quite a lot of political polemic, but it began to wear thin after a while, especially when you consider they were essentially just preaching to the converted. Actually, while we're at it, one thing did annoy me a little. For a band who preach endlessly against prejudice and intolerance, it was strange how vocalist Phoebe designated an area of the mosh pit as a "safe space" for anyone except white cis males. Because only white cis males have ever committed any crimes against women, the LGBTQ+ community, people of colour, etc., right? I was disappointed at the hypocrisy. The only people we should be intolerant of are those who preach intolerance. There were plenty of white cis males in attendance, so to blatantly discriminate against that single section of the audience is not only naive, but everso slightly offensive.
Oh, and the mosh pit. It was insane, one of the wildest I've seen for quite a while. Everyone seemed to be making a good job of it. So when Phoebe signalled from the stage that she wanted the crowd to split to enable them to come together hard when things got loud again, the audience duly obliged. And they did so a second time. And a third time. By the fourth and fifth time, it just felt like the whole thing was a ruse to eat up time. It got a little tiresome.
Am I making it sound that I hated this show? Because I really didn't. I thought Lambrini Girls were brilliant, very hard-hitting, great tunes and really good with the audience. They just need to dial back the rhetoric a bit. It's all very well getting an audience with liberal left-wing views to chant "Fuck Reform" over and over, but I wonder, in reality, how many of them will actually vote? I'm asking as someone who has been there and done it all in the past. Most of the people I knew who reckoned they despised the Tories never ever cast a single vote against them in an election, no matter how many bands vented their views at them.
I'd love it if Lambrini Girls just made their point though their music. They're good enough to do it, and they're a lot of fun too. That's more likely to have an impact.
These clips appear to have been filmed really close to where we were standing on the balcony. Great quality too.
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