Gig review: Cast at The Wardrobe, Leeds

“We’re going to run through some tracks from the new album, Leeds,” Cast frontman John Power informs The Wardrobe as he troops onto the stage. Decked in a sky-blue bucket hat, five-o’clock shadow stubbled across his jaw, the singer-songwriter cuts every inch the late summer reveller, bidding for one last weekend of sunshine. “It’s amazing,” he continues, “what can happen in a year when you’re living the dream.”

It’s a fascinating time for the Liverpool indie veterans, born out of the remains of their frontman’s old band The La’s and ex-bassist Peter Wilkinson’s Shack some 30-plus years ago. Not since the halcyon days of Walkaway and the BBC’s famed Euro 1966 exit montage has their particular stock been so high, aided by the Britpop revivalism of an Oasis reunion and a prime supporting part on the Mancunian outfit’s stadium-shattering tour last summer.

Now, they return to more intimate surroundings with their eighth studio album and aspirations to secure a first number-one record in the process. The group’s brief stop comes one day before they unfurl new effort Yeah Yeah Yeah, held in conjunction with Crash Records; it forms the spear-tip of a blitzkrieg that will criss-cross the country, with release shows stacked across the next week and beyond to aid their assault on the charts.

Unfortunately for them, the crowd that has turned out on a wet Thursday night to catch them up close and personal appear to have missed the memo for this stripped-back affair. It is a shame, given that the material is among some of the strongest Cast have released since their Nineties prime, with the likes of Poison Vine and Oh Yeah offering strident and slinky rock underscored by flurries of Beatlesesque melody and hymn that should, in practice, bring the house down across a shortened fifty-minute set.

Power finds himself battling against incessant chatter from the wings, increasingly exasperated as he implores for quiet to celebrate torch ballad Devil and the Deep. He would be forgiven for simply exiting without any old favourites; it is testament to his professionalism that he still offers up Live the Dream and Walkaway for an audience that promptly switches to lusty singalong without an apparent care in the world.

“This renaissance is down to you as much as us,” he remarks as he departs. It is a kind assessment; on an evening like this, Cast’s merits feel strictly their own.