Gig review: The Soup Dragons at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

Beneath his trucker’s baseball cap, The Soup Dragons’ singer Sean Dickson gives the gracious smile of a man who knows he’s been upstaged.

To his left, bass player Sushil K Dade is enjoying a rare moment of his own in the limelight. “This is dangerous giving me a microphone,” he quips, taking the opportunity to salute Leeds’s musical heritage – “Gang of Four, The Mekons, Soft Cell” – and compare the noise of the refridgerator in their dressing room to something from a David Lynch film.

“We were in Birmingham last night and I was speaking in Punjabi,” he says mischievously.

Thirty years on from splitting up, the newly reunited Soup Dragons seem to be relishing each other’s company once more, and this charge through highlights from their first three albums, together with a couple of long-lost John Peel session tracks and both sides of their new single, Love Is Love/No Music on a Dead Planet, is more than an exercise in nostalgia.

Even if their playing and singing may occasionally be a little rough around the edges – this is, after all, only their third gig since reforming – the urgency of their performance suggests there’s plenty of life in this band yet.

Jim McCulloch’s buzzsaw guitar riffs teem with a Buzzcocks-like energy in Whole Wide World, Hang-Ten and Can’t Take No More, the harder-rocking Pleasure and Backwards Dog – part of what Dickson terms the “cowbell section” of their set – pack a real punch, and The Majestic Head and the inevitable rendition of their biggest hit I’m Free are hugely well received by the audience.

There’s even time to throw in a cover of the Red Crayola’s Listen To This and re-live their ‘baggy’ days with Mother Universe.

Mention too should be made of opening act The BMX Bandits, whose shaggy-haired, bearded singer Duglas T Stewart was once in a Glasgow band with Dickson and Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub. He’s here radiating good vibes after recently becoming a father again and songs such as Serious Drugs and Razorblades and Honey are good-natured hymns to the virtues of sweet four-part harmonies.