Spike and the Gimme Gimmes
There’s a particular pleasure in hearing a song you’ve known for years get dragged into unfamiliar territory, have its hair shaved into a Mohican and come screaming back at you twice as fast. That’s the glorious business of Spike and the Gimme Gimmes, who bring their Take The Fall Tour to Rock City on Thursday 19 November, with Valencia in for a night of punk-rock irreverence, familiar hooks and gloriously questionable musical decisions.
The band has built its reputation on taking songs from across the musical spectrum and giving them the full punk treatment. Pop anthems, country favourites, soft-rock staples and chart-topping guilty pleasures are all fair game. The originals might have been designed for radio playlists, dancefloors or a particularly emotional karaoke session, but in the hands of the Gimmes they become fast, loud and irresistibly daft singalong weapons.
And that’s precisely the point. This isn’t about sneering at the songs or pretending that punk has to be permanently miserable. It’s about taking music everyone recognises, turning the volume up and having an outrageous amount of fun with it.
Fronted by the unmistakable Spike Slawson, the current line-up is a mouth-watering collection of punk and alternative-rock pedigree. Joining him are CJ Ramone, whose name is permanently woven into the history of one of punk’s most influential bands; Pinch, the former long-serving drummer of British punk legends The Damned; John Reis of Rocket From The Crypt; and Jake Kiley of Strung Out.
That’s a formidable amount of musical experience packed onto one stage, even before the first chord rings out. These are musicians who know their way around a fast, tight and ferocious performance, but the Gimmes give them a different playground. Here, precision meets mischief, and the challenge is to make a familiar song sound as though it has just been released from a particularly unruly punk-rock detention centre.
Their catalogue has travelled through the Beatles, Elton John, Billy Joel, Neil Diamond, John Denver and The Beach Boys, among countless others. The source material changes, but the mission remains wonderfully consistent: take a tune lodged somewhere in the public consciousness, speed it up, add guitars and harmonies, and see what happens when the audience recognises the chorus. The answer is usually a room full of people singing at the top of their lungs.
There’s an extra personal connection for me with this one. Pinch comes from Grantham in Lincolnshire, the same UK town I come from, which makes seeing him on a Valencia stage feel that little bit more special.
Grantham might not be the first place that springs to mind when you think of international punk rock, but Pinch helped put it on the map. Born Andrew Pinching, he was a founding member of local punk outfit English Dogs before going on to join The Damned in 1999, spending two decades behind the kit for one of the defining bands of British punk.
From the early days of the UK underground to the stages of some of the world’s biggest venues, that’s quite a journey for a lad from Lincolnshire. And now, with Spike and the Gimme Gimmes, he’s part of a line-up that takes punk’s musical muscle and applies it to an entirely different kind of set list.
The Valencia show also arrives hot on the heels of the band’s new album, Shit the Bed, released on 23 October through Fat Wreck Chords. The record sticks firmly to the Gimmes’ tried-and-tested approach, bringing eleven recognisable songs into their own fast-moving musical universe.
The track list takes in Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, OutKast’s “Hey Ya!”, the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”, Duran Duran’s “Rio”, “Kokomo”, “Fame” and “It’s Raining Men”, alongside “Rhinestone Cowboy”, “Think I’m in Love”, “I’ll Make Love to You” and “We Are the World”.
It’s a wonderfully unpredictable selection. One minute you’re in the world of Eighties pop, the next you’re dealing with country music or a giant charity single, all filtered through the Gimmes’ distinctive punk-rock sensibility. The fun lies in the contrast between the songs’ original personalities and what happens when the band gets its hands on them.
There’s no need to pretend that every version is a solemn act of musical reinvention. The humour is right there in the concept. But it takes musicianship to make this kind of material work night after night, and the band’s long history of touring has turned the format into a finely tuned live proposition.
The band’s particular talent is making that familiarity feel fresh without losing sight of the joke. These songs are already in the collective memory; the Gimmes simply give them a different engine and let them loose. It’s punk rock with its tongue firmly in its cheek, but played by a band with the chops to make the whole thing fly.
And with CJ Ramone, Pinch, John Reis and Jake Kiley sharing the stage with Spike Slawson, there’s plenty of musical firepower behind the silliness.
For anyone who likes their punk rock fast, their pop classics mangled with affection and their live music served with a healthy dose of humour, this is one to put in the diary. Sometimes the best way to appreciate a classic song is to hear it played exactly as it was written. And sometimes the best way is to let a bunch of punk veterans tear it apart, put it back together at twice the speed and invite the whole room to sing along.
For tickets and more information: HFMN
Check out the band here: Spike and the Gimme Gimmes
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