From time to time it’s good fun to go and check out a band performing live that you’ve not really listened to properly before and that’s the situation I find myself in, a friend having invited me to check out Thumpasaurus at a party the weekend before, sitting on the train heading towards Scala. I’m not going in completely blind, Spotify unexpectedly pushed Emotional Pain at me a while back (which is excellent but didn’t feature tonight) but I know there’s a lot of weirdness in their discography that I’m looking forward to hearing.

First up thought we have Wooze, a mysterious band on stage due to 3/4ths of the members hiding under yellow balaclavas, led by the incredibly charismatic Theo Spark – within about 30 seconds of me arriving in the venue he’s over the barrier and crowd surfing upon an audience of people who are clearly already fans. They sound excellent – plenty of fuzzy guitar lines thickened up by the bass player, all delivered with a tonne of energy behind them. A lot of the tracks, including the excellent I’ll Have What She’s Having use a really heavily chorus-laced guitar sound, usually a sound I associate with bands from decades past, but the melodies and riffs created sound fresh and modern. I can’t believe they haven’t had an album out yet – definitely a band to keep an eye on!

Thumpasaurus have got my interest from the get go – a Star Wars intro-esque visual plays on screen to an epic sounding backing track, essentially letting newcomers (ie. me) in to the world of Thumpasaurus and the concept of their music in a way that’s fun and completely lacking in pretentiousness. As soon as the band are on stage though I’m blown away – they sound incredible. The musicianship is obviously incredible – they’re a band full of highly respected musicians in their own right but that still doesn’t prepare me for the first time the bass player absolutely shreds a solo. It’s an ensemble of people using their musical prowess to create pure fun, the songs themselves are lighthearted and occasionally silly but the drive of the songs is so funky, with so much energy, that you can’t help but move along with them. The set balances the positive and negative well – you get a song like Strange Headspace, about not feeling anything (still incredibly funky, to be fair) and it’s quickly followed by Life Can Be Good Sometimes, a genuinely upbeat and uplifting track.

One element that surprised me were the live visuals – I’d heard they had a powerpoint presentation to run with the gig but it’s hard to state just how much the projectionist adds to the performance – the visuals are hilarious – often they’re a literal translation of the music being played but every so often you’ll look up and see, for example, Grogu holding a camera as the band sing “There’s a little green man with a camera in his hand” during Alien Sex Tape or “Rikki Rikki Goose” during Space Barn – I can’t explain why I found this one so funny, it just was in context. Bringing out extras on stage for certain songs just added to the fun – an alien dancing away through half of the set, a vampire to introduce the encore – it felt like a big budget Flaming Lips show performed at Scala.

Do the band need the extras? Probably not, they’re an insanely tight collective of incredible musicians creating music with a sense of humour. Do they add something? Yes! The visuals were incredible and the extras on stage created a real sense of fun. I posted a short clip as an instagram story and had far more people ask who the band were than usual, purely because it looked (and sounded) utterly mad. Sadly they were only in the UK for two shows this time around but they seem to head over fairly often (apparently this was the third set of UK dates this year?!) so hopefully they’ll be back for a tour soon – I can’t recommend seeing them enough, just an hour of pure joy and utterly ridiculous music.