Chris T-T
The 100 Club, London
⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑

“AS I was saying…”

It’s a jokey way for Chris T-T to launch his first London gig in eight years; a callback to Ken Livinstone’s “…before I was so rudely interrupted” return to metropolitan power after years in the post-GLC wilderness.

Unlike Ken, Chris stepped away willingly, sick of the minor pop star treadmill. He retired his T-T persona to focus on other things (you might, for example, have spotted someone looking suspiciously like him playing keys at various sold-out Jim Bob concerts).

After this boisteriously triumphant gig: dang, it’s good to have him back, if only ephemerally. These songs, multifaceted in their theme and approach, and exquisitely confident in their execution, have only grown in the intervening years.

In an attempt to squeeze as many as possible, the 100 Club sees two separate Chris T-T sets, one solo and one with a full band, a furiously full-bloodied collective featuring original Hoodrats bassist Johnny Lamb and the charismatic Charley Stone on lead guitar.

This comeback show happened because Chris wanted an excuse to release two of his best albums, 9 Red Songs and London is Sinking on vinyl for the first time (the latter in The Times’ top five albums of 2003, Chris points out, “between Dizzee Rascal and Outkast”).

The first set is a raucously received terrace singalong, if your average football crowd was good at making up catchy chants about the genocide in Gaza, environmental catastrophe, and the dead-ends of smug liberalism and go-nowhere factionalism.

Amid the prescient and melodic 9 Red Song punk-folk classics, like M1 Song and A Plague On Both Your Houses, are moments of gentler beauty. Even Market Square, a beautiful tune set to a AA Milne poem, works on two levels, a cute nursery rhyme for kids and also a clarion call to liberate the commons.

There’s the odd lyrical brain fade here and there, unsurprising given the vastness of the body of work being represented here. Chris at times seems overwhelmed by the reception he is receiving, as ultras in the audience remind him how verses start and the whole room bellows along to every word of Preaching To The Converted — ironically, I’m sure.

“As he faded into old age, Conan Doyle believed in fairies…” The second set starts with a beautifully delicate Tomorrow Morning, a London is Sinking highlight, with Chris accompanied by Jon Clayton, who produced the album and receives heartfelt thanks for doing so, on cello.

We’re then into a staggeringly intense and potent run of songs from the full back catalogue. Alongside crowd favourites about revolutionary giraffes and injured pop stars, it’s the songs with an unsettling undercurrent of violence that linger. Cull, 4am, The Bear, and (We Are) The King Of England all thunder past, this band as tight as a chuff’s arse, Chris’s voice in fine fettle as these songs about the collapse of democracy into violence and chaos couldn’t feel more thrillingly vital.

It’s good — fleetingly — to have him back.

Run ended. For more information see: christt.com