Venue:
Metronome Nottingham
Date: 18/11/2025
All songs are time machines, capturing the moment they were written, the recording session, the day the record came out, the day you first heard the single and went ‘who is that?’ So when bands reform after a substantial hiatus there’s an element of time travel for both band and audience – what are we playing now? How do they look and sound fifteen years afterwards? The Oasis fervour is in large part a desire to travel – for half a day at least – thirty years backwards to the mid-nineties.
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart haven’t been away for that long – six years. So it’s possibly a continuation after a hiatus rather than the full getting back together deal. The band, original drummer apart, are all present and correct.
Frontman and songwriter Kip Burman, now I am guessing in his early forties, is revisiting on this tour the POBPAH self-titled debut, now sixteen years old. The songs are, as the band’s name and the b & w photo on the cover of two teenage girls suggest, centred on teenage love, first crushes, the weekend, and other distinctly youthful themes. Titles like Young Adult Friction, A Teenager In Love, Everything with You and This Love is Fucking Right set out their stall pretty clearly.
At the Metronome we’re all time travelling – these songs, and the band playing them, aren’t aged 24 any more. The audience – actually some of them are 24 indulging in some saudade for early-noughties Myspace indie – neither. All of us of whatever age are glad to see them, and so glad to hear these songs ring out in rude health, as crunchy, anthemic and softly melancholic as they were in 2007.
We get the album in its entirety, in the order of the record. And why not. The encore – more of a second half really, is EP tracks from the time of the debut and two tracks from second album Belong. I’m not altogether heartbroken to hear nothing off last album Echo of Pleasure, where they channelled eighties synthpop, or their track by track cover of Fullmoon Fever, but have a lot of time for their third, Days of Abandon. Never mind, we came for the fizzy fuzzy pop of their 2007-9 sound and that’s exactly what we got. The guitars are fuzzy, the rhythm section tight, and the PA copes admirably with Peggy Wang’s keyboards and second lead/harmony/backing vocals, so essential to what made them stand out from a myriad of Mary Chain imitators.
8:30pm start – not many of us are 24 any more – and back home and ready for work the next day by 11.
The audience:
twenties to sixties, a lot of plaid shirts.
It made me think..
The Metronome is a curious venue, and that rarity, a brand new venue – offering rock and pop and comedy since 2018. The venue itself, a squarish black box, is great. The sound is clear, the stage just about high enough to see the band, and there’s enough room to move around easily. It’s part of Nottingham Trent Uni in a block with I am guessing some teaching. While the venue itself works, the foyer and bar can’t escape an institutional feel. Perhaps a slightly overdesigned European youth hostel.
I felt the same about the set order when the Mary Chain played a complete album tour a few years ago, either the first or second album. Why not do the ‘odds and sods’ in the first half, and the album in the second? Here it definitely made the second half feel slightly anti-climactic.