I found myself in a Groundhog Day-esque cycle of conversations on Friday as I made idle chit chat with colleagues about weekend plans. Each time I told someone I was off to a gig and was then asked who I was seeing, my response of “Hey Colossus” was met with a blank look of incomprehension and then a follow-up, “So what sort of music do they play?” I struggled to answer this. “Kind of rock music, but noisy, I guess,” was my response. Not exactly articulate for someone whose day job is English teacher, but Hey Colossus are a hard band to categorise.
How do you describe the music they make? It’s a problem I am still puzzling over as the unassuming, disconcertingly normal looking members of the band take to the stage at New River Studios, a wonderful not-for-profit venue/cafe/rehearsal space in a former furniture warehouse in Manor House. It is my first time at the venue but definitely won’t be my last.
An hour or so later, as Hey Colossus finish a set which is light on between song chat, but heavy on excellent music, I accept defeat and return to my original response. They are a rock band. Heavy, experimental, inventive, but a rock band nonetheless. It is, however, rock music shorn of the posturing and free of the self-indulgent mythologising that mars much of the genre.
As soon as they start playing, the unassuming, normal looking blokes are transformed, not into rock heroes indulging in the usual stereotypes, but into single-minded purveyors of righteous noise. The basic elements of rock are there – guitar, bass, drums and vocals, but the sound is stretched to see where it will go. There’s a metronomic, kosmiche feel to many of the songs, the band whipping up a hypnotic, repetitive groove which abates only in the brief pauses between songs. The whole band is in sync with each other in an almost telepathic fashion; “tight” doesn’t quite seem to do them justice.
Present too is a persistent heaviness, at times lurking just beneath the surface and at others swaggering out to confront the listener and wash over them. Although much of the setlist is drawn from their lighter more recent albums, when played live the songs have a heft to them that they lack on record. Underpinning all of this is the rhythm section, co-founder Joe Thompson’s bass playing somehow both lithe and monolithic.
The resulting sound is transportive and cathartic, band and audience slipping into an almost meditative state together. Paul Sykes’s vocal delivery, shamanic and intense, helps the audience on this journey. So too does the intimate size of the room; musicians as fellow humans rather than distant idols is an easier concept to grasp when they are standing a few feet away from you rather than on the stage of a stadium. In a madcap scheme befitting the band’s single-minded approach, the gig was one of four Hey Colossus were scheduled to play in London over the weekend all in similarly small venues.
A lot of fuss has been made recently about the death of small venues. Too much of the discourse has focused on the role of those venues as a stepping stone for the future Coldplays of the world. But small venues are really vital because, without them we would be denied the pleasure of seeing a band like Hey Colossus, 20 years and several line up changes into their career, showing off the craft they’ve honed to perfection in that time and offering a masterclass in music that, whilst it may be of niche appeal in relative terms, matters a huge amount to those who care.
That there is still (just about) a way to make and release music on your own terms – and Thompson’s excellent Sleevenotes biography makes clear just how challenging and often utterly thankless this process has been – is a huge cause for celebration, but also something we shouldn’t take for granted. The band warrants every lazy superlative I am tempted to chuck in their direction, but I’ll try and swerve that and just say this: if you like your music heavy, uncompromising or a little bit different then there are few bands doing it better than Hey Colossus.
Words by Will Collins
Picky Bastards 
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