In the sold-out basement of Sidney & Matilda, Sheffield’s ‘Lunarca’, clad in
denim shirts and Doc Martens, aptly warmed up their audience for Minds Idle,
and closed with a mosh-pit-inspiring rendition of ‘My Generation’.
The penultimate act Minds Idle sauntered onto stage. Minds Idle brought an
experimental feel by way of a fascinating range of instruments and cowboy
hats. Minds Idle had a more poppish feel than Lunarca who played before
them. The band’s particular talent for song writing was showcased in their
performance of ‘D-Day’. The lyric ‘take summer very seriously cause you
know it’s only momentary, take winter in the nuclear way, and pack up all your
necessaries, I’ll be on the front next D-day’, posits the band as operating at
the frontlines of modernity, embracing and grappling the angst of living in a
time of uncertainty. This is a familiar theme of Minds Idle’s discography and
can be found in tracks such as ‘Love in the time of the Apocalypse’. Mind’s
Idle are clearly routed in the long line of Sheffield’s illustrative lyricists. No one
song in the six-track performance felt stationary, changes of pace and sharp
turns in instrumentation encouraged the real buzz in the room.
Later in the evening I got the chance to ask lead singer Ted Mitchell which
Sheffield Venue he feels most attached to, Mitchell felt Minds Idle are ‘part of
the furniture’ at Sidney Matilda’s, Tufty who runs the downstairs venue at
Sidney’s was ‘one of the first people… to spot us and be like.Yo!, I like you
guys, come and record with me!’. Mind’s Idle had only played the one gig prior
to the 2020 lockdown and came together through the pandemic, to Mitchell
being able to start playing gigs properly was ‘exciting but a bit stifling’, having
to navigate the various tiers of the COVID pandemic by playing to audiences
confined to groups of six around their tables. Against these odds, creatively, it
‘whipped us into shape a bit’, three of the four of the band were living together
through the lockdown. Frequent acoustic jam sessions saw the band come up
with some ‘weird nebulous s**t’, this seemingly was then fused together and
polished on their way out of the lockdown, giving us Minds Idle’s imminent and
refreshing presence in the Sheffield music scene which will only expand in the
future.
Excellently picking up the mantle, the night was wrapped up with a pervasively
fun set from CVC, ‘Docking the Pay’ had everyone bouncing about.
