Where: Stoke-on-Trent
Venue: The Graduate
What started out as a quiet Saturday night, ended with a
nice tuneful ending because Punchline did pretty good for their headline show. Punchline are a Stoke on Trent pop punk band, they
haven't been going for that long but they already bagged themselves a smaller
headliner. The band consists of Shannon Whetnall on vocals,
Matt Wade and Rob Hoofe on guitar, Alec Wheildon on bass, and Chloe Griffiths on
drums.
It was at a small pub called The Graduate, with an attendance
mainly by students studying at Staffordshire University. The drinks are cheap and they were flowing as well,
which adds more to the temptation of seeing the acts. Tonight it was nice seeing some variety of people
from older generations attending this gig. It may not have been a fully packed out venue but
it was still good enough for a free entry on a Saturday night, it's a shame I
didn't have any peanuts.
There was only one support act tonight, that came
from young acoustic musician Holly Pender. She was pretty decent, with nice soft tunes which,
due to some lyrical content, have personal meaning to her. She was delightful to watch, giving a warning about
saying the word “fuck” in a song, I barely see bands or musicians do this at
gigs so it was a polite gesture and stopped me from buying peanuts I was that
intrigued. After swapping guitars throughout her set she then
whacked out a harmonica and played it with a charmful and soft instrumental
flow, which caught attention from the crowd. Sadly a lot of people were talking during most of
the set, she may have been support (which I know some people are half arsed
about) but she deserved more attention.
On come Punchline a few moments after that, already
set up and using the PA system themselves as there wasn't a sound engineer
present.
The sounds of the instruments were near enough spot
on, one of the guitars was only a little bit louder than the other one but it
wasn't a prominent bother during the set. The sound of the drums were sharp and the snare was
punchy, which is pretty perfect considering the pop punk genre of the band. One slightly major thing that was wrong with the
levels was the vocal microphone, it was sometimes a struggle to hear the
vocalist, Shannon Whetnall, sing the lyrics to some of the songs. However, this matter was dealt with roughly through
half of the set as it was good to hear the singer's voice to its finest. Popping in some originals was a good move; they
were all catchy and quite cheery and easy to sing along to considering the
audience of the genre. One of them was called "Why So Serious" that seemed
to be an attention grabber and showed the loyal fans out of the attendance as
they were bouncing around enjoying themselves. Even though the vocalist's performance during the song
was brilliant, when a song ended she didn't supply much entertainment as to
speaking to the crowd until the second half of their set.
The bassist, Alec Wheildon, supplied the entertainment
half of the time by playing an amusing yet recognisable tune to which the crowd
would smirk or laugh at when a song ends and the rest of the members prepare
for the next song. Half of the set were covers of songs; the ones that
brought the most attention were cover songs of commercial songs. Fusing the punk sound with the commercial music
element was a perfect match, both genres are easy to sing along to (I only sing
to commercial music when I'm drunk as when I'm sober I think it's fucking
shit.) The one that stood out was the cover of Taio Cruz's
“Dynamite” that was pretty decent, most importantly it was sang nicely with
added audience encouragement. They had two Paramore covers, which is quite
typical from a band of this genre, but despite on “Still Into You” the vocal
mic was a bit quiet they pulled off the covers well and pleased the crowd, a
few of the people even sang along to the songs. Even though it's quite difficult to pull apart the
connection of Punchline and Paramore due to the similarities, they don't intend
to try and be like Paramore when it comes to performance, they are their own
little unit.
Aside from technical difficulties due to a lack of
a sound engineer, that didn't weigh down the fact that it was a good
performance and Punchline seem encouraging. Their next show they will be supporting In The
Cards at The Box in Crewe, maybe they could flourish further, and perhaps put
more original material into their set, it sounds promising.
~Matt C