Bowling For Soup don’t do subtle. Or polite. Or serious. But they do know how to throw a great party. The Texan punk outfit have been regular visitors to the U.K. over past few years, both as a fourhander and as an acoustic duo featuring frontman Jaret Reddick and bass player Erik Chandler, and have established a reputation as one of the baddest, loudest, rudest, funniest and most entertaining bands around so when their ‘One Big Happy Tour’ rolled into West Yorkshire for a show at the iconic Holmfirth Picturedrome, with support from New York four-piece Patent Pending and LA duo The Dollyrots, the place was packed.
Opening the show, Patent Pending were the surprise of the night going down a storm with a tight, high energy set taking in songs such as “Anti Everything”, “Cheer Up Emo Kid” and their 2011 single, “Douchebag”. Although they’ve been on the scene for over ten years, they were new to many in the audience, but their drive and the charismatic vocals and stagecraft of lead singer Joe Ragosta quickly won them a roomful of new fans. 
Setting the tone for a night in which occasionally subversive audience participation was to play an important part, Ragosta managed to organize a communal sing-a-long and mass display of crooked finger pirate hooks to accompany “Psycho In Love” – no mean feat in a part of the country where audiences take a pride in their reputation for reticence, although his subsequent embarkation on a potentially disastrous crowd surf, during which the audience turned him round and sent him back over the barriers head first, did show that the ruthlessness and mischief of Northern crowds are still forces that should never be underestimated. Ragosta’s praise for the security man who dived to catch him and averted disaster was well deserved, although Jared Reddick’s claim that ‘this man nearly died for you tonight’ was possibly an exaggeration.
Second up The Dollyrots, Kelly Ogden on bass and vocals and Luis Cabezas on guitar, ripped through a set that included highlights from their back catalogue like “Because I’m Awesome”, “Jackie Chan” and “California Beach Boy”, as well as material from their recently released CD including “After 2012” and title track “Hyperactive”. There was less comedy and more emphasis on the music in this part of the show, but the duo are an exciting combination – Ogden’s voice and demeanour are a compelling blend of toughness and frailty, at times she seemed almost dwarfed by her bass, but her vocals were hard as nails and she can switched effortlessly from punk to pure pop with Cabezas guitar providing an excellent foil – shown to best effect on their cover of Melanie’s 1971 hit “Brand New Key”.
Sometimes songs can change as they cross the Atlantic and few will do so more than this one. In the U.S. it may be just a pleasant pop song and piece of seventies kitsch but in the U.K. there are whole other layers of meaning – the song being best known to many via the parody version “I’ve Got A Brand New Combine Harvester” by The Wurzels. Ogden had clearly heard rumours. ‘We think this is a song about roller skates, but apparently you guys think it’s about agricultural implements? Somebody’s going to explain it to me later.’ She sounded puzzled. With this amount of semiotic baggage around one might have expected that they would have had trouble selling the song in the U.K., but the way they took the original to pieces and rebuilt it as an ultra high tempo instant punk classic was one of the highlights of the show. If you haven’t heard it check it out on YouTube.
The arrival of the headliners was greeted with roars – they have established a dedicated following here in the past few years – and they launched into a set including recent material and favourites like “1985”, “Emily”, “Girl All the Bad Guys Want”, “Turbulence”, “Punk Rock 101” and finishing up with “The Bitch Song”. Along the way they also fitted in a cover of The Fountains of Wayne’s “Stacy’s Mom”, explaining that after many years of being wrongly given credit by audiences and interviewers for having written and performed it and having tried vainly to explain that it was not theirs, they had decided to simply bow to public acclaim and adopt the song.
Some recent reviews of the band’s albums have criticized them for failing to develop a more sophisticated sound and certainly they have not attempted to compete with the Green Day’s march into high concept punk opera with American Idiot or the darker indie-pop stylings of Blink 182, but to fault Bowling For Soup for failing to mature is to miss the point. Put simply, BFS cannot mature because immaturity is the beating heart of everything that they do and if they matured they would simply be a different band. They are essentially naughty schoolboys, still in shorts, still laughing at farts and pointing at tits, still uttering streams of expletive laced drivel simply because they know that whatever the naysayers would have us believe it is big and it is clever. As punk’s official Peter Pan battalion, their appearance is almost unchanged from when they broke onto the scene in 2000 with “Let’s Do It For Johnny”, same baggy shorts, same keychains, Reddick’s baby face and goofy smile still sits under the same improbable backcomb.
What it all adds up to it is a great night – funny, outrageous, dirty minded and never a dull moment – so thanks a lot for the show guys and stay naughty.
