BOW WOW WOW @ 229 THE VENUE, LONDON

Touring under the name ‘Annabella Lwin of the original Bow Wow Wow’ as the official incarnation of the band and to differentiate from any impersonators, frontwoman Annabella Lwin brought back their ’80s new wave music as a headline act after nine years to a live audience albeit without the late, great Matthew Ashman, original guitarist of the band. She now has her own band formed of Lightnin’ Woodcock (guitar), Menno Verbaten (bass) and John Montgomery (drums), having previously played on support for other headliners in recent years such as The Beat.

Performing from Bow Wow Wow’s back catalogue, the band opened on their jumpy debut single B-side, ‘Sun, Sea & Piracy’, backed up on vocals by brash male voices against the chugging Burundi beats, which were also replicated with a more tinny sound in 1981 single ‘W.O.R.K (N.O Nah, No No My Daddy Don’t)’ along with psychobilly guitar. They then performed the tribal rhythmics of Bow Wow Wow’s debut 1980 single (and the world’s first-ever cassette single), ‘C·30 C·60 C·90 Go!’, which in part was written by the band’s manager Malcolm McLaren whom Lwin paid homage to. She also relayed how she had been discovered by a talent scout in a drycleaners where she was working, at the age of 13.

The tribal beats continued in the Caribbean vibe of ‘See Jungle’ with surf guitar before the liquid purring strings of underrated pop song ‘Baby, Oh No’. Lwin then paid tribute to Ashman, dedicating ‘The Man Mountain’ to him; a jangly folk acoustic track from the band’s second debut album, ‘When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going’.

Lwin left the stage to allow her band to play the fabulous instrumental, ‘The Joy of Eating Raw Flesh’, including a stripped down drum part led by races of psychedelic, garage guitar. Wanting to showcase more of her forward thinking songwriting, she included some of her solo material in the set in the way of ‘Do What You Do’ from 1984: opening with a fretboard scratch, her performance revealed this song really needs to be re-recorded from its release as a dance track because of Lwin’s aromatic soulful voice against a sexy, dark funk rhythm, making it one of the strongest in the set.

Bow Wow Wow moved onto the homophonic dizzying gallop of ‘Aphrodisiac’ with its reverberating guitar riff – a song that was used in the soundtrack of the film ‘Marie Antoinette’ – and finished their show on the band’s two 1982 top-ten hits, the cutely clumsy ‘Go Wild in the Country’ featuring Lwin’s outlandish shrieks and their famous cover of ‘I Want Candy’, the latter with quiet moments of guitar noise feedback.

25/10/25: Bow Wow Wow @ 229 the venue, London.