Beans on Toast – Gorilla, Manchester.
Folk singer, preacher and fellow outlaw, Beans on Toast slid down the hungry gullets of many Mancunians last Saturday during his late-night serving at Gorilla, Manchester. Though, before the main course could begin…
The Starter – pulled out from the dustiest shelves of Kansas is Sky Smeed – handpicked by Jay McAllister himself while coincidentally meeting at the “fittingly named” Knuckleheads bar. Dressed, not to impress with his checked shirt and cowboy hat, but rather to caress the funny bone. This country-bluegrass dish is best served to ease the initial strain of wheeling in the first round of Budweisers, 4 pounds a pop. Many voices could be heard during the first two mouthfuls of music, but by the third song – a light-hearted tale about fishing with his father – the audience finally began to digest. While introducing the song, a Jesus lookalike wearing a robot-patterned cardigan yelled “Get your rod out!”, then later just resorted to shouting “take your top off!” repeatedly. Defiantly, Smeed smiled as wide as the room, played the highly demanded ‘Bumper Sticker Song’ and ‘Talkin Medical Marijuana Blues’.
To cleanse your pallet – Tensheds mercilessly rides in on the ‘Milktrain’. A punk on a piano, singing the moodiest of augmented blues with a howl as husky as a hound. Joined by drummer, this duo tackle the 12-bar blues with tangy inflections that grants their flavour a certain uniqueness, a feat rarely accomplished with a taste so tried and tested. The Skrillex lookalike finished on an emotive version of ‘City Of Dreams’. The taste of the ballad was only conceivable due to the minor key. It’s apparent that something “ain’t easy”, but the sentimental context is left unintelligible due to the Louis Armstrong-esque zest that seasons this beverage. The instrumentation spoke words Tendsheds could not. He entertained all, no doubt.
Beans on Toast – certainly, not the usual suspect for a main course but more like the new-age pied piper of an uprising. With 2016 coming to a close – a year that lead Syrians astray, lost heroes and witnessed the wrong hands possess new powers, Jay McAllister had to start “putting the world to rights”. Not just the world either, he even had qualms with the “supermoon that somehow earned its own PR campaign”. He performed songs from new album ‘A Spanner In The Works’ but his wife Lizzy B was selling copies from the merch stand – this, before the date of official release – but you didn’t hear that here. One song, ‘I Think Everybody Should Be Terrified’ concerned a certain “vicious lying bigot in the all-important chair”, a song that isn’t featured on the album as it was written on short notice post the US election. ‘Things’ is a song that references the detrimental laws of censorship. Before a relevant verse in the song, McAllister went on a rant about the topic due to recent laws that entail the government’s scrutiny of internet porn and condemning the female ejaculation when a male’s is absent. He said,
“Fucking wankers won’t let you have a wank, I wanna know what they get off on the fucking paedos”.
To mourn the loss of 2016’s fallen heroes, Beans on Toast performed a cover of the late Leonard Cohen’s poignant ‘Everybody Knows’. Mcallister admitted that he would have performed a Guy Clarke song but he ripped it off for a song about stoners in his new album. For this cover, McAllister invited both, Sky Smeed and Tensheds back onto the stage to play along with Beans and his accomplice, Bobby Banjo. An example of genuine unification at such a time where such qualities can be forgotten, and all to celebrate a poet who spoke for a lot of the same values that Beans On Toast so passionately preaches.
It’s not as if Beans on Toast was alone with his way of thinking. The crowd was raucous to say the least that evening, angry for all the right reasons and singing with all the right emotions. The passion didn’t end at doom and gloom, however. Beans on Toast used the night as an opportunity to set the example of love after he received a request from a devoted fan – an onstage marriage proposal – she said yes. There was no encore necessary, McAllister left Gorilla and marched with willing fans up to Manchester’s highly acclaimed Big Hands to keep the party going.