Don’t be fooled by their name: there’s nothing green or wholesome about Cabbage. These five Mancunian miscreants are on the warpath — and it’s a journey worth following. Having already locked horns with The Sun after the newspaper had the temerity to tip them for success, the politicised punk-rockers came to the Lexington as Brexit Britain’s commentators-in-waiting.
While their world view and mortal fear of soap casts them as the Northern Fat White Family, the band they most closely resemble is early-era Arctic Monkeys. There was a similar deadpan humour to Grim Up North Korea — in which co-frontmen Lee Broadbent and Joe Martin drew parallels between life in working-class Britain and Kim Jong-un’s DPKR — and plenty of craft amid the chaos.
Occasionally, Cabbage can regress into juvenilia, hence the title of their EP, Young, Dumb and Full of… Given a cause to get behind, however, they were electric. Necroflat in the Palace’s refrain of “I was born in the NHS, I wanna die in the NHS”, was more rousing than anything Jeremy Corbyn has managed in his tenure.
For a band who claim to be inspired by G G Allin, a man famed for eating his own faeces on stage, last night was surprisingly tame. But make no mistake, Cabbage are the real deal — and 2017 just got a lot more interesting.
The Lexington, N1
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