Tubes on strike and the heavens opening couldn’t keep wild horses away from Camden – and by wild horses, we mean the fans who brought their feverish energy to London for rising Scottish legends Dead Pony. Having taken the nation by storm on their Eat My Dust! tour, they close out their run with a sold-out show at The Underworld, the last 2 weeks of non-stop moving about barely making a dent in their enthusiasm and gusto.
With cries of “here we, here we, here we fucking go!” echoing from the front row, Dead Pony’s instrumentalists bounded onto the stage, ramping up the crowd for a deservedly thunderous welcome for singer Anna Shields. Before she’d even had a chance to kick the night off with title track ‘Eat My Dust!’, the mosh pits were in full swing and yells at full volume. Shields skipped and two-stepped across the stage, briefly stopping to take her shoes off due to the rising heat in the packed room, as guitarist Blair Crichton wheeled about the stage and repeatedly gestured for wider circle pits. He needn’t have worried as the crowd understood the assignment and passed with flying colours, losing their shit for ‘Freak Like Me’ and ‘RAINBOWS’, and a heavy cover of Alanis Morissette‘s ‘You Oughta Know’ that had fans shouting back in nostalgia.
Pausing to talk about their tour to date, Shields and Crichton asked the crowd if they would let their other audiences beat their energy levels or if they had more to give, the crowd drowning out their demands with a deafening war crime and renewed ferocity as Dead Pony launched into fan favourite ‘MANA’, bassist Liam Adams aiming his bass at the crowd like a gun and cocking it back with the track’s sound effects as the audience threw themselves in the air or at each other in a gloriously expanding mosh pit.
Switching up between beloved new and classic tracks, Dead Pony gave us a set that showcased the absolute best of their growing career, even to the end when Shields left it to the audience to decide their final song of the night, pointing out that it wasn’t called the Eat My Dust tour for nothing and ripped into the title track for the second time that evening, the excitement palpable for the last chance to completely lose all sense.
Dead Pony said “let’s have some fun” and we damn well did.