Review: Frost*, Thekla

What do you do for fun when your gainful employment is writing and producing three-minute pop hits for the likes of Atomic Kitten, Morcheeba, Katy Perry and Ronan Keating (probably harder than it seems)? Why, get together with your mates and purge your soul with progressive rock epics, of course. Occasional Gary Barlow collaborator Jem Godfrey won his Ivor Novello Award for Shayne Ward’s That’s My Goal rather than services to prog, which is a bit like giving Orson Welles a gong for his sherry ads instead of Citizen Kane but is doubtless better for the bank balance.

The Thekla is packed for this rare show by his unprolific Frost* (the asterisk is silent and is some kind of legal thing to avoid confusion with another band, rather than an affectation), who’ve managed to record just three albums in ten years in between all their other commitments, somehow finding time to split up twice along the way. But first, as if to signal that this will be an evening of prog of the pomposity-free variety, it’s The Two Twats – aka Godfrey and his partner in musical crime John Mitchell of It Bites. Recast tonight as Twats With Bats for reasons too cheesy to explain, they spend half an hour or so running through back catalogue bits’n’bobs on keyboards (Godfrey) and guitar (the much under-rated Mitchell), interspersed with plenty of playful banter and a quite extraordinary amount of gurning. Amid all the tomfoolery, the duo manage an exquisite unadorned version of It Bites’ The Tall Ships and a couple of stripped-down Frost* songs, including Lights Out, that didn’t make it into the full band set.

If you thought the arsing about was going to end there, think again. With four accomplished musicians on stage, including Level 42 guitarist Nathan King on bass and Craig Blundell on drums, there’s twice as much fun being had. Even the audience feel obliged to join in. “Can you make it a bit louder and a bit proggier?” quips one wag after the eardrum-rattling, fiendishly complex, Vocoder-augmented Signs, which is probably the closest Frost* get to prog-metal. “That was in 5/4, you fucker!” exclaims Godfrey. “I was being ironic,” asserts the heckler in a slightly smaller voice. “Right,” continues Godfrey, having threatened to do Whole Again (the Atomic Kitten hit he penned), “here’s a 31 minute song about dying.”

He’s not kidding, as they proceed to play all six parts of the Sunlight suite that forms the centrepiece of new album Falling Satellites, which runs the gamut from catchy melodic rock (Closer to the Sun) to the full-on multiple keyboard prog assault of the splendidly titled Rage Against the Dying of the Light Blues in 7/8 and even veers into what sounds a little like ELP and Duke’s Travels/Duke’s End-era Genesis on occasion.

For all their relentless horseplay, Frost* deliver the music magnificently, the real surprise being how well it all works in a live setting given Godfrey’s penchant for kitchen sink studio trickery. His high-pitched voice blends superbly with Mitchell’s gruffer tones, while King adds an extra dimension to those three-part vocals. Indeed, it’s fascinating to observe how much of Godfrey’s day job pop sensibility bleeds into his prog. Is it really heresy to point out that the gorgeous vocal harmonies of first encore Black Light Machine could be lifted out of this convoluted arrangement performed so expertly by a bunch of middle-aged lags and repurposed as a number one hit for some shiny-faced boy band?

All photos by Mike Evans

Read more: Metal & Prog Picks – August 2016