Teenage Waitress | Sneakers On Now!
Heartbreakers, Southampton
1st November 2025
Dan O’Farrell attends Teenage Waitress’s homecoming album launch for the mighty third LP: ‘Upstairs To End A Dream’.
Teenage Waitress are an enchanting proposition. Musical mission of pure-voiced Daniel Ash, the band’s three wonderful albums all showcase Ash’s bold craft with songs stuffed with left-field turns and genre-hopping twists, while by no means dropping the melodic sense of the very best pop music. Within the studio, Teenage Waitress may be very a lot constructed on the collaboration between Ash and Michael Bissett – his ‘Producer with a capital ‘P’’ – as Dan places it. ‘It’s all the time been an actual workforce effort.’ The query must be requested: how will the studio wizardry of the newly-released third album – Upstairs To End A Dream – translate to the dwell area on a moist and windy Saturday night time in Southampton?
There’s a pleasing sense of anticipation as we wander upstairs to the gig-room at Southampton’s marvellously cosy Heartbreakers, a 100-cap room that has seen greater than its justifiable share of musical excellence in the previous couple of years. Teenage Waitress have generously provided this as a free gig, and there’s a heat, friends-and-family environment because the room fills up. Assist comes from the mid-life punk-japery of Sneakers On Now!, who add to the heat with a nerdy-Inexperienced-Day vibe and quick, pointed songs about gardening, videogaming from 1993 to 1997 and the thrill of being over 40 – full with the lyric ‘I’m so drained on a regular basis!’ repeated again and again. We really feel you, brother!
Teenage Waitress enter after a passionate speech from BlackStar Data supremo Fran, who offers a touchingly private enchantment that proudly proclaims his religion in Ash’s expertise and the glory of Upstairs To End A Dream. A tinkling intro-tape greets the emergence of the 5-strong band – fetching in a Ghostbusters-esque uniform of colored boiler-suits – and so they get straight to work with a meaty model of the brand new album’s opening observe, Sq. One.
That is the third time that I’ve seen Teenage Waitress, and the impact of listening to Dan Ash begin to sing is all the time the identical: a grin-inducing shock on the purity of his high-tenor voice. It’s a stunning instrument – completely suited to the twisted, melodic pop music that its proprietor creates. It’s all the time a mug’s recreation making an attempt to match voices, however the closest I can are available my private listening expertise could be Colin Blunstone in full Time of the Season impact, with a splash of Glenn Tilbrook for an earthier observe.
Ash’s voice is all of the extra startling as his stage persona creates a pleasingly jarring distinction. He’s in all probability sick of the comparability, however when you can think about an AI-created video for the immediate Daniel Radcliffe fronting a re-formed model of Squeeze after being kicked off the filming of Goblet Of Hearth for taking magic mushrooms behind Hagrid’s cottage…in boiler fits, then you definitely’d be near the visible majesty.
For the second tune – the mighty Blue-Tick Burning – a uncooked, sincere and devilishly-catchy tackle OCD and thwarted ambition – Ash jettisons his guitar and stalks the stage just like the tormented ghost of a Jarvis Cocker nonetheless ready for his Widespread Individuals second. It’s intelligent and affecting stuff: existential angst smuggled inside a Computer virus of toe-tapping tunefulness.
All through the set, the band sound muscular and spectacular, with particular point out to Chris Hann’s genre-straddling keyboard work. In my follow-up inquiries to Dan, I questioned if there was a rigidity between the technical complexity of the studio recordings and the need of a extra pragmatic set-up on stage, however he was adamant that each had been equally necessary to him: “I really like having a dwell model AND a studio model. I really like…the attractive musical tangents that the remainder of the band will go off in typically, we purposely go away house for these moments”.
There’s actually a growing looseness and swing to the total band’s mojo, and you can begin to listen to the dwell chemistry take flight throughout yet-to-be-released Watching The Bridesmaids and older classics Child Blue and Trak!Trak!Trak!, nonetheless Ash’s ‘favorite child’ of all his songs. Ash’s onstage banter additionally helps, alongside a really humorous Jools Holland joke and a number of references to Chas And Dave, he calls again to expressions of his need to personal a piano and cat earlier within the set by spending the beginning of the encore serenading a stuffed moggy on a toy keyboard.
Alongside the self-deprecating humour, the viewers laps up each adventurous change of time signature and key, browsing the waves of the decade-hopping decadence of the tune smithery. Dan credit his love of David Bowie and Elvis Costello for his fixed quest for recent concepts, and this (at instances, prog-like) ambition offers Teenage Waitress an ‘not possible to pigeonhole’ relevance and a modernistic, cut-up-and-collage really feel which serves them effectively. There are components of 60s beat-pop, layers of ‘70s singer-songwriter precision and shimmers of rather more modern pop-fizz. In less-capable palms, this might all really feel an excessive amount of, however right here all of it works superbly.
It’s head-spinning, ear-pleasing stuff and – judging by the queue on the merch-table after the gig – sounds that shall be reverberating by means of many a family over the months to come back.
~
Teenage Waitress play:
twenty first Feb: Folklore Rooms, Brighton – Tickets right here
eleventh March: The Bedford, London – Tickets right here
Discover Teenage Waitress on Fb, Twitter and Instagram
Iain Key’s album evaluation of ‘Upstairs To End A Dream’ is right here
All phrases by Dan O’Farrell. Extra writing by Dan might be discovered at his creator’s archive. Dan can be on Instagram as @DOF_AND_THE_DIFFERENCE_ENGINE
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