Lambrini Girls @ Saint Luke's, Glasgow, 9 Apr

A Lambrini Girls live show is a wild and wonderfully mad live experience. Their show embodies the same playful chaos as their critically acclaimed debut album, Who Let the Dogs Out, and while the album did a good job of committing the group’s scuzzy sound and shouty ferocious lyrics to record, the live environment is where Lambrini Girls are most fully realised.

The Brighton duo are made up of guitarist and vocalist Phoebe Lunny and Lilly Macieira, who provides the fuzzy distorted bass that's the bedrock of Lambrini Girls’ vintage punk sound. Lunny loves playing with the crowd, treading the line between shiny fun frontwoman and rallying political preacher; it’s a vibe she switches up throughout tonight's packed Glasgow show.  

“Who’s been to Brighton?” she asks the crowd at one point, which is met with modest cheers. “It’s so nice, isn’t it? It’s so beachy and inclusive.” The crowd cheers more, before Lunny changes gears. “But it also has a problem with ABUSE! and SEXUAL ASSAULT!” The heaviness of the sentiment is the perfect on-ramp to one of the group’s early tracks, Boys In the Band, a suitably furious take on misogyny and secrecy in the music industry.


Image: Lambrini Girls @ Saint Luke's, Glasgow, 9 Apr by Elliot Hetherton

This lurch between silly and serious gives the show an urgency and adds heft to the group’s political messaging. Before performing Bad Apple (a song about police brutality), Lunny encourages the audience to boo the police and join in with a “When I say 'fuck', you say 'the police'” chant. Making their way onto the floor, she tell the audience to back off until there's a circle of floor space around them. “Now imagine I’m a cop! I’m a cop, guys. You hate me!” Chaos ensues as the audience ram back towards them. Lunny eventually emerges minutes later in a crowd-surf drifting back towards the stage.

During a Lambrini Girls show, the line between the stage and the crowd is entirely blurred. Lunny has the audience at their command, swirling them into a circle pit with the turn of a finger; at one point the crowd even hold Lunny aloft in a standing position that she’s almost at eye level with the balcony. Later, she instructs the crowd to form a human pyramid and volunteers quickly emerge, climbing on top of one another on Saint Luke’s sticky floor.

The pair close the show with Who Let the Dogs Out’s final track, Cuntology 101. It’s something of an outlier in the Lambrini Girls arsenal – a synthy pop call-and-response bop that hints at a more mainstream sensibility. It’s easy to imagine a song this catchy taking the cult punk duo to higher heights, if only it didn’t say cunt, like, 50 times.