The Scare - NME/Radio 1 stage

Kiss Reid was like a tainted bottle of ointment, wearing a vibrant, blood red jacket that was mixed in with a sea of black that was the rest of the band. As if the initial sight of the lead singer wasn’t enough to make an impact, the fact alone that the band has two drummers is impressive. Some may say that having two drummers is just decadent and surplus to requirement, but there seemed to be a genuine telepathy between the two of them, chopping and changing beats as they raged their way through the album ‘Bats! Bats! Bats!’.

At first I was taken aback by what I was seeing – it was almost like seeing Iggy and The Stooges, only scarier… if that’s possible. Watching Reid spring backwards and forwards from stage to audience, interacting with the closest people to him, was threatening but at the same time endearing. The ambience of horror was only further perpetuated with the feeling that the band were performing in some kind of Hammer Horror graveyard, with smoke billowing around of them, obscuring the audience’s view, but adding to the mystery surrounding the charismatic rage that was being expressed.

For a man who was supposedly brought-up in a trailer by a porn-star mother, Reid has certainly developed unique social skills, casually talking to audience members mid-performance and generally winning-over the crowd with ease. Watching The Scare was tantamount to watching a pornographic film, with a strange sense of ill-ease countered by the wanting to watch more of the show and view the eventual climax – and it was worth the wait, as The Scare didn’t fail to deliver, both on an eponymous level and through their music.

James Wright