There are certain concerts you walk into already knowing you’re going to enjoy. Monday night’s show at Drizzly Grizzly was one of those for me. For a Monday evening, the room was properly packed, and that was reassuring in itself. Gdańsk still has people willing to get out of the house at the beginning of the week, have a few beers and listen to loud music when there is something worth seeing. As simple as that sounds, it is actually quite encouraging.
I’ve been following Danziger for a few years now, so seeing them on the bill was a good reason to be there in itself. They may be a Gdańsk band, but they are not some obscure local act that only plays to the neighbours. Over the years they have built a solid reputation beyond the Tri City and become a familiar name on the Polish punk scene, sharing stages with bands such as The Casualties, Authority Zero, The Analogs and Moskwa. Their music sits somewhere around melodic punk, alternative rock and post punk, although they seem quite happy to leave the exact categorisation to everyone else.
For me, though, it is much simpler than that. I’ve followed them for years because they are friendly, they make good music and they put on a good show. There is no great mystery to it and no need to manufacture one. Danziger came on, played their set and were as good as expected, and as good as usual. Sometimes that is exactly what you want from a band you’ve come to trust.
Then came The Rumjacks, and I have to admit that they had me before they had even played a note. I’ve always had a weakness for Irish music, I’ve always loved punk rock, and when the two are thrown into the same pot, I’m hardly going to complain about the result. The real question was whether the live show would live up to the version I had already constructed in my head after years of hearing the band. Thankfully, there was never really any doubt once they started.
The Rumjacks have found a combination that sounds completely natural, with the rougher energy of punk sitting comfortably alongside Irish melodies and traditional instrumentation. Nothing about it feels forced, and that is probably one of the reasons it works so well. You can hear the pub, the street, the punk club and the folk tradition all sitting somewhere inside the same songs, but the band never seem particularly interested in explaining any of it. They simply play it, and the mixture does the rest.
They also seemed genuinely pleased to be back in Poland, something that came up repeatedly during the evening rather than being reduced to the obligatory bit of stage flattery that every touring band eventually learns. They spoke warmly about the country and its place in their history, and there was a sense that Poland means something to them beyond being another stop on a European tour. That was picked up by the audience too, although I have to admit that I expected a little more physical chaos from the crowd. There was some pogoing and some crowdsurfing, but given the music and the number of people packed into Drizzly Grizzly, I had expected considerably more people to lose their minds.
Perhaps it was Monday. Perhaps Gdańsk was simply being unusually well behaved.
The set itself certainly gave everyone enough reasons to misbehave. Hearing “Lizzie Borden” was particularly amusing because Netflix had just released its new series about the infamous axe wielding woman, so suddenly there she was again, appearing in the middle of a Rumjacks set in Gdańsk. It was one of those completely accidental bits of timing that makes you smile because, for once, reality has managed to write a better joke than you could.
But it was the final song that really stayed with me.
“I’ll Tell Me Ma” is one of those traditional Irish songs that seems to have existed forever, at least if you’ve spent enough time in Irish pubs. I’ve heard different versions of it over the years when I lived in Ireland, but hearing it played by The Rumjacks at the end of this particular night brought back something much more specific than just the memory of the song. It reminded me of that easy, slightly reckless feeling that comes with a good night in an Irish pub, when everything seems lighter than it did a few hours earlier and nobody is particularly interested in worrying about tomorrow.
It was a bloody good way to finish the evening.
