Mamas Gun

With a new album, Dig!, in tow, the five-piece British funk/soul hipster band Mamas Gun are back in Italy, at the Blue Note club in Milan, with two shows tonight. I’m at the early show, and there’s a good vibe in the lounge on this warm autumn Thursday evening.

Since their debut album, Routes to Riches, back in 2009, there has always been a certain interest surrounding their music and live shows, from critics and punters alike. Since the days of Average White Band, white guys have tried to pull off black-guy pop/funk with varying degrees of success and popularity. Why? Because it’s great fun to play and to hear, and it pulls on the heartstrings and mind-chills, creating an almost inebriating, cosmic effect that inevitably leaves you with a smile on your face, whether you’re on or off the stage.

Of course, like AWB, to be great you need at least one of these white guys to be magic. Mamas Gun have the amazing Andy Platts: lead singer, composer and producer, whose work with Young Gun Silver Fox is stellar. He has also forged songwriting partnerships with the likes of Rod Temperton, John Oates and, indeed, Brian Jackson of Gil Scott-Heron and The Bottle fame, who co-writes the title track, “Dig!” on the new album.

With any group of guys who start a band from scratch and embark on a journey together, a special chemistry is formed. And though this is hardly breakthrough music in the pop/soul field, the heart beats proudly, and the camaraderie on the boards — and probably off them as well — is what makes the difference.

I want to see bands — bands that like being and performing together and actually mean it. Look at Oasis now compared to 1998, per se when I saw them here in Milan. No comparison. They are much better now. People want musicians on stage who want you and me to have fun.

Mamas Gun are Andy Platts on lead vocals and guitar, Dave Oliver on keyboards, Terry Lewis on guitar, Cameron Dawson on bass, and Chris Boot on drums.

I’m sorry to get all personal, but I just loved being in that room with this band. There is no showboating. Complexity can be endearing in the right hands, but often it becomes endless and confusing. Mamas Gun keep things simple, allowing you to soak up the melodies, listen and relax. There is space in the songs, with none of that badgering or hounding of the senses that can sometimes come from musicians determined to prove just how clever they are.

It’s cool. It’s fun. It grooves.

Maybe some of the songs can seem familiar, as they undoubtedly borrow from their peers, but Mamas Gun have an added strength in the shape of Andy Platts. He is simply phenomenal. He makes everything seem effortless, with an ability to meander between octaves and weave clever, genial vocal melodies through every song he sings.

Technically brilliant, for sure, but that’s never enough. He makes you — and me — want to sing because, listening to him, it all seems so easy. Obviously, it isn’t.

He is the best white soul singer I’ve heard since ’80s Daryl Hall in a live setting. There… I’ve said it. Alot of the Brit soul funk acid jazz outfits I love have often had female singers as lead and at the helm or no singers at all. It’s not easy to cut it, out front as a male soul singer.

The set draws soley from Dig! and Golden Days, their 2018 release, leaving little doubt as to where the band’s current affections lie from their back catalogue.

Highlights include “You Make My Life (A Better Place)”, with its masterful band performance, “First Time (In a Long Time)”, the brilliant “DIG!”, the band jam on “Phantom Love”, and the cover of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Lady Day and John Coltrane”.

The latter is completely owned by Andy, who demonstrates something Daryl Hall has always understood: the really gifted soul singers can inhabit somebody else’s song and make it their own. George Michael was another — and will always belong in the conversation about great white soul singers — although his musical leanings were perhaps more inclined towards crooning and Black American soul than straight white soul.

Closing with the great single “This Is the Day”, this was the first date of a 40-date tour taking Mamas Gun across Europe, China, Japan, the USA and Canada, and of course including gigs in the UK for in Bristol, Leeds, London, Manchester and Glasgow around the end of October.

If you want to have some fun and hear a proper live British soul band, it’s worth taking aim at Mamas Gun and getting them firmly in your sights.

Setlist
* The Hardest Yards
* Food for the Flames
* I Need a Win
* You Make My Life (A Better Place)
* We
* Living on Mercy
* First Time (In a Long Time)
* DIG!
* Phantom Love
* Strangers on a Street
* Joy

Encore
* Golden Days
* Lady Day and John Coltrane
* This Is the Day