Blending electro-tinged mental music, weird outfits and a healthy disrespect for the traditional boundaries of crowd/artist separation, Dogshow, with support from local punk perverts Hot Pink Sewage, didn’t exactly take the stage at Bootleg.
This is not, as they say, my first Dogshow, nor is it Dogshow’s first trip to Blackpool – previously appearing at Bootleg in support of alien adventurers Henge in March 2024. As such a bizarre experience that I lapped up at the time, when they announced for a headline show at Bootleg again I jumped at the chance to see them. When the support act was announced to be local electro-punk perverts Hot Pink Sewage the anticipation cranked up to new levels.
Minus the usually nun-attired Miss Dolly Bones, the band announce themselves as three quarters of Hot Pink Sewage (as vocalist/keyboard vandal Kurt Dirt states, “Minus the Hot, so just Pink Sewage”) before launching into their particular brand of drum machine-driven, sleazy punk with song Live, Laugh, Loathe. Although they start out constrained by the stage barriers, it doesn’t take long for them to start lurching forwards in amongst the crowd, and an early stage mishap prompts Kurt to fling his keyboard over the barrier where it cracks open in much the way you would imagine a keyboard thrown across a room would.
Dogshow are preceded by their custom-made music station keyboard/drum machine/mini lightshow unit… thing. This is wheeled out into the middle of the dancefloor well before the set begins, prompting a number of crowd members to tentatively approach it for a closer look, pulling backwards and forwards in a manner that brought to mind the curious simian appraisal of the monolith from Kubrick’s seminal sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Eventually someone lets the dogs out and the show begins. Literally dressed as dogs (albeit anthropomorphic dogs wearing sunglasses and smoking cigarettes), the duo take their places on the apparatus (genuinely the best description for this thing) and launch into a round of extremely daft and feelgood tracks that combine addictively pulsing squashy beats, an almost conversational weirdness of vocals, and a video game/electro inspired sound that quickly latches onto you and engages you.
What strikes me about this live set isn’t just the oddity of the tunes and the (not) stage show, but just how much fun everyone is having. Everywhere you look in the crowd there are great big beaming smiles, this is just an incredibly wholesome and uplifting experience that by the end of the night has most of the crowd bouncing, spinning and conga-ing round the duo, woofing and howling like… well, like a Dogshow.
These are two acts that may differ in the vibes of their sonic output, but tick a lot of boxes that nonetheless mean they complement each other well. Defying genre, description and explanation that means the difficulty in reviewing them is not so much a matter of transcending any artistic discussion but more one of standing in incomprehension of these live performances and wondering what the hell it was you’ve just been watching, but in the best possible way. Each blending electro-tinged mental music, weird outfits and a healthy disrespect for the traditional boundaries of crowd/artist separation. All round, a very entertaining evening.
Check out what other gigs Bootleg have coming up here.
