Live Review: Stephen Evens, Hurtling + Windpipe at The Cavendish Arms, London

One last gig for 2025 and what better way to spend it than surrounded by friends? Tonight’s impressive line-up features two long-term Joyzine favourites on stage (and a fair few in the audience) at one of South London (and indeed the UK)’s loveliest little venues.

Before we get onto those established faves there’s the intriguing prospect of opening act Windpipe – a band so box fresh the only online presence we’ve been able to find is an instagram account with four posts, two of which are advertising their appearance at tonight’s show. They come recommended by tonight’s headliner, a man who’s seen plenty of South London’s finest bands come through Brixton Hill Studios (where he is the proprietor) so expectations are high.

With an unorthodox line-up of vocal, two guitars, saxophone and drums, they’re at that exciting stage of throwing ideas at the wall and seeing which ones stick, and tonight most of them do. Playing with textures and contrasts, their sound is still coagulating, and the flow of the set stutters with the constant retuning of the frontman’s guitar and a slightly timid stage presence between songs, but there is plenty to suggest that Windpipe are a band worth keeping an eye out for in the new year. Some of the best moments come when they mix spiky and smooth sounds, their use of sax and the singer’s vocal stylings at times bringing to mind the early days of previous Brixton scene graduates Black Country, New Road. We see more than enough from them tonight to be excited to hear what they’ll produce once they get into a studio, and with the band picking up regular support slots at The Windmill, they’ll likely be knocking their live show into ever more interesting shapes too.

After a glimpse of a potential future favourite, we prepare to move onto the warm embrace of the familiar with sets from two bands I’ve seen many times over the past few years, who’ve graced the stage at Joyzine nights and have commanded many a column inch within these pages. But familiar is not what either of them have in store for us tonight.

It’s been fairly quiet on the Hurtling front of late, with frontwoman Jen Macro jetting off around the world as part of My Bloody Valentine, drummer Jon Clayton welcoming a constant stream of excellent bands into his OneCat Studio in Crystal Palace and bassist Simon Kobayashi busy raising a small human. But we discover tonight that there has in fact been a flurry of activity behind the scenes, and tonight we are privileged to hear the fruits of their labours with a set largely consisting of new material, albeit with a few favourites from 2019’s Future from Here scattered amongst them for good measure.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s heard that album or encountered them live that the new songs are, without exception, stunning. They manage that fantastic fusion of sounding both complex and endlessly fascinating whist at the same time feeling utterly natural, like the improbable sequence of chemical collisions that led to life emerging from the primordial soup, pulling itself out of the ocean, hoisting itself upright and starting to hit, blow and strum things that make a pleasingly resonant sound. These songs soar and swoop, they build and tear down, they lull us into reverie then jolt us back into the moment, they are beautiful and ugly and anxious and assured and they are exactly what I need to be hearing right now. We even get a dreamnoise rendition of Slade’s ubiquitous festive classic ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ to round things off (and if the band are reading this, submissions for next year’s Joyzine Advent Calendar are very much open).

News of a new Hurtling album was always going to be greeted with excitement at Joyzine HQ, after tonight’s show I’m contemplating starting work on a time machine to cut down on the wait for its release.

Most nights I’d be pitying the band that had to follow that, but tonight is Stephen Evens‘ night and there’s never a moment of doubt that he and his band are up to the task. Striding onstage in a blue velvet jacket and white feather boa, Evens too has new music to share – a whole album’s worth, and we’re going to hear it in full tonight, bookended by two old favourites, the buzzing glam stomp of ‘Dustbin Man’ from 2020’s Employee of The Month and knock-knock joke gone gloriously punk-wonk ‘A Bee’ from last year’s Here Come The Lights.

We were given a glimpse of what is to come with a demo of album track ‘Are We Expecting Guests?’ premiered on this year’s Joyzine Advent Calendar, and for all it’s wonderfully quirky, spiky, quiet-loud genre jumping it still couldn’t prepare us for the cabinet of curiosities that would be unveiled over the course of tonight’s show. Fans of his previous work will be aware of Evens’ knack for merging the profound with the ridiculous, the personal with the political and the heartfelt with the unsettling in his lyrics, and while I’ll definitely need to sit down with the new record for a good long while to appreciate its lyrical richness, there are certainly moments of wry humour and deeply felt sentiment already apparent on first listen, the latter particularly abundant in an ode to Hurtling singer (and former Evens’ former bandmate) Jen Macro.

Musically I’ve always placed Evens on a peculiarly British lineage of slightly off-kilter, wide-eyed pop psychedelia that runs through the likes of The Kinks and Blur (particularly their earlier albums). At times there’s a nostalgic end of the pier feel of an England that never really existed, which at the same time pokes fun at that very notion or draws out the melancholy air that lies behind such imagined vistas. This is of course then followed by a fuzzy punky blast or a prog-adjacent wig out in a ludicrous time signature or some other contrary concoction of Evens’ restless creativity to ensure that you never get too cosy. And with all that going on the band never forget that, despite Evens’ cynical, world-weary stage persona, this is all supposed to be fun. So we sway and we jump and we nod our heads and we smile and we laugh and our brains fizz with pleasure as the music swirls and Evens shares stadium rock poses with guitarist Jimmy Scandal or trades between song barbs with keyboard player Josh Perl.

As the night comes to an end one thing is clear – if I hear two better albums than those trailed by today’s performances, 2026 is going to be a very good year indeed.