This summer’s bop… the Moldy Peaches!
- Jan 3, 2025
- 2 min read
Carrying on this theme of music, it’s fair to say that this was mostly a summer of musical returns, starting with something really exciting… the return of the Moldy Peaches, who played their first UK gig for 22 years! If that didn’t make it enough of an occasion, the New York indie band came playfully attired in sailor suits, Super Mushroom hats and zebra costumes – a nod to the band’s love of dressing-up.
The whole concert was like a ‘warm hug’, wrote one reviewer, ‘a super-inclusive celebration of feeling different, being a bit (or very) weird.’ Alternatively, he said, it was ‘group therapy’ for anti-folk ‘alt-nerds’.
For any non-’alt-nerds’ out there, the Moldy Peaches emerged from New York’s early 2000’s anti-folk scene. Revelling in what the Roundhouse (where the Peaches played) describes as their ‘lo-fi production, sing-song melodies and unvarnished emotional vulnerability’, the band are made up of Kimya Dawson and Adam Green, who, rather gloriously, told the appreciative crowd how they first crossed paths, when, seven years her junior, the thirteen-year-old Adam used to come into the store where she worked and pester her to sing songs. This fits with a previous interview in The Guardian when Adam described encountering Kimya at an open mic night: ‘I was playing these sad grungy teen-angst folk songs, Kimya was reading a poem about finding corn kernels in her poop. We crossed paths again when she started working at a record store in my hometown. I used to bring my guitar to the shop and we'd write Moldy Peaches together.’
Most people will know the Moldy Peaches through the song ‘Anyone Else But You’ which plays at the end of Juno, a 2007 film directed by Jason Reitman. But their one-off eponymous debut album remains something of a cult classic, and, according to Adam Green, continues to be ‘passed from locker room to locker room’, encapsulating what The Guardian describes as ‘teenage outsiderdom… social awkwardness, gleeful energy, playground-like chants, [and] stoner nonsense’.
As an ‘alt-nerd’ myself, the concert was a giddy, heart-warming, joyous return to form, with the night ending on a rousing, jolly note, as the whole crowd bopped and exploded to the Juno hit, singing the words right back at them.
‘You’re a part-time lover and a full-time friend / The monkey on your back is the latest trend / I don’t see what anyone can see in anyone else, but you..’
‘We both have shiny, happy fits of rage / You want more fans. I want more stage / I don’t see what anyone can see in anyone else, but you…’
‘London, we love you!’ Kimya Dawson called out, telling us how she felt more at home in the UK capital than practically anywhere else in the world.
It was clear by the reception that the audience felt the same way too.
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