There were points when the lights hit Bobby and he looked like a back-alley preacher mid-ecstasy. Arms outstretched, palms up, soaking in the devotion. Not grateful. Gratefulness is for the meek. This was ritual. As Don’t Fight It, Feel It bled out of the speakers like sweat from cracked neon, the floor shaking—acid house undertones dragging us into a gospel-drenched vision, our limbs not dancing, exactly, more… caught in something. Twitching in place, ecstatic, loose-jointed. Gillespie didn’t even need to say it. We’d already surrendered.
Jailbird ripped the roof clean off—filthy blues strut, leather-clad swagger, a riff that swaggered like it owned the place and had the eviction notice in its back pocket. Gillespie didn’t sing it so much as sneer it, hips loose, tambourine arm slicing the air like a blade. Later, I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have drifted out like smoke from under a locked door. The horns hung in the air, warm and tired, like they’d seen too much. Gillespie stepped back from the edge and let the rhythm do the remembering. A few people closed their eyes. Someone swayed wrong, off-beat, like the song had rerouted their spine. It didn’t ask for anything. Just stayed there, heavy and quiet, like a bruise you forgot you had.
And then Swastika Eyes came, and the room stiffened, clenched, exhaled fire. This wasn’t a song, it was a broadcast from inside a riot van. Red strobes, sharp angles. Something in the way the synths punched through the air felt punitive. Not catharsis—judgment. The crowd didn’t cheer so much as bark. Fists were up. Someone screamed. Maybe it was me.
And then—no transition—just a collapse into Movin’ On Up, and suddenly you’re weightless, hovering above the rubble of your own rebellion. The tempo lifted like prayer. Gillespie floated into it, a messianic silhouette lit gold. He’s not showy. Just tuned. The kind of frontman who leads not by force but by vibe—lean, wiry, vibrating at frequencies designed to shake ideology out of bones. “I was blind, now I can see”—the lyric didn’t land like metaphor. It felt earned. The crowd sang it back not like fans, but like survivors.
Midway through Higher Than the Sun—or was it before? Or part of Loaded pretending to be Higher Than the Sun in drag?—the floor became liquid. Everything was too slow, too vivid. The drums melted into long-distance radio transmissions, half-remembered revolutions. Someone lit something. No one cared. The lights strobed pink, then ultraviolet. I remember thinking: this is what it must’ve felt like when sound first discovered light. The music wasn’t loud. It was total.
Gillespie moved like he was carving air. A dancer in someone else’s dream. Sometimes you caught him snapping back to himself, like he’d just remembered we were here. Sometimes you caught yourself not caring. It wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about us. The band was the sermon. We were just the congregation who showed up and found salvation in sweat.
And then there was Loaded. Not a drop, not a rise. A becoming. It started somewhere in your chest, and by the time you noticed it was in your feet, your mouth was already open and shouting. Not words. Just release. The guitar licks skipped like vinyl, teasing memory, and the rhythm section—Jesus, the rhythm section—tight enough to cut steel. No ego. No solo. Just propulsion. Like being hurled down a motorway in a convertible with no driver, yelling into the wind because that’s the only way to stay sane.
And Rocks—god, Rocks was nuclear. It came in like it’d been waiting all night behind a steel door, and when it hit, it hit. Dirty glam swagger, bluesy sleaze, Gillespie sneering like a man who’d lived every line. The whole room went stupid. Arms, hair, boots in the air. The guitars were feral. The chorus cracked something open in my spine. If Movin’ On Up was salvation, Rocks was the sin you crawl back to the next morning, smiling. It didn’t end. It detonated. The house lights came up before the last note died, as if they were trying to erase it before it could spread.
Outside, the air tasted wrong. Or maybe we were just different now. Someone said something about how tight the band were. Someone else just laughed. I walked for ten minutes before I remembered I had feet. No encore could’ve topped that. No words can close it.
Still vibrating. Still loaded.
Words & Photos by Richard Isaac
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