My first time seeing Let’s Eat Grandma: a delightfully spirited and idiosyncratic show with a sadly muted crowd.

Sandwiched in between my two Mark Owen gigs this week in October 2022, I found myself finally venturing out to see this duo of girls I’d admired for more than four years. Let’s Eat Grandma first caught my attention in 2018 with their stridently shouty and off-kilter masterpiece “Hot Pink” and its parent album “I’m All Ears”. You can read my mini-review of the former on this early post on this blog, and see me rambling on about the latter in this early video on my YouTube channel.

Impressive as these were, they could not prepare me for the sheer scope and brilliance of 2022’s follow-up “Two Ribbons”. This album manages to capture all the joys and heartaches that come with close, life-long friendships with a precision and beauty of expression that is astonishing for two women still so very young. Combined with their uncanny sense for stirring and bewitching melodies, it was a stand out album in a year full of great music.

So it was finally time for me to experience them live, and to visit the majestic venue Koko for the first time since I saw Delays there in 2008. Slightly weary from my recent trip to Manchester for Mark Owen, I set out a little later than perhaps I should have and arrived just as the support band were finishing. There was already quite a dense crowd of what seemed to be mostly 30-somethings, and I found myself a spot towards the back of the downstairs area.

The girls came on just after nine and were as wonderful as I’d expected: full of high spirits, both in great voice, and as in sync with each other as you’d expect for two people who’d been friends since the age of four. They had some technical hiccups during the opening track, the vibrantly celebratory “Happy New Year”, which meant a couple of restarts, but apart from this, it was a delightfully uplifting and fun set full of highlights mostly from their second and third albums. In particular it was great to hear “Hot Pink” in all its shouty yet melodic glory, and “Two Ribbons” was beautiful, full of yearning melancholy about complicated friendships.

On the downside, it was a short set – only just over an hour – and the crowd left something to be desired. I got the impression that the bulk of the crowd were just there to witness the latest trendy band in order to impress their friends with it later, rather than actually get immersed in the joyful idiosyncrasies of the girls’ tunes. It made me hope that Let’s Eat Grandma have a proper hit soon so they can get the audience of screaming, obsessive teens that they deserve.

Sadly, that has yet to happen, and here in 2024 the band are somewhat quiet, with no whisper that new music may be on the horizon. Hopefully, they are lying low making their next album, and will return before too long with a world-conquering smash that will see them propelled into the limelight they deserve.