As I walk into the venue, there’s no imme­di­ate visual clue as to what kind of con­cert we’re about to exper­i­ence. There’s a guy in a Van­dals t-shirt, one in a Less Than Jake hoodie, a few guys in track­suits, some girls with black lip­stick — there was even a chap in suit. The first time I heard (hed) P.E., there was no such ambi­gu­ity. I was sit­ting in a friend’s liv­ing room, drink­ing Sainsbury’s rip-off ver­sion of WKD (Red Rus­sian, any­one?) listen­ing to a “metal” com­pil­a­tion CD my mate had thrown together a few weeks earlier. There, nestled among Dis­turbed, and Kill­switch Engage was (hed) P.E.‘s Bar­tender. It’s fea­tured on a num­ber of my playl­ists ever since, but it was only really in the run-up to the gig that I star­ted listen­ing to more of their stuff, and I was sur­prised at how quickly I’d lumped them in with metal bands. Hav­ing grown up in Orange County, Cali­for­nia, they spent most of their early days together play­ing along­side hard­core punk bands — and their influ­ence shows.

Still, there’s no deny­ing the fact that who­ever chose the sup­port acts had been singing from the same hymn sheet. They were both decidedly metal, and, although the first band did not impress me, the second were very, very good. Attila played an excel­lent set. As they were play­ing, I glanced over the shoulder of the girl in front of me, who was writ­ing a text. The text said, “We no likey Attila. They too coordin­ated”. I think “We no likey” means “we don’t like”, but “too coordin­ated” sounds a bit of a strange cri­ti­cism. Check them out, and make your own judgement.

(hed) P.E.‘s set was a mix­ture of two-minute hard­core punk songs, longer metal tracks, reg­gae cov­ers, and some mor­al­ising about the “vibra­tions of the world”. And it worked. The band man­aged their audi­ence per­fectly, which must have been no mean feat, given its diversity, and every song was in exactly the right place in the set list.

Even Suit Guy was skank­ing to No Woman No Cry.

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