It’s 25 years since Oldham’s Inspiral Carpets formed a third – along with the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays – of what the music press called the Madchester era’s “Holy Triumvirate”. Today, while the reformed Stone Roses drew 60,000 people to Heaton Park, the Carpets’s appeal is considerably more selective. Their bowl cuts are greyer or gone and the famous “Cool as fuck” T-shirts aren’t flying off the merchandise stand as they once did. Otherwise, though, they’re playing to more or less the same people they were the first time, who jiggle around to Madchester “top tunes” in the warm-up and greet the former Cow Records recording artists by loudly mooing.
There have been some developments in Inspiralsworld. Original singer Stephen Holt returned in 2011 after Tom Hingley – whose distinctive croon fired all the hits – rolled his carpet up for the last time. The setlist draws heavily on the new, eponymous album. It’s their first in 20 years, although the sound – built around Clint Boon’s swirling 1960s Farfisa organ, Graham Lambert’s twangy Yardbirds guitar and Martyn “Bungle” Walsh’s rumbling Stranglers bass lines – hasn’t changed a bit.
Still, nobody goes to see Inspiral Carpets expecting dubstep. Recent, typically breezy single Spitfire would have surely given them another smash hit, if this were 1990. Inevitably, the old ones are all given a nostalgic dusting down. Even a clear-as-mud sound mix and Holt’s unlikely crucifixion poses can’t hinder the likes of This Is How It Feels, Move and especially Saturn 5, fantastic pop tunes which today sound simultaneously bright-eyed, innocent and ever so slightly quaint. The Carpets exit as they came in, to a room full of love and a chorus of moos.
