Sometimes the best way to understand the present and imagine the future is to delve into the past. That is, if you can manage to not get stuck there like Doctor Strange in a multiverse of madness or indeed many of us algorithmically bear-trapped into reliving our teenage years by Spotify and its self-soothing, ultimately dissatisfying canonic playlist spoonfeeding.
Iraina Mancini is a musician who has the kind of impeccable taste in 60s and 70s records that has made her an in-demand DJ as well as a cult hero who gleefully revels in the cream of those decades as a magic mix of Bardot/Gainsbourg’s Bonnie and Clyde, the blood red Giallo scream queens and Nancy Sinatra with her walking boots on.
And yet, as this show at the Social shows, this is passion over pastiche, and she is possessing a batch of new songs that will make up her second album which represent an exciting leap forward.
Mancini, backed by Adam Chetwood on guitar, Marco Ninni on drums and Ben Simon on bass, showed an easy command of a space filled with a crowd who were, tellingly, 30% mods, 20% skins (or possibly bald mods) and 50% young and cool rock girls. What You Doin’ melded bright pop with garage rock, while one of her standout singles Undo the Blue was a reminder that all the best psychedelic-psych tunes had melancholy laced through them, as if knowing that the love revolution was going to fail somewhere in Altamont.
But it was the new ones that hit hard. Tonight was about fleeting love, a delicious confessional that suggests working intimacy into her rock n roll glamour may be the key for her . Another newie, I Wonder, occupied a dreamy place that built into cinematic peak. And best of all, Burning Hearts, was an epic that saw Mancini’s vocal soar as the song built from delicacy into an addictive raucous rabble-rouser.
And its that tension between chaos and control that feels exciting here, of Mancini stretching beyond expectations into fresh territory. You feel she’s surfing a surging audience here, one where young generations are as rock literate as the older ones, joining her on the throwback/throwforward balance, the familiar and the unfamiliar making it all a communion in a music stirring a strange, intoxicating brew.
Is the future the past, or is the past the future? Mancini is exploring the answers here, and somewhere within it she’s bringing a good time to the present.
