Ocean Colour Scene's Moseley Shoals at 30: Heritage Without Apology

Thirty years on, OCS play their breakthrough album in full at the Hammersmith Odeon. What arrives is not nostalgia management but a band still operating at their ceiling.

Simon Fowler opens by noting that Moseley Shoals is 'only 30 years ago,' and you can hear the disbelief in it. But the math is blunt: the gap between Moseley Shoals (1996) and tonight is now longer than the gap between Moseley Shoals and Revolver was when they made it. The band that spent the 90s raiding the 60s has become the thing it once raided. The venue — the Hammersmith Odeon, where Led Zeppelin first played Stairway to Heaven — doesn't let you pretend otherwise. They walk on to Green Onions, fresh from the pub, which is either studied or just who they are, and it's probably both. Fowler opens with You've Got It Bad, hand in his pocket, looking genuinely taken aback by the welcome. His voice has changed: what was once smooth has grained at the edges and gathered something honeyed underneath. The comparison the review reaches for is peak Joe Cocker, and it holds. Lining Your Pockets hits harder than it did in 1996. All 12 Moseley Shoals tracks are played — shuffled, not reverentially front-to-back — alongside later catalogue like Hundred Mile High City and Profit in Peace. The six-piece has become a family firm in a literal sense: Steve Cradock's son Cass plays guitar and keys; Oscar Harrison's son Leon works congas and tambourine and sings backing vocals. On The Circle, the first big singalong, father and son drum together. This is not the kind of thing you can manufacture. The band that was accused of worshipping the past has built something generational without trying to. Steve Cradock's guitar playing on Fleeting Mind is described as glacial pull-offs and slow runs, as if he's still finding colours in a palette mixed when MiniDiscs were the future. That's the right image. Get Away still welds Dear Prudence and When the Levee Breaks into something that transcends both sources. The two modes — wistful craft and maximum R&B — are genuinely distinct, and the ease with which OCS moves between them is not common at this level. One for the Road's closing refrain, 'I'll sing my sorrow,' is the thesis statement: songs about fragile feelings, sung back by people who are rarely given permission to have them publicly. The ballads cluster early, which costs some momentum but earns some of the night's finest singing. The encore finds Fowler alone on stage, introducing Robin Hood as 'the night I came face to face with Christ, all for £2.50,' before Belfast takes the song from him in the best way. The Day We Caught the Train closes it, as it must. Thirty years old and still seismic. The consensus has filed them under dad-rock, and with two fathers and two sons on stage, the term finally sounds like a compliment. The flowers are overdue. There are twenty more nights to send them.