Wednesday saw the return of 2024 Mercury Award winners ‘English Teacher’ to Glasgow’s Barrowlands. They returned to Glasgow having supported Franz Ferdinand at SWG3 over Summer.
The indie rock band formed while studying at the Leeds Conservatoire in 2020 and their debut album, This Could Be Texas won the Mercury Prize in 2024. To be as brief as possible, they’re post punk. But there’s a lot more to them than that which they incorporated into their debut album and received a lot of praise for.
Halifax-based Orielles were the support, whose electro, dream pop blend felt right at home with the Barra’s reputable acoustics. Songs from their most recent 2022 album, Tableau, which tends towards the long and experimental, featured heavily. Their off-kilter rhythms were a delightful precursor to the night’s main act.
English Teacher began with Broken Biscuits. “My mum’s bones are breaking, and there’s cut outs in the photographs so we’re splitting our prescriptions like they’re broken biscuits”: poetic.
Since 2024, they’ve made some adjustments to the way they perform live and released a remix version of This Could Be Texas earlier this year. The piano slide at the end of Broken Biscuits was one of these additions and it does indeed seem that English Teacher have mastered the performance of their debut album.
Though most of the songs played were from their debut album, they did also play one unreleased track. In this, we see drummer Douglas Frost take to the keys in a captivating display of rhythmic freedom (and yet, I can only imagine, serious discipline). I cannot wait to see its release, potentially within the body of a wider work. Only time will tell.
You Blister My Paint, the slowest piece on the album and a symphony of a love song, demonstrates singer Lily Fontaine’s vocal range and had those in attendance fixated.
Lily Fontaine dedicated Nearly Daffodils to the Scottish football team, an apt tribute. Another of This Could Be Texas’s louder tracks, The World’s Biggest Paving Slab, also fell near the end of the set. Here, the guitar riff is key, but again so is Fontaine’s voice, given especial talk-singing prominence in the verse. “I am the world’s biggest paving slab and the world’s smallest celebrity”, she insists; it’s a song about being walked over, but also a lot more than that. English Teacher did an awful lot of thinking about paving slabs in the latter end of 2022.
Albert Road is the concluding track of the album and concluded their set at the Barra’s, too. In the encore, they did a cover of Billy Eilish’s Birds of a Feather, of which they did a tremendous job. But in the most complimentary way possible, singing about paving slabs is their forte.
Feature Image Credit: Frank Baker
