Grandaddy

The rockers are: Burtch, Dryden, Fairchild, Garcia and Lytle. That’s how Grandaddy presented themselves on the inlay for debut album Under the Western Freeway back in 1997. Seventeen years on, post-reformation still the rockers are those motley five responsible for some of the best songs written about California in the past twenty years. Led by Jason Lytle, the band followed up their debut with one of THE great albums in the shape of The Sophtware Slump before slowly getting sick of the sight of each other and calling it a day. But then, in 2012, Lytle decided to get the band back together for some celebratory reunion shows. Ten years passed between the two times I’d seen Grandaddy in the flesh, but if anything had changed it was only that they’d gotten better at playing live. From the moment the band eased into the sunny ‘El Caminos in the West’ I could tell that nothing had changed. They raced through the back catalogue hitting on all the summery indie classics they have up their sleeves: the synth bounce of ‘AM 180’ (better known now for soundtracking a Charlie Brooker TV programme) was as exhilarating as ever, the one-two punch of ‘Jed’s Other Poem’ and ‘So You’ll Aim Towards the Sky’ are as lovely and affecting as they were all those years ago, and they even threw in a cover of ‘Here’, originally by fellow travellers and reformers Pavement. Will they play again? Who knows, but if they do you have the guarantee that this is a band whose class has not been affected by the passing of time.