The Boojums had already pulled everyone away from the sofas and smoking area and brought them closer to the stage. By the time Wine Lips appeared, Lido was ready.
Where The Boojums carried themselves like a group of friends having the best possible time together, Wine Lips arrived with something slightly more dangerous. Cam Hilborn kept his sunglasses on for the entire show. Andrew Donofrio stood centre stage, cap on, tongue out. Aurora Evans sat behind the drums, looking far too calm for the noise coming from her kit. Further back, Wesley Martin held down the bass without making much of a claim for the spotlight.
They looked cool. They knew they looked cool. And they made sure we knew it too, somehow without ever putting any real distance between themselves and the room.
Hilborn is exactly the kind of frontman a show like this needs. He knew when to push the audience towards chaos, but also when to step aside and let the rest of the band take over. Evans was particularly difficult to look away from. Garage-psych punk drummers often appear to be physically dismantling their kits, but her touch seemed almost light by comparison: controlled, collected and somehow still enormous. Even when the music became messier, she never appeared to be fighting against it.
The songs followed one another quickly. There was little room to breathe and even less reason to ask for it. TV Dinner, released just two days earlier, supplied almost half the set, but the distinction between new and old material quickly stopped mattering. Wine Lips played the new songs as though they had already spent years dragging them around the world, and the crowd received them in much the same way: dancing, shouting and cheerfully throwing one another around the room.
At one point, the band called for a women-only mosh pit. The centre opened, the women duly tore into each other, and everyone else eventually flooded back in. We had not seen that happen since Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes at SO36 in 2019. It was just as good an idea now as it was then.
By the time Wine Lips reached “Choke”, the nineteenth and final song, people were finally crowd-surfing across Lido. One of them passed above our heads saluting the band while Wine Lips stood onstage saying goodbye.
A fitting farewell to a band capable of keeping everything under control while making the room feel completely out of it.
All images were taken by Pablo Iriarte with the permission of the artist and venue and are subject to copyright.
For usage rights, please contact photo@piriurdi.es .
