Manchester Deaf Institute
March 2026
The cult classic band return to Manchester to play their cult classic ‘Lost Weekend’ album in full…
It’s more than 40 years since I was first captivated by the Monochrome Set – a band so out of sync with everyone else then and now that they were instant total genius. In the then post-punk playground, they somehow captured the spirit of punk itself by being gloriously out of sync. This was not the brattish, noisy speed freak version or the new noise of post punk, but a wilful idiosyncratic creativity with melodic jazzy songs with dark, arch lyrics and exquisite melodies creating a self-made trajectory that spun out of the art school big bang of the original form. Some of the band, like core member bassist Andy Warren, had been part of the 1976 gene pool that would eventually create Adam and the Ants, but what they did with the creative space they were presented was very much their own thing.
So as if to underline this, they play two sets tonight – a ‘normal’ set and then a celebration of their fourth Lost Weekend album that is now 40 years old with original guitar player Foz Foster back in the ranks for the tour. The album sounds like a greatest hits album of some arena selling indie titan that the Monochrome Set influenced, but has somehow remained a cult classic. Time has not diminished them, though, and they sound as effortless as ever with their mix of jazz tinged sophisticated rhythms that can nod to bossa nova or trip out with a spectral psychedelia with a tip of a hat.
The band ooze an effortless cool with bassist Andy Warren is as stoic as ever holding the ground with his melodic bass lines whilst Foz Foster is stunning dealing out fantastic flurries of notes from his guitar that can be tripped out ragas, Grateful Dead note tumbles or neat and concise melodic licks – he sounds fantastic and helps create the platform for Bid’s soothing vocals that deliver the poetic word flurries that are one part romantic and one part deadpan dark humour and shape shift the songs into slices of pop perfection that defy the decades in their timeless time capsule.
Whilst the album is the Lost Weekend, it’s also true to say that the Monochrome Set are the lost band. They are the ultimate bunch of cults who retain a core crowd who hang onto every word, every note and every nuance of pop perfection in their songs that drip honey and venom. They exist on the periphery of the madness and it feels like that is how they like it and yet as the Smiths proved when they were influenced by their sound at those early Manchester shows that we all went to in those ancient post punk times or later on when Franz Ferdinand stumbled across them their sound can be a world beating pop and not just undergound trapped by its perfection.
No one writes melodies this exquisite, and the Monochrome Set are the greatest guitar pop band you should have heard of. If this review is your intro into their genius, then it’s time to explore!
And then it’s time to climb Jacob’s Ladder…
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