Real Farmer: Gullivers, Manchester – Live Review

Real Farmer
Gullivers, Manchester
March 31 2025

For the past decade, the Dutch underground scene has been an endless conveyor belt of fascinating and idiosyncratic bands that have put post-punk into new and invigorating shapes. Real Farmer are yet another enthralling example of this new noise.

The Dutch lowlands have always been the great translator of British punk innovation, turning it into their own shapes and styles, and Real Farmer mangles this all into their own idiosyncratic whole.

Hailing from Groningen, in the north of the country, the band’s name is a nod to their more rural roots in a nation that sometimes looks like a one city continuum with neatly designed houses and suburbs stretching along canals and blurring one conurbation into the next. Yet in the north Netherlands, there are still longer stretches of rural flatland with their eerie waterlogged silence creating a space for imagination to run riot and create such visceral and original beat combos as this.

With their tight linear sound, the band is driven by a propulsive rhythm section that is piston powerful with the melodic bass lines locking with the pumping drums. The guitar plays spindly, effective shrapnel riffs that beak away from rock power chords into the scratching, scraping chord shapes that don’t clutter and cut through the pop/noise with their linear perfection and switchblade lead lines. It all creates a perfect post-punk chassis, with every instrument doing its bit to be lead whilst entwining around each other to create an energetic, sharp and angular dissonance for the vocals to slide over the top. 

The frontman flails in the venue gloom and lives out the songs with a great voice that is stained by both the road life and the blues and yet retains the post-punk poetic sprawl. Sometimes he’s like Pere Ubu and sometimes like a sweatshod shepherd attending to his high decibel flock with his impatient words and magnetic dark voice that turns the shape shifting songs into a strange yet compelling neo underground pop.

Real Farmer are the real deal. They have the hooks, and they have the inventiveness and the scratching, scrapping garage band thrills to soundtrack the lovers of awkward music twisting and shouting world.

Oral agriculture…

Words by John Robb