Riding The Low – Brewhouse, Burton – 2 October 2026
Marking 20 years of, in their words, getting nowhere Riding The Low play a sold out hometown show with a set full of their trademark catharsis, heavy riffs, and a whole lot of love
Line up: Riding The Low, Joseph Hooligan
Venue: Brewhouse Arts Centre, Burton upon Trent|
Date: 2 October 2026
I am stood with tears rolling down my face, assuming the Rocky Balboa stance with both fists raised in the air, surrounded by strangers as from the stage frontman Paddy Considine in a bedazzled Lucha Libra mask unknowingly exorcises the ghosts of my growing years, and Riding The Low bring the (first) encore of their sold out show in our shared hometown to an end.
But let’s go back to the beginning: tonight they’re marking 20 years of – in their words – getting fuckin’ nowhere and they’ll been rolling out picks from their extensive catalogue on the waves of love this crowd is sending tonight.
Before we get to Riding The Low we get Joseph Hooligan. Punk in look, sound and attitude the set includes tracks old and new. This is Buzzcocks by way of Green Day at the surface but listen that bit closer and you are delighted with touchpoints from BIS to Beat Crusaders through Urusai Yatsura. It’s fast, full of harmony, bedroom DIY spirit and pure expression. Highly recommend giving recent release Bedroom Punk DX a listen if you’re yet to check these out.
And then it’s quickly time for the main event: Riding The Low. A giant skull already adorns the stage as guitarists Dan Baker and Chris Baldwin, bassist Rich Eaton, and tonight’s drummer take up their positions. Frontman Paddy Considine joins them, holding aloft a pumpkin carved with their iconic imagery. We are wild for this already and it’s not even begun.
It, of course, would not be a legitimate review of the band if Considine’s acting career were not acknowledged. So, let’s do that. Most will recognise him for his intense portrayals of anti-heroes from Dead Man’s Shoes to Mobland, from his parts in Peaky Blinders and House of Dragon, or perhaps the comedic and pathos of Hot Fuzz and World’s End. The list goes on, and on, and on.
And while this band may have come together to find creative solace between roles Considine’s involvement in music predates his acting by quite some way. Riding The Low is not an actor’s side project, but rather a band where one member’s day job happens to be acting.
Now let’s move on and take this band as we find them. Which is full of self-deprecation for making it from playing their first show in a small bar on the next street to the town’s arts centre in 20 years of grinding out the bangers. And they do have bangers.
With 3 albums under their belts (2013’s What Happened To The Get To Know Ya?, 2016’s Riding The Low Are Here To Help The Neighbourhood, and 2022’s The Death of Gobshite Rambo) they open with From The Top Of The World and She Wanted To Be Burned from their debut. They then catapult us forward in time to Stay In Your Lane – a preview from a promised new album and perhaps a flip of the bird to those who want activity limited to one thing rather than a Lynchian creative crop rotation of disciplines – plus 2025 single Above And Beyond. From here it’s the best of their back catalogue with every track a high-energy crowd-pleaser, and showing what this band does best: emotional rock.
These are songs where fists fly as the only way to dissipate feelings that have broached the cracks in hearts broken by more than romantic love. These are songs of (arguably) deeper, more universal love but often tumultuous relationships with parents, siblings, and with your self. It’s the untethering of love that comes from loss. The peace you can struggle to find but ultimately have to make with your past. The imperfections you need to not only forgive but embrace. The moving on from people, places, and things which were once everything to you. These are songs of life. And in this age of fake news and AI everything, Riding The Low are incredibly, cathartically, comfortingly real.
We get The Dizzly Doo Dah Man, The Piss Parade, and a first outing for the melodica on Carapace of Glass. Each of these tracks featuring heavy but everyday imagery in the lyrics, often holding us sonically in that fizzing anticipatory moment before a riff kicks in and we drop and ride it like a rollercoaster loop-de-loop.
Hearts are fluttering, heads are banging, and we’re all inside the music now as we head through the floor drum and band chants of Tommo Hawk, His Love Affair With Americana Is Over, and the pinnacle of catharsis as we all raise our middle fingers and scream-sing arms around each other to What Has The Universe Done For Me Lately?.
The melodica is back out soon enough for the wonderful Lifeboats. Lending itself to a crowd sing-a-long, the imagery of this track is both nostalgic and forlorn. We can see those boats coming in but we’re yet to know if anyone is saved, but we’re going to hang on to hope anyway. We’re going to hang on to it together.
The pace is picked back up and we once again throw ourselves into the collective movement of the mosh for The Greatest Blast. This song of pushing through so the struggle doesn’t gain a victory over self, is what we’re all here for – lyrically giving a nod to the inner darkness while dissipating it with the blinding glow of love making and playing music will bring. The confetti cannons firing yellow and black ticker tape across us was the only plausible physical interpretation of this track, and we were given it.
We didn’t need the house lights to stay down when the band leaves the stage to let us know this wasn’t over. But we know exactly what we’re getting when Considine returns to the stage in that wrestling mask I mentioned at the start of all these words. He’s already swinging a RTL baseball bat, all menacing stage-stalking and theatrics as Heed builds, while here on the floor we’re twitchingly eager to be blown away by this heaviest of their anthems.
With a middle eight that sounds like a hair metal band got their hands on the TARDIS (to be clear: this is a good thing) and a rousing line ‘I hear the warnings, but I don’t ever heed them’. We let the bubbling bass line become the rhythm of our hearts, faces up to say those words with our whole chests, the riffs slice and dice. What’s left but to acknowledge how headstrong and reckless we can all be, and to rejoice as we’re swept away by it all
From here we’re taken fully to that moment I opened with, as they give us Rocky 99. This song entered my personal timeline in the months after my mother had died, and that undoubtedly plays a part in the emotional reaction it draws from me anytime I hear it (seriously, any damn time). That connection with it is mine alone, but from the way the voice of the crowd rises around me and the way our fists are held resolutely skyward, everyone here has one of their own. We might not all be openly crying in the pit but we are all bursting with the feels it gives us as we do as instructed and give a response to Considine’s call.
If they only had this one track which gets such a response from the audience would be enough for most bands, but this milestone set is absolutely packed with them. What a way to end this celebration.
But of course it isn’t yet over. We’re nowhere near ready for this to be over though and with rhythmic clapping and a growing chant of ‘one more’ the band return to the stage. They’re not ready for this show to end yet either.
This second encore is relaxed and full of deep cuts, including taking a request from the audience for Medusa’s Head. From the 2023 EP Awake You Sleeping Giants, Pt.1 it’s full of the imagery and twinned heaviness of lyrics and melody so typical of this band. The drummer, we’re told, has only ever played this once before in a practice. The crowd I’m sure would have been forgiving, we’re all here because we’re on the side of the underdog. We are the underdog. And as it turned out no slack needed cutting as this was a solid and satisfying run out for the track.
The show closes with any separation between band and crowd broken down, we’re all one as we scream-sing back the words to Easy On My Own. Confetti underfoot, branded balloons still bobbing sporadically across the audience, the band all wide-grins as their energy is sustained for this final moment by the love coming at them from us fans. It’s a beautiful thing, a moment you want to live inside forever.
As this second encore draws to a close, Considine reminds us this band has put in a lot of graft over the last 2 decades to get nowhere. He tells us that if you love something you have to keep doing it. There’s a bittersweet tone when he says that it is cool they have 400 songs that no-one knows. But everyone – everyone – here tonight not only knows those songs, they feel them, they love them deeply and they are more than here for the next 20 years.
For a band that started like so many others – a creative outlet between mates to bring in light when days are dark – they may not (yet) have found mass audiences, but they’ve found a fanbase with a fierce love for them. They’ve found a way to be not only a gang, but a family, and make sure those finding a connection to their music knows they are an extension of that.
And perhaps that is the real measure of success, and an achievement to take pride in, for Riding The Low.
Riding The Low has teased they will return with a new album.
~
Images: Sarah Lay and Tristan R.
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Sarah Lay
A long-standing music journalist she's also co-founder of independent record label Reckless Yes, an author of novels, and when not messing around with words and music, a digital strategist.
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