The sun has been battering Manchester all week: Thursday night rolls around, and the cool air is a blessing for the punters bustling from pub to tram to venue. The sky is burning a terrific orange, which reflects off the facades of the great glass monoliths in the skyline, bathing the excitable rabble in the dregs of the spring sunshine.
The sunglasses used in the queue remain firmly fixed to faces as VB break into ‘Man Made of Meat’, the lead single from their latest studio effort, viagr aboys. As anticipated, Victoria Warehouse breaks into an outrageous mire of flailing limbs and pogoing bodies. The crowd around the centre of Victoria Warehouse moves and sways like a pink, sweaty sea as VB launch wave after wave of sleazy funk punk into the baying crowd. ‘Slow Learner’, ‘Waterboy’ and ‘Punk Rock Loser’ all follow suit, each causing more chaos in the pit than its predecessor.
Viagra Boys are in incendiary form, barely stopping for breath as they play a gigantic set of career-spanning bangers. Every pause or breakdown in a song causes the pit to convulse and writhes – huge circles open up at any opportunity before sweat-drenched revellers smash into one another at top speed. As the pit heaves, sometimes a pocket of cool air opens up, providing blessed relief from the stifling room; other times, a pint of (what you pray is) beer gets whipped 10 feet in the air, and the splattering of cool lager is like a blessing from a benevolent god.
The chaos of the evening is what makes the whole event so utterly magical. Strangers hoist one another onto shoulders, crowd surfers are held aloft in triumph and at one point, a man with an almost comically large joint in his mouth is provided a lighter out of a sea of bodies – it resembles a kind of anarchic ‘Creation of Adam’ scene, with our Swedish punk rock masters acting as Michaelangelo.
There is utter glee and hedonistic joy throughout, but the love in a pit like this endures. Anyone who hits the deck is immediately pulled to their feet, strangers are reunited with phones, shoes, sunglasses or cigarettes by fellow revellers. There is magic in a place like this: the world doesn’t matter, your life is irrelevant, your struggles and problems melt away in the vociferous, ritualistic, primal sensation of smashing yourself into a collective of equally maniacal punk rock fans.
VB are nothing short of sensational, and a pit like this simply cannot exist without the purveyors of chaos-inducing tunes working their otherworldly magic. ‘Ain’t Nice’, ‘Medicine For Horses’ and ‘Sports’ all tear the roof off the place. Dry ice from the stage mixes with the fervent mix of tobacco and marijuana smoke from the crowd, the lights are a sinful deep red and the evening climaxes in a glorious explosion of hedonism, punk, sweat and ultimately, love.
