Maruja live at the Cluny review – an extraordinary plunge into hell

The Manchester noise merchants provided all the expected thrills – tempestuous drumming, atmospheric saxophone, sharp-tongued poetry – and added sweeping improvisations and stupendous operatic climaxes. This tepid Newcastle crowd was spoiled rotten.

Harry Wilkinson stomps on to the Cluny stage in an enormous fur-lined anorak, pouting aggressively with his arms aloft as if basking in adoration from an audience much larger than the 100 or so punters before him. For a split second, as Jacob Hayes promptly launches into a showboating volley of drums, it seems worryingly like we might be about to get an obnoxious 90-minute Liam Gallagher impression.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary gigs I’ve ever witnessed. Opener The Invisible Man set out this new band’s unique draw: a haunting blend of punk and jazz, with a knack for recreating a visceral hurricane in musical form. Hayes’ busy drumming wasn’t just for show – his flurries of cymbals had genuine musicality behind them, swelling and subsiding as the storm slowly swept by. Joseph Carroll’s insistent saxophone riffs were another essential ingredient, wistful one moment, insistent the next, all with a timeless, folkloric sheen. On top of it all, Wilkinson was imperious, delivering line after line of striking spoken word poetry. “The truth / It hides!” he cried at the song’s devastating climax like a desperate street preacher foretelling some incoming doom. The resulting sonic melee was breathtakingly intense – there can have been few set openers in the humble confines of the Cluny this utterly gripping.

Abstract modern rock with heavy use of spoken word poetry might sound at risk of being pretentious, but Wilkinson’s undeniable belief in every last word he was uttering sold this concert as a genuine piece of art. He filled almost every song with unrelenting urgency, pacing up and down the stage and frequently throwing us arms up in the air, desperate for this thin Cluny crowd to give his feverish music the manic mosh pit it deserved. On a few occasions he even resorted to hopping off stage and straight into the audience to provoke havoc, to limited success. I was so close to the stage that I was left with the responsibility to reel in the microphone cable and give Wilkinson a leg up when he headed back to the stage. At other times, Carroll played his sax centimetres away from my face, thrusting his instrument forward at either side of my head as if giving me my own personal binaural musical experience.

But old-fashioned rock and roll antics is only half of the Maruja appeal. The other half was demonstrated best in an ambitious 10-minute jazz improvisation performed for the first and last time at the Cluny, a gem in the middle of the set list. It amounted to a patient, expansive rise and fall, Carroll’s formerly yearning saxophone now slinking into the background like a thin layer of smoke. Matt Buonaccorsi played like a man possessed, underpinning it all with sonorous strummed chords on the bass. Wilkinson was a marvel when improvising alien-sounding electronics with the elaborate soundboard at his feet before adding wordless, belted vocals to the beautiful cacophony. He even soared upwards into his falsetto range, sounding both technically proficient and achingly vulnerable.

Nightmarish standout Thunder followed before anyone had time to mentally recover. Carroll, who was just as mosh-hungry as Wilkinson, split the crowd and jumped off stage and into the gap before a thick silence fell on both the band and the audience. Suddenly the whole thing felt like an immersive Halloween play. “Are you ready Newcastle?!” he finally bellowed. “I’m bloody terrified,” the older woman next to me said who, judging from her interactions with Carroll before the show, could quite possibly have been his mother. The crowd obliged with the subsequent ‘Wall of Death’ (two walls of people rushing towards each other), but still seemed reluctant. Carroll’s theatrics might have come across as more ill-judged if he hadn’t been so earnest.

Wilkinson ended the show with a message of love and hope (complete with a chant for ceasefire in Palestine), genuinely grateful that anyone at all had paid money to see his show – in reality, the £15 tickets were a bargain. The gig ended – as no Liam Gallagher gig surely has – with a free jazz sax solo and soothing fadeout of mellow guitars. Aside from a few judicious cuts to the longer, jazzier pieces, Maruja could have hardly delivered a better performance. But five-star gigs depend on the perfect symbiosis of performer and audience, each energising the other, and the truth is this band will have (and no doubt already have had) much wilder audiences than this shy, under-capacity Cluny crowd. To Maruja’s credit, they never let the subpar audience noticeably dishearten them.

A telling moment came during a thumping recital of One Hand Behind the Devil. Having successfully inspired a small mosh pit with some vigorous hand gestures, Carroll reached towards the crowd, trying to grab hold of someone’s shoulder and tell them something important. The message didn’t get through, but Carroll went ahead with his plan anyway: a death-defying stage dive with no one ready to catch him. Facing upwards, Carroll slunk down against the bodies before my companion Liam and I picked him up by the ankles, eventually helping to propel him up and into the air. There might not have been a willing crowd to catch them, but Maruja can only be applauded for diving into this gig headfirst anyway.