prong live

For many people in their mid / late 20s and a little older Prong’s Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck will have been a huge part of their growing up as from the moment of its release it was a veritable dancefloor smash with its irresistible groove and shoutalong chorus resisting changes in trends to keep its place as a firm dancefloor favourite for a generation or more.

I’ll admit that I largely lost touch with Prong not after the 1994 release of the album Cleansing that bore Snap Your Fingers... but the chance to relive some of my misspent youth simply couldn’t be ignored. After a spot of trouble parking in Manchester I arrived at my least favourite venue in Manchester to catch the end of Die So Fluid’s set, I was rather surprised to see them on the bill tonight, not least because I’d thought they split up at least five years ago!

No matter where I stood in the venue I found I couldn’t actually hear the guitar and I can’t actually say if they were any good or not since the sound was largely overwhelmed by a constant bass drone with Bettie Page lookalike vocalist Grog’s voice occasionally punching through over the top.

Fortunately Prong fared much better with the Music Box’s legendarily poor sound and whilst I wouldn’t go so far to say it was actually good it was at least passable – and Tommy Victor’s guitar was, fortunately considering how much of Prong’s sound is built on his trademark crunchy guitar sound, clearly audible at all times.

I will freely admit upfront that I didn’t recognise many of the songs Prong played tonight in their impressively lengthy twenty two song set but the band gave an excellent performance with the newer songs sitting in the set very well indeed alongside the classics from the earlier albums with the set melding songs with a thrash / crossover influence to those with huge, crunching riffs that displayed a sense of groove that most bands that would later come to be labelled as “groove metal” would kill for ensuring that there was a constant, small but enthusiastic, pit going in front of the stage.

After going to the gig largely for nostalgic reasons (and yes, Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck did bring plenty of teenage memories rushing back) I came away pleasantly surprised not just with how well the band had performed but with how good and relevant their music still is. Now I just have to invest in the band’s post-1994 catalogue and catch up with what I’ve been missing.

by Neil Woodfin