The large industrial fan set into the wall to the rear of the stage is supposed to swirl dry ice around the band. Were it working, it might serve as a subtle echo of the process of dry cleaning itself. Instead, the venue’s fan is on the blink. “Just a big, smoking hole,” notes Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw with wry amusement. It sounds like a future lyric.
The band ease into Her Hippo, a standout from their 2021 debut album, New Long Leg. “I’m smiling constantly,” Shaw intones, magnificently stony-faced. By contrast, Tom Dowse’s guitar is eager, ringing and exploratory, then increasingly anxious, ratcheting up the tension as Shaw keeps her impassive cool. While Dowse and hirsute bassist Lewis Maynard rock out beside her, Shaw runs through a repertoire of punk-adjacent stares, shrugs and glances heavenwards. There are expressions you might dub “regretful oncologist” and a side eye that implies exasperation or complicity. The band’s kit boasts the initials DC in gothic script; smiley faces made from tape adorn their speaker cabinets, of which, fittingly, only one smiles and two are much more equivocal.
You might call Shaw’s lyrical work in Dry Cleaning cut-up, or free-associative, if it weren’t funnier, sadder and more fed up than that. “You didn’t necessarily feel/ So I don’t necessarily feel,” she offers neutrally on Kwenchy Kups, a highlight of the band’s second album, 2022’s Stumpwork. If you haven’t heard Stumpwork, you may have noted its notorious artwork: the LP’s title rendered in pubic hair on a bar of soap.
Dry Cleaning band lore runs that Shaw, a visual artist, joined the angular outfit founded by Dowse, bassist Maynard and drummer Nick Buxton – all veterans of previous post-punk acts – after being persuaded she could repurpose her sheaves of overheard conversation, notes-to-self and found texts into a collage of oblique lyrics. There was no need to sing. Dowse and Shaw had met at art college; you can still see some of his pizza-based figurative work online. Significantly, one of Shaw’s 2019 graphic works, Sleep Torpor, used “found narration sourced from online forums, synthesising personal experiences and collective feeling”. Her drawings have also become tattoos.
Shaw’s discipline-pivot to front this extraordinary band has resulted in two albums and three EPs of focused art rock – non-sung, rather than unsung. That one foundational idea – Shaw deadpanning over Dowse’s hyperactive guitar and Maynard’s funky or metallic basslines – has proved surprisingly expansive. There is so much going on in Dry Cleaning. Dowse’s guitar lines dash pell-mell into the indie disco or get lost in post-rock; often, they could curdle milk at 20 paces, so deliciously sour is his tone. Towards the end, Shaw breaks out a melodica; at the climax of the encore, Buxton plays sax drones.
Dry Cleaning have been a surprisingly fruitful endeavour too. For a band just getting going with a seemingly niche offering at the start of the pandemic, they captured the lockdown imagination with their jigsaw wordplay and wiry, dyspeptic sound. Having quit their day jobs at the least best inflection point in living memory, Dry Cleaning soldiered on through the worst of the live music drought to release 2022’s Stumpwork. Maynard’s mother died during this time; with no overt references, the past couple of years turn up nonetheless. “Staying in my room is what I like to do anyway,” runs Liberty Log.
This tour coincides with the release of a new EP, Swampy, essentially unused bits of Stumpwork, but no new song makes it on to the set list. Shaw, meanwhile, is a guest on a recent Sleaford Mods track called Force 10 from Navarone, where the parallels between her aloof witness-bearing and Jason Williamson’s disdainful invective are made plain. The repurposed former wind turbine factory we are in sits in a lonely bit of the Liverpool docks that boasts statuesque industrial decay, deluxe developments and the continuing Everton stadium rebuild, with a smattering of breweries and plucky creative industries making up the middle ground. That sense of dislocation, of places in flux, a vernacular struggling to retain meaning, feels of a piece with Dry Cleaning’s uneasy associating. They also have their more straightforward moments. “Everything’s expensive and opaque and privatised,” Shaw mutters on Anna Calls from the Arctic. A song called Conservative Hell gets a whoop when Shaw announces it.
When all around, certainties seem to be crumbling, the fact that Dry Cleaning seem to be consolidating audiences - ones who will happily spend 90 minutes egging on a living music installation - is no small boon. In part, a rising tide lifts all boats: if Wet Leg can bag Grammys, it’s probably good news for the mid-size British left-field musician. But Dry Cleaning are genuinely radical prospects.
They could so easily lean into their lyrics as cutesy memes, or comedy catchphrases, but don’t. Moreover, few front people are doing what Shaw is doing. While still being a magnetic focus of attention, she is dialled-down, un-needy, boundaried. In a recent interview, Shaw talked about using “a dispassionate woman’s voice, not giving or seducing”. Perhaps she says it best on Hot Penny Day. “I’m not here to provide blank,” Shaw avers. “They can fucking provide blank.”
