“Book them and people will come”, as the Waynes World adage goes. On paper this shouldn’t work : some unholy crossbreeding experiement of disparate influences – country & western, blues, techno, Elvis, drugs, hardcore communist-leninism, and outlaw chic. It sounds so obscure, they should practically be the houseband for a David Lynch movie.

But it works. (Unless you like your rock in rigid boxes and no one trying to mix the genres around). After an indeterminable age trying to find the venue – an unmarked hall not shown on any maps nor signposted anywhere on the enormous student campus oustide of the seaside city of Exeter – finally I arrive – in incredible style* – to the hall. The Lemon Grove is almost as elusive as the clitoris.

Shorn of their London trimmings (which has seen them headline to 4,500 people and have 23 people on stage at once), the Alabama 3 are on a leaner, meaner regime. Playing to 400 people and with their core of just 10 partners in crime, we’re watching a slick but playful mockery of genres they love and loathe, compacted into an efficient 100 minute set. From the opening “Me And The Devil”- still yet to see an official release – to the closing communist techno of “Mao Tse Tung”, the ‘Bama’s manage to win over the floating vote of curious students and appease (or delight) the hardcore community of the Converted.

And, outside a Robbie Williams or U2 gig, I’ve never seen as disparate an audience. The techno kid stands next to some 50 something with receding, greying hair and cardigan whose dancing like Your Colour Blind Relative at the wedding disco. The tattooed bike contingent next to the endangered New Model Army fan in dreadlocks. An appeal as wide as an ocean. And the front row bears a couple of 14 year olds whose voices don’t sound as if they’ve broken – yet.

With a career wide set – no historical revisionism here – they offer a Greatest Hits Platter that pleases everyone. A moshpit of sychronised pisstake Grandad dancing for “Hypo Full Of Love” erupts into some Morton Rave 1992 Flashback during the encores, as the entire room wobbles as one. In the euphoria, nobody seemed to tell them that the gig had finished as human pyramids form in a fully-lit room to the strains of Johnny Cash.

The central schtick – of techno cowboys transplanted to urban Brixton – is born of love, a sense of the theatric and the absurd, that makes one realise that you can tell the truth most clearly in the midst of a great lie. “Star Wars” says more about George Lucas’ beliefs than the essays of a thousand academics. Alabama 3 – by becoming the improbable – by living the Outlaw myth, not of being outside the law by definition, but by following their own moral code – are The Outsiders in the classic tradition. Aware of the absurdities of the life we take for granted and seeing this world for the Grand Conceit that it actually is. As we try to reach God with our skyscrapers, the further we fall from the spiritual in our quest.

Rooted in all of this, their moral sense, the one that recognises laws as means of control and maintaining the status quo as opposed to providing moral guidelines, burns brighter than a thousand suns. Alabama 3 see themselves as, quite rightly, saviours, aiming for the Glory Bound Train, uniting their disciples in a fiercely moral (yet never po-faced) set that, if it were believed by more, would change the way the world is, because it could, just could, change the way people see the world. And that’s enough hyperbole. 

Great music brings people together. Gasp as Devlin Love accidentally knocks over a couple of pints of lager and tips the mike stand into the crowd. Laugh as the Spirit Of Love and Seggs (of Madness and The Ruts) on bass decide to play one song lying on the floor because It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time. Dance To Techno as the classic-retro-futuristic leanings of their army of bleeps accompany a Blue soundtrack from the year 3012. Or something. I don’t know what it is, but I like it.

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