Alex Warren is greeted with a huge cheer as everyone stands immediately and stays that way for the whole show.
That is the ground floor of the Civic Theatre, and from countless previous shows, I have not seen that for any past performers that I can recall.
That is around 600 seats. The Circle is much bigger with 1500. Tonight, the venue is looking its most stately and elegant. It feels like a huge end-of-year school ball, as young teens and adolescent women predominate.
Plenty of pre-teens accompanied by their mums. Dads escorting older offspring.
Alexander Warren Hughes inspires that.
He was born in Carlsbad, California, on the cusp of the new millennium. A lower southern part of the Western seaboard state. Lots of sun and fabulous coastlines, and close to the contentious Mexican border.
A difficult upbringing. Him and his siblings had a father who died of cancer, and an abusive alcoholic mother. He was kicked out and homeless at 18 and living in his car.
But then he sounds equally precocious, gifted and talented, and his nature could override his nurture.
He helped to found a collective called Hype House, where Tik-Tok content creators would collaborate and post videos on YouTube. He first started creating YouTube content, a skateboarding themed one, at age 10!
The crucial years of Hype House leading up to gaining a management contract for music with Warner was from 2019 to 2021.
That spans one of the most turbulent and chaotic years of human history with the pandemic madness. One response to heal Chaos can be enduring Art. Pan the God of music with his panpipes. Pan equals panic, pandemonium, pandemic, as he is also the God of war.
Which comes to the interesting part of Warren’s music. He draws a lot of inspiration from Catholicism, although he is generally secular in his life.
His writing is Folk-based overlaid with inspirational Pop. Maybe he is closest to U2 in his ambitions.
He cites Justin Bieber, Benson Boone and Shawn Mendes as direct influences. Nu-Folk is a rather ugly epithet of artists like Mumford and Sons whom he touches on. I like my own Intense Folk better. A generic descriptor could be Soaring Heartfelt Melancholic Guitar-Based Pop.
All the songs, save one, come from the 2025 version of You’ll Be Alright Kid.
Commences with Burning Down which is reasonable, but the show ignites with second song Before You Leave Me.
Lyrics are plaintive and pleading but the music erupts and explodes in a fashion not too far from love in the middle of a fire fight. The Stooges Search and Destroy does make for queer bedfellows.
The engine room works overtime to give the essential cut and thrust, and the bombast. That is Ken on drums and Sophie on bass.
Didn’t catch the lead guitarist, and Joy on keyboards rounds out the stripped-back band.
Save You a Seat is an outstanding song which Warren casually flicks out as a song to my dead parents.
You never left me/ You just left too soon/ I’ll save you a seat next to me/ You’re always at the table.
That is the equal to John Lennon’s Mother, and just as cathartic. Warren and most of his audience may never have heard that, but that is how art works. It is an eternal energy.
Title track You’ll Be Alright Kid mines similar territory.
This is the Cheaper Than Therapy tour where the predominant emotion is joy and ecstasy.
As a commodity, that is granted. But in the words of another Boomer (scarce in the audience tonight) What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding (Nick Lowe).
Bloodline is a road song, and it touches on Americana in a way that brings up the spectre of Tom Petty. A secret presence in Warren’s music.
Carry You Home has some of the Celtic Irish rave beats of the early Pogues.
Alex Warren closes the show with Ordinary and it’s another highlight which starts with a hilarious one-liner. They say the holy water is watered down. To then raise the inspirational roof one last time.
Rev. Orange Peel
Photography by Leonie Moreland
Alex Warren
Cassie Henderson
