THE BEAT RATS & JEREMY

GIG: The Beat Rats & Jeremy
DATE: Thursday 17th May 2012
VENUE: The Lathom, Lathom Avenue, Seaforth
COST: £1
OUR VERDICT: totally rocked


The Lathom is a lovely venue, a short taxi ride from Liverpool city centre.What a pleasant surprise when we got there. The hall is filled with all sorts of rock and roll memorabilia. The club can even boast having the stage that The Beatles played on ten times before 1961. This is a great social club, which does a lot for charity (the artists appear for free and the door charge and raffle raises money for the charities they support).

Tonight their rock and roll party had some US interlopers! Jeremy from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and from New York, The Beat Rats.

Jeremy, with his son on acoustic guitar,  Todd Borsch on bass and a local lad on drums, gave us a set of good old rock and roll numbers, with some of his own sparkly pop tunes in between including “Highway to Heaven” and his latest “Love Explosion”. Jeremy is a great entertainer and his enthusiasm to delight the audience usually ends up with him doing an injury to himself. Tonight he was quite restrained, and limited himself to some guitar shredding and jumping around the stage (during which he broke his guitar strap!). What we got was some great rock and roll and Powerpop numbers which ended with a terrific version of “Twist and Shout” which went down very well with the audience.




Jeremy rocks the Lathom

The Beat Rats from New York, clad in their black leather, took command of the stage and after a quick tune up (“That’s close enough for rock & roll” they said), launched into their Beat Rats theme and then promptly stormed through their tunes in a gig reminiscent of Mersey Beat versus the Ramones. Their songs are short, very 60’s influenced and just rocked the house down. Their set included some of our firm favourites, such as “Thunderella” and “She’s Mine All Mine”. They were really on fire tonight and appeared to love being on the Lathom stage.

The Beats Rats rule the stage

They have recently recorded a new instrumental tune “Have Mersey” which includes a saxophone piece, played by Brian Jones of 60’s Mersey band, The Undertakers. Tonight, they played this instrumental and Brian Jones joined them on stage. You could tell the guys were chuffed and felt this was a great honour.

Brian Jones joins The Rats

If you ever get the chance to go to a gig in this venue…TAKE IT!