There are many gems of wisdom our parents have taught us to heed long beyond childhood; we should all aspire to brush our teeth twice daily, change our bedsheets at least once per week, and of course, lest we forget never to judge a book by its cover.
My (humiliating) case in point: I once (drunkenly, may I add) proposed to Twisted Wheel’s frontman Jonny Brown that his Mancunian accent rendered him the perfect candidate for a part on Coronation Street. His response? “You sound like you should be on Eastenders.” Well, I suppose I asked for it.
And the moral of this brief anecdote? Certainly, I should learn to drink less. But still, perhaps it should be to disregard stereotypes and typecasts; delve a little deeper and discover an appeal which shies away from that initial glance.
Twisted Wheel are, after all, a band you might be forgiven for at first misjudging. For one, there is the minor issue of that name; drawn from an infamous Manchester-based nightclub of the same name, there are no prizes for guessing which Mancunian godfathers the Oldham-based three-piece have been inspired by (and for the clueless, that would be Oasis, who pilfered their own name from a nightclub in Swindon).
But that is where the lazy comparisons to every other band hailing from the renowned Manchester music scene end, and rightly so. “Gobby frontmen might be a Manc cliché,” the NME once mused in reference to the Wheel. “But then again, so are ace bands.”
And as much as I hate to concur, I kind of have to. Because as tempting as it is to pigeonhole a band like Twisted Wheel, you just can’t do it. They’re admirable in their own right, and they know it too.
But for those who will insist on relying upon the most exploited and dullest of stereotypes (and believe me, I learnt the hard way), Brown himself once expressed in reference to the Gallagher brothers: “If there’s one thing we learnt from Oasis, it’s that you shouldn’t try to please the critics. Just please the people who get it.”
