Queen Zee, Pete Bentham & the Dinner Ladies, MINCEMEAT: Liverpool Shipping Forecast

Queen Zee bring their party and full supporting cast to Liverpool’s Shipping Forecast so Getintothis’ Amy Chidlow gets her sass on.

Tonight, Queen Zee brought a night of spectacle and sass to The Shipping Forecast on the second stop of their Inaugural Tour.

Actually, tonight’s gig is taking place downstairs in a basement , as all the best gigs do, called The Hold.  What it holds is about 150 people, but for this band it’s all about quality.  Since their EP release in 2017, Queen Zee have broken so many boundaries it’s not worth counting anymore, with their outrageous style and fearless stage performance that gets the crowd into a fit of frenzy by the end of the night.

The night gets started with MINCEMEAT, a trio with songs in the vein of punk/psychobilly.  MINCEMEAT also feature the first toplessness of the evening, as their bassist brazenly flaunts his nipples.

‘Are we all having fun?‘ asks front man Pete Bentham, who, along with his band The Dinner Ladies, bring Liverpool a night of diversity and audience participation in the form of two jazzy dinner ladies, dusting and mopping their way through the crowd.

By now the venue is nearly full, and Bentham and his Dinner Ladies rise to the occasion with a storming set.  The anthemic Dead’s not Punk and the very wonderful Goth Postman make sure that the crowd are served some hearty fare and do not go hungry.

Pete Bentham talks Free Rock and Roll nights, the spirit of punk and doing it for yourself

It would seem that Queen Zee are on the brink of greater things.  Although this is their first headline tour, they already have enough confidence in their songs and their stagecraft to know that their songs are likely to inspire an intense reaction in their audience, letting the unaware know that stage front was likely to become a mosh pit and the faint hearted may want to move to the back a little.

True to their word, their first number saw beer and bodies flying around, a good natured riot that carried on throughout their set.  At one point, Zee cheekily told the crowd how the previous audience in Leicester reached a level that Liverpool were unable to match.  The result of this was, of course, an even more frenzied mosh pit as Liverpool refused to be beaten by any other audience.

Queen Zee delivers their latest track Victim Age along with a mixture of covers, from Electric Six’s Gay Bar to Dizzy Rascal’s Bonkers. An unusual choice of cover you might think but, if you’re familiar with the Queen Zee style, is everything you’d expect it to be and more. On top of the organised chaos that is the mosh pit, the band also have fans ballroom dancing and beating the dust down from the ceiling, all in all the night was truly all about the audience.

Sass or Die took things to even higher levels, with Gold Teeth and Medicine continuing this trajectory, before Pete Bentham was brought back on stage to join Queen Zee on You Could be a Woman Too.

 Queen Zee know how to leave the room wondering what they hell the just happened. It’s the type of gig where if you’re not, at the very least, rocking your head back and forth, you’re clearly not meant to be here.

Photos by Lucy McLachlan

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