You can hear the sound of Bluebeat ska pounding from the PA, while the Sky Blue Army chant out terrace anthems. Tonight, the Enemy are playing at home; which makes it kind of ironic they’re here to plug a new single entitled ‘Away From Here’.Hailed as the hottest thing to come out of Coventry since the 2-Tone era, the Enemy deal with the inner conflict that comes from living in the provinces; you hate it, you want to escape it but you’ll always have a rooted affection for it. It’s a theme that stretches back to the Kinks via the Jam, the Specials, Oasis and, more recently, the Arctic Monkeys.
The Enemy’s own addition to the canon is ‘We’ll Live and Die in These Towns’. It’s one of many from a big bag marked ‘tunes’, with the likes of ‘It’s Not OK’ and ’40 Days and 40 Nights’ uniting the crowd-surfing indie kids with the Coventry City fans in a fast, furious set. Up front, lead singer Tom Clarke has a Liam Gallagher-esque swagger to him that isn’t wholly original but is perhaps the kind of cockiness the band needs to rise above the indie-punk crop.
As they leave the stage to mutual chants of ‘City ‘Til I Die’, the band acknowledge it’s been a home game and it might not be so easy on the road. But the Enemy has enough ready-made anthems in it’s armoury to make it a promising new season.
