Sleepy Sun – Queen’s Social Club, Sheffield 18/04/14

In town to headline the first night of Detestival 2014, and as last year’s event had been a complete sell-out success, Sleepy Sun may have been rather surprised to look out into the 500 capacity main concert room of the Queen’s Social Club and find it less than a quarter full. Sheffield United were playing at home just up the road at Bramall Lane, the bingo was in full members-only swing next door and it was, after all, Good Friday, but even allowing for the solemnity of this religious occasion, you would not think that those demographics and that of an event which has already established a good reputation for sonic exploration, creative scheduling and a mighty thirst for adventure may not have a significant overlap.

Sleepy Sun, however, began as if they had far weightier concerns in mind, choosing to open with a quite magnificent triple salvo from their second album, Fever, as if to affirm that the loss of original member and co-vocalist Rachel Fannan shortly after that album’s release in June 2010 and in what would appear to have been very acrimonious circumstances had not impacted upon their progress whatsoever. Her presence and the wonderful counterpoint of her voice and Constantino’s had been the fulcrum upon which that original Sleepy Sun sound had been based; a sunshine state of mind laced with epic guitars, dreamy voices, tripped-out vibes and an everlasting belief in the true spirit of the summer of ’67. With Constantino and Fannan inhabiting the roles once held by Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, Sleepy Sun were a veritable Jefferson Airplane for the modern age.

Whilst “Sleepy Son” still sounded ever so woozily comforting, spinning lazily around its psychedelic blues axis, the wheels did then start to slowly come off on this leg of the Sleepy Sun road trip. That this was paralleled with a gradual yet steady haemorrhaging of the audience was surely no coincidence. A room already short on atmosphere suddenly seemed to be struggling for air and this clearly translated to the band. Many of the audience who it would seem had come to support local stalwarts, the far more conventional rock sound of Mike Hughes and the strangely one-dimensional thrash of Bromheads just sort of drifted off into the Easter night.

“11:32” was still a pulverising punch to the solar plexus and “Martyrs Mantra”, from the otherwise insipid Spine Hits album, was brim-full of spacey elliptical guitar, nagging rhythm and sheer cosmic charm, but by the time Sleepy Sun had reached the final song of their set, the title track from this year’s relative return to form Maui Tears, they just sort of ran out of steam. The hastily scribbled set-list had promised “New Age” as an encore, but by then Constantino and his four cohorts were probably beyond the Steel City limits and well on their way to their next date - the Instant Karma festival in Belgium.