Geese
Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith, Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Geese have been including a location-specific cover version in each of their UK tour setlists, in one way or another. In Glasgow it was Primal Scream’s Movin’ On Up. In Manchester, it was The Stone Roses’ Fool’s Gold. Leeds fans were given short measure – Geese singer Cameron Winter held up his mobile phone to his mike and streamed Tubthumping by Chumbawamba. Tonight a rolling blues interrupts the Zep-esque riff mania of their own song, 2022, and Winter sings “It’s 1987 and all I wanna do is fly”. It’s Come Down Easy by Spacemen 3. The fact that Spacemen 3 hail from Rugby – a good 80 miles from Hammersmith – well, who cares?
It’s not 1987 of course. In fact it could hardly be more 2026, with Geese defining all that is hot, and cool right now. The New York band’s UK tour is their first since 2023, when venues were more of the stature of Guildford‘s Boiler Room – before Winter’s extraordinary 2024 solo album, Heavy Metal, and Geese’s step-change third album, last year’s Getting Killed – and tickets for tonight are like hen’s teeth. In fact, with rising UK indie group Westside Cowboy providing support, this is a veritable Buzz Band Bonanza.
Westside Cowboy – a charmingly dorky British four-piece who play fast and tight and specialise in unison vocals – are themselves on the rise. Signed to Island imprint Adventure Recordings, they combine late-’80s UK indie rock with early-’90s US indie rock and have two EPs to their name. Tonight, the slower Strange Taxidermy, with bassist Aoife Anson O’Connell’s weepy bleat leading the line, is the one that leaves its hooks in. They sign off with In The Morning, the four gathered around one mike, drummer hitting a hand-held snare, belting it out like a hootenanny. “Britannicana” is a word that‘s been used to describe them, hopefully tongue-in-cheek.
Geese are on another level, in another world. They are remarkable because everything that makes them ‘difficult’ is what makes them currently so adored (the anticipation of tonight’s audience – posh kids, post-punk dads, Courtney Love, Zoe Ball and all – is electric). In many of their songs you can hear the shreds of the child-genius jam band they once were (they’re still only 23 or 24), before Cameron Winter started fucking with the format or detonating it completely. They’re present in the full-on boogie of Crusades or Exile On Main Street ramble of I See Myself from 2023’s 3D Country album, and in the Stax resonances of Au Pays Du Cocaine.
Opener Husbands’ refrain of “Falling apart, falling apart….” seems apt. Geese scoff at ‘tightness’ as a rock’n’roll requirement; sometimes you wonder if they’re homaging The Nazz’s Loosen Up. Second song Getting Killed moves in and out of focus, with Winter scratching disruptively at his guitar like he’s never played one. Geese seem to stumble until they don’t and come together in explosions of incredible power.
Geese songs can be episodic, the crowd waiting with patience for the ‘good bit’ to happen then going mental, extending the moshpit a good third of the way to the back of the stalls. This can make them feel scattershot – why not make the good bit last longer? At other times they’re capable of super-sustained and sophisticated grooving, as on Islands Of Men, where guitarist Emily Green and bassist Dominic DiGesu pedal an open-ended riff into a kind of fugue state, or the Immigrant Song-style locomotion of Bow Down. It’s another kind of rock’n’roll orthodoxy being challenged – The Necessity Of The Resolution.
Another tradition being dispensed with is showmanship. Geese’s stage is mostly dark, the band mostly backlit – projecting players’ shadows to the back of the gods. The audience is rarely directly addressed. Drummer Max Bassin is the most flamboyant member, playing his cymbals with a Keith Moon flourish, sometimes under a spotlight the other members are mostly denied. But shyness in presenting themselves is no indicator of lack of confidence in the music or its power. Geese fill this venue – the biggest theatre venue in London – with noise and personality.
Tonight’s most transcendent moment is one of perhaps only two predictable things about the show. Taxes is Geese’s primo anthem, a protest song of sorts (“If you want me to pay my taxes/You’d better come over here with a crucifix/You’re gonna have to nail me down”) that surfs a chiming riff into the hearts of all.
The main set ends with a new song called Apollo. Winter claims they’ve written it especially for tonight – but it’s a fib; they’ve played it at several shows already. It would be an anticlimax if it weren’t so obvious that they’ll return to play Getting Killed opener Trinidad, which they do. The gig proper ends with Winter’s crazed ejaculations of “There’s a bomb in my car!” razoring anarchically from the stage and reverberating through the venue.
It’s hard to be original in rock’n’roll. And it’s getting harder, in the post-Spotify cosmos, now there’s so much of it, and the obscure influences are no longer obscure. Winter is one of the few young artists who seems bothered by the stasis, and is driven to do something about it. Where that will lead him, as a solo artist and the leader of Geese, is pleasingly hard to imagine. “We have danced for far too long,” he sings tonight on 100 Horses, “and now I must change completely.”
Setlist, Geese, Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith, March 25, 2026:
Husbands
Getting Killed
Crusades
Islands of Men
Half Real
2122
(with Spacemen 3 – Come Down Easy)
100 Horses
Cobra
I See Myself
Cowboy Nudes
Bow Down
Au Pays du Cocaine
Taxes
Long Island City Here I Come
Apollo
Encore:
Trinidad
Photos: Lewis Evans