Prolapse | Stuart Pearce
Soup, Manchester
30th October 2025

Martin Gray revels in the welcome return of gleefully boisterous noiseniks Prolapse to Manchester after a ten year absence, as part of a short UK tour in support of their masterful new album ‘I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face’.

The very last time Leicester’s finest Prolapse (swivel on that, everybody else!) trod the boards in Manchester, it was at the hallowed Roadhouse venue back in May 2015 – all of a distant decade ago. The very last time yours truly caught them, however, it was at the same venue but a considerably longer time ago: October 1997, when they were riding high on the success of The Italian Flag. Due to me being blissfully unaware of the 2015 gig which was announced at short notice unknown to me (I wasn’t on social media then which explains it), I missed that triumphant return of theirs, which also served as a bit of a requiem for the Roadhouse itself as Prolapse were the very last band to play there before the place shut its doors for good.

So when news of their fifth album and a short UK tour to accompany it was announced a few months ago, my excitement was palpable. Fuck! At long last! And how great was that ‘comeback’ album, we all asked ourselves?  It’s like they’ve never really been away – despite the 26 years since 1999’s Ghosts Of Dead Aeroplanes, and a full 10 years after they first regrouped thanks to Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai. And so here they are, back once again on Mancunian soil, tarmac and concrete, looking and sounding just like before, completely in defiance of all the changes that have taken place.

Nevertheless, even this much anticipated return was victim to a strange turn of circumstance. Originally, the venue was to be the equally legendary (and still surviving) Star And Garter, close to Piccadilly Railway Station, but due to last minute changes – the original location was doubled booked for some reason – the band had to quickly rearrange an alternative venue, hence Soup [Kitchen] right in the heart of the Northern Quarter. To further complicate matters, said Soup venue also had a club night on the same evening, thus the gig had to start and finish earlier, with a curfew of 9.00 pm!

First on then, are a trio from Nottingham by the name of Stuart Pearce, proudly flying the flag (East Midlands variety) for punishingly noisy, in-yer-face post-punk. With a few of the crowd already chanting ‘Psycho! Psycho! Psycho!’ in reference to the eponymous legendary footballing namesake (he was once a Forest player after all!), the trio happily oblige by plying the gathered masses with some quite bruising art rock, which is both uncompromising and confrontational, but no less arresting for that matter. They treat the crowd with tracks from their first album Red Sport International and their latest release All This Vast Overproduction and sport matching striking sweaters bearing the new album cover’s nifty artwork.

With aggressive, Mark E. Smith-esque shouted vocals throughout much of the set, and song titles like The Bosses Are Stealing Yr Days, Fuck No; I Jangle, and Ex-IRA Voice-Actor, the singer/guitarist (and occasional analogue synth knob twiddler) vents his spleen whilst his two comrades on bass and drums crank out a fusillade of short, sharp shocks and slaps to the face. Their opening number comes across like The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again dragged screaming into a 21st century dystopia, with its pulsing oscillator synth undercarriage atop which storms a ferocious slab of aggro-rock. The fact that the singer then does flying scissor kicks, leaping into the air like Pete Townshend, further reinforces the comparison.

Another number has relentlessly pummelling stop/start dynamics with snarling vocals reminiscent of a truly belligerent Wire at their most rancorous (i.e. latter period Read & Burn).  I’ve since discovered that the footballer Stuart Pearce himself is indeed also a fan/admirer of this combo….that’s as good an endorsement as any, given that this trio’s gloriously unhinged racket is certainly not for the faint-hearted. To coin a suitably apt analogy, this trio administer a righteous kick in the bollocks to everything that is smug and complacent about modern life today, a much needed tonic to shake the ignoramuses out of their slumber. Ignore them at your peril.

Prolapse have always thrived on an element of chaos and unpredictability, and ever since their formation all of thirty-four years ago, they have never been ones to simply accept mediocrity or conform to the staid machinations of the ‘industry’. Few bands from the same era have ploughed such a distinctive furrow and remained so vital and fascinating – even allowing for a near quarter-century hiatus from the recording studio.

So it is with barely restrained excitement that many of us were assembled here to witness their return, and to state the blatantly obvious, they did not disappoint. Opening their set with the first single (featured on the new album) On The Quarter Days, the band pretty much hit the ground running, as if this was the most instinctive thing in the world. Notwithstanding the number of years that have elapsed in the meantime, in some ways it really does sound as if the band have not aged at all.  ‘Did I want it? YES! Did I need it? YES!  Did I like it? FUCK YEAH!!!’

As befits this almost celebratory set, just about every album is plundered for highlights – with the curious exception of Ghosts Of Dead Aeroplanes. We’re promptly dragged aboard the out-of-control speeding juggernaut that is Headless In A Beat Motel for the second number – and boy, is it a truly breathtaking joyride or what? An equally adrenalised tear through the almost poppy T.C.R. follows, and I can already see people’s eyes lighting up in pure euphoric joy as they behold the antics playing out in front of them on stage as Mick and Linda cavort and swoop about with sheer abandon.

Testation (the B-side to Scottish Mick’s most hated Prolapse single of them all Autocade), duly follows before another new album track Err On The Side Of Dead gets a welcome airing, with Linda performing much of her angst-filled spoken sections shielding her head behind a large cut-out drawing of a manically smiling face. Throughout the set, Mick is particularly obsessed with messing with his mic stand and lead, which he repeatedly wrestles with, adjusting, re-adjusting, shortening, lengthening, placing horizontally on the stage, picking up again, etc… as if he’s using it as some sort of curious prop or something. Occasionally reading lyrics from bits of paper, he also has a fine line in between-song banter, eliciting much laughter from the crowd with cryptic asides and exchanges with his foil Linda.

At a couple of points during the set in particular, Mick regales the crowd with hilarious anecdotes, having a swipe at Toyah Willcox (and her endless lockdown videos on social media with her beau Robert Fripp) and later at Marti Pellow from Wet Wet Wet, whom he found himself standing behind at an ATM in Glasgow. Whether these were apocryphal or not is irrelevant, given the way he tells ’em they would make him a match for any stand up comedian!

Slash/Oblique sends a lot of us once again into a gleeful frenzy, the sheer piledriving motorik barrage being cranked out from the three guitars (Dave, Pat and Donald), and the pounding drums and bass (Tim and Geordie Mick respectively) overwhelming the senses as Mick and Linda go suitably full-on animated, the former stooped over and pacing back and forth as his wont rather like an unshackled animal that is looking for the bastard who stole his cage.

The set continues with another recent single from the new album Cha Cha Cha 2000, featuring the already infamous dream monologue of Mick’s starring Canned Heat and Cat Stevens, followed by a truly coruscating Visa For Violet And Van which churns relentlessly, and it’s at this point where you really fully appreciate the wonderful paradigmatic dichotomy that is Prolapse at full tilt live on stage.

The four members wielding guitars and bass (Pat, Dave, Donald and Geordie Mick) are all but motionless, deeply absorbed in adding their vital component to the unrelenting four- and six-string blizzard, whilst the three most animated are inevitably Tim’s multi-limbed flailing about behind the kit  (earning him from me the nickname ‘Octopus’, something which, to my utter delight, he’s happily played up to by wearing a black t-shirt sporting a cartoon drumming cephalopod with ‘ROCKTOPUS’ emblazoned across it!), and of course, Linda and Scottish Mick out front, careening and carousing all over the stage.  It makes for a very effective kind of onstage theatre and serves as the ideal foil to the measured chaos that is detonating from all sides around and behind them.

Another glorious blast from the past – in a set which is truly delivering on the ‘greatest hits’ – follows as Doorstop Rhythmic Bloc stomps its way into our collective cranium. ‘All abooooooaaaard!!’  The volley of scuzzy staccato guitars that herald The Fall Of Cashline wrap up the quartet of tracks from their newest album before the remainder of the set bowls down the home straight with a trio of old fan favourites: a delirious Killing The Bland and the two encores – an unhinged rendition of already cacophonous and lurching Pull Thru Barker (a close sibling to the equally breakneck Headless In A Beat Motel) and, finally, the mighty tour de force that is the truly incendiary Flex from Backsaturday, by which point the whole place goes into near meltdown.

On tonight’s evidence, after this gloriously rambunctious 1 hour 20 minute set, we need not have worried about mellowing with age. I mean, who gives a swinging monkey’s chuff about all those pesky Britpoop [sic] revivalists all treading the boards now in support of their 30th anniversary tours? Right now, one band – and one band only – from the same decade are masters at flicking the proverbial V’s and bogeys into the faces of those other incumbents and showing them up for the complacently generic dullards that they are.  To paraphrase the title of that thoroughly indispensible early-2000s bible to the US Indie Underground scene of 1981-1991 (by author Michael Azerrad), this band could be your life!

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All words and band photographs by Martin Gray. 
Further articles by Martin can be found on his profile