Teenage Waitress | Shoes On Now!
Heartbreakers, Southampton
1st November 2025

Dan O’Farrell attends Teenage Waitress’s homecoming album launch for the mighty third LP: ‘Upstairs To Finish A Dream’.

Teenage Waitress are a fascinating proposition. Musical project of pure-voiced Daniel Ash, the band’s three excellent albums all showcase Ash’s ambitious craft with songs full of left-field turns and genre-hopping twists, whilst never losing the melodic sense of the best pop music. In the studio, Teenage Waitress is very much built on the collaboration between Ash and Michael Bissett –  his ‘Producer with a capital ‘P’’ – as Dan puts it. ‘It’s always been a real team effort.’  The question needs to be asked: how will the studio wizardry of the newly-released third album – ‘Upstairs To Finish A Dream’ – translate to the live arena on a wet and windy Saturday night in Southampton?

There is a pleasing sense of anticipation as we wander upstairs to the gig-room at Southampton’s marvellously cosy Heartbreakers, a 100-cap room that has seen more than its fair share of musical excellence in the last few years. Teenage Waitress have generously offered this as a ‘free gig’, and there is a warm, friends-and-family atmosphere as the room fills up. Support comes from the mid-life punk-japery of ‘Shoes On Now!’, who add to the warmth with a nerdy-Green-Day vibe and short, pointed songs about gardening, videogaming from 1993 to 1997 and the joys of being over 40 – complete with the lyric ‘I’m so tired all the time!’ repeated over and over. We feel you, brother!

Teenage Waitress enter after a passionate speech from BlackStar Records supremo Fran, who gives a touchingly personal appeal that proudly proclaims his faith in Ash’s talent and the glory of ‘Upstairs To Finish A Dream’. A tinkling intro-tape greets the emergence of the 5-strong band – fetching in a Ghostbusters-esque uniform of coloured boiler-suits – and they get straight to work with a meaty version of the new album’s opening track, ‘Square One’.

This is the third time that I’ve seen Teenage Waitress, and the effect of hearing Dan Ash start to sing is always the same: a grin-inducing shock at the purity of his high-tenor voice. It’s a lovely instrument – perfectly suited to the twisted, melodic pop music that its owner creates. It’s always a mug’s game trying to compare voices, but the closest I can come in my personal listening experience would be Colin Blunstone in full ‘Time of the Season’ effect, with a splash of Glenn Tilbrook for an earthier note.

Ash’s voice is all the more startling as his stage persona creates a pleasingly jarring contrast. He’s probably sick of the comparison, but if you can imagine an AI-created video for the prompt ‘Daniel Radcliffe fronting a re-formed version of Squeeze after being kicked off the filming of ‘Goblet Of Fire’ for taking magic mushrooms behind Hagrid’s cottage…in boiler suits’, then you’d be close to the visual majesty.

For the second tune – the mighty ‘Blue-Tick Burning’ – a raw, honest and devilishly-catchy take on OCD and thwarted ambition – Ash jettisons his guitar and stalks the stage like the tormented ghost of a Jarvis Cocker still waiting for his ‘Common People’ moment. It’s clever and affecting stuff: existential angst smuggled inside a Trojan horse of toe-tapping tunefulness.

Throughout the set, the band sound muscular and impressive, with special mention to Chris Hann’s genre-straddling keyboard work. In my follow-up questions to Dan, I wondered if there was a tension between the technical complexity of the studio recordings and the necessity of a more pragmatic set-up on stage, but he was adamant that both were equally important to him: ‘I love having a live version AND a studio version. I love…the beautiful musical tangents that the rest of the band will go off in sometimes, we purposely leave space for those moments’.

There’s certainly a developing looseness and swing to the full band’s mojo, and you can start to hear the live chemistry take flight during yet-to-be-released ‘Watching The Bridesmaids’ and older classics ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘Trak!Trak!Trak!’, still Ash’s ‘favourite baby’ of all his songs. Ash’s onstage banter also helps, alongside a very funny Jools Holland joke and multiple references to Chas And Dave, he calls back to expressions of his desire to own a piano and cat earlier in the set by spending the start of the encore serenading a stuffed moggy on a toy keyboard.

Alongside the self-deprecating humour, the audience laps up every adventurous change of time signature and key, surfing the waves of the decade-hopping decadence of the song smithery.  Dan credits his love of David Bowie and Elvis Costello for his constant quest for fresh ideas, and this (at times, prog-like) ambition gives Teenage Waitress an ‘impossible to pigeonhole’ relevance and a modernistic, cut-up-and-collage feel which serves them well. There are elements of 60s beat-pop, layers of ‘70s singer-songwriter precision and shimmers of much more contemporary pop-fizz. In less-capable hands, this could all feel too much, but here it all works beautifully.

It’s head-spinning, ear-pleasing stuff and – judging by the queue at the merch-table after the gig – sounds that will be reverberating through many a household over the months to come.

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Teenage Waitress play:

21st Feb: Folklore Rooms, Brighton – ⁦Tickets here ⁦
11th March: The Bedford, London – Tickets here

Find Teenage Waitress on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

Iain Key’s album review of ‘Upstairs To Finish A Dream’ is here

All words by Dan O’Farrell. More writing by Dan can be found at his author’s archive. Dan is also on Instagram as @DOF_AND_THE_DIFFERENCE_ENGINE