Laura Cox

The Laura Cox Band
The Underworld, Camden
12/10/2018

There are many “have-a-go” bedroom guitar heroes regularly showing off their skills on YouTube but there are not too many prepared to leave the bedroom, put the work in and take it to the bigger stage. French national Laura Cox started posting her guitar solos on YouTube ten years ago when she was 17 years old, amassing 70 million views with 300,000 subscribers. Laura met another young guitarist, Mathieu Albiac in 2013 and they started writing together but it wasn’t until 2015 when François C. Delacoudre (Bass) and Antonin Guérin (Drums) completed the band with an excellent rhythm section.

The Underworld gig was the final date of the Band’s first U.K tour and with the exception of this London date, they had been headlining. For this date, however, they filled the support slot for ex-Europe front man Kee Marcello’s band. This was possibly the first time I had been to a gig where the support band pulled a larger crowd than the main act.

The Band was given a one hour slot which was certainly more rock than blues but they immediately captured the audience’s full attention with the title track from the Band’s debut album, Hard Blues Shot, which was released last year. The number starts as you would imagine it should end with a drum crescendo but then we got a tasty bass riff followed by an AC/DC rhythm from Mathieu Albiac before Laura appears from the side of the stage kicking in with a Johnny B Goode style riff. Without taking breath the rocky Going Down follows, again with a driving bass from the animated Francois C. Delacoudre and Mathieu and Laura working together beautifully on rhythm and lead respectively. Too Nice For Rock ‘n’ Roll gives Laura the opportunity to invite the audience to interact with some hand clapping. Foxy Lady is given a nice treatment without Laura finding it necessary to mimic Hendrix which so often is the case these days. Laura brings it down a little for Bad Luck Blues followed by the radio friendly Good Ol’ Days. Each band member was given full freedom to express themselves throughout the set and Mathieu Albiac was allowed to express his during the The Australian Way with some very impressive guitar licks.

This was a very impressive introduction to the UK from a young lady going in the right direction with purpose who will hopefully gain the respect she truly deserves in time.