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London’s Astoriais on it’s last legs. It’s almost time to switch off the lights and call in the wrecking ball. I was just passing the place and found myself thinking: “Airbourne are on tonight…might be the last chance to go there…” The venue is full of proper old skool characters, the smell of denim and leather and overpriced canned lager. I even saw ‘a’ girl!
First on is Sounds and Fury, looking like every axeman Guitar Hero ever shat out. They really throw their hearts into it, but sadly nobody in the audience can bring themselves to bang their head, or even sway a little bit. They just stand there, wondering when some good music might come over the PA.
Next up on support are Stone Gods, currently sitting astride the rung of their own personal ‘can we headline yet?’ ladder. Coming across one-part Def Leppard and one-part really-chugging-and-hard-dirty-riffage, guitarist Dan Hawkins is the only person all night that doesn’t seem to pretending. He stands, slender in the corner, delivering storming string twizzling while the singer, RichieEdwards, acts like he has ‘arrived’. Hawkins is the star of the evening by miles, and he never said a word, barely looking up from behind his hair.
It’s their second night on the trot here at the Astoria, and Airbourne have almost sold out both. Are we really that deprived of AC/DC here in the UK that these jokers can get away with this? Everybody seems quite excited by the whole thing, while I look on baffled. I swear their last london gig was the Borderline, and it was just an ‘okay‘ show, with their then-support act Skirtbox seeming a more exciting prospect. A more enthusiastic hack enthuses to me that “this everything that I’m about”, while I’m just confused. Has a little brain bug taken over these people’s minds?
Airbourne’s frontman, Joel O’Keefe, screams at us for bleeding hours. No smiles, no sense of Irony, no thanks that he has upscaled from the Borderline - nope, Joel O’Keefe and his headbanging buddies seem to act like they are actually areAC/DC.
The crowd is happy, outside in the smoking corner. People accept Airbourne are a ‘AC/DC but cheaper’ ticket. Fair point, but I just can’t get any sense of fun out of it. It’s just wholesale rip-off, fronted by a long-haired James Blunt lookalike. Some say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but to me this band feel like a leech, taking every stylistic nuance, and distilling it into a cynical money-making project, aimed squarely at AC/DC fans’ wallets. It’s no surprise that the best track of the night is a cover of ‘Whole Lot Of Rosie’, to which Hawkins returns to the stage to join in.
Go on - watch it if you don’t believe me:
Airbourne might have 8 Marshall stacks on stage, but you can see only 2 of them are mic’d up. The guy screeches a fake, ear-busting banshee noise all evening, even when he talks, not once dropping the horrid stolen veneer. Airbourne are the trade description of pretentious.
pre.ten.tious
/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [pri-ten-shuhs] Show IPA Pronunciation–adjective
1. full of pretense or pretension.
2. characterized by assumption of dignity or importance.
3. making an exaggerated outward show; ostentatious
4. This ruddy Airbourne band that do my head in, I still have a headache.
In the 20 years I have known him, my mate Tom has never once said:
“So-and-so are playing the Dublin Castle - want to come along?”
“Yep, I will meet you there,” I reply, somewhat stunned.
The band in question is The Sea, playing at the Dublin Castle in Camden - and Tom loves them. Their search engine-proof moniker means I walk blind into the venue, and was pleased to see nothing but a guitar amp and drumkit on stage. The Sea are just one man bashing pigskins, and his brother twisting strings on a Rickenbacker plugged into a scuzzy vox.
We later discover that not five minutes before they are due on stage, a fellow cornered the guitarist, Peter Chisolm in the toilet. “Give me coke, skinny indie kid,” he ordered. Upon finding that this skinny indie kid had none he proceed to punch him a few times in the face.
Which is why a dazed Peter Chisholm joins his brother, Alex, on stage. “This song goes out to the man who just gave me a black eye’” he syas, and lunges into a guitar frenzy. A hard-hitting bluesathon of riff rings out, and the room fills up. A lot of miserable old blokes shuffle around at the back, and optimistic teenage girls bounce around up front - always a sign of record company interest (or a paedophile ring).
It’s only 8:30pm, and The Sea are shamelessly riffing and drum filling away. If I’m being lazy, it is quite like early White Stripes, before Meg had that breakdown, and Jack turned into a humourless git that wrote wishy washy Bond themes. They have calls of Dan Sartain, Robert Johnson, and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Moby Dick’. The set creates a warm feeling like sausage & mash might, but instead it is made up of guitar riff porn and killer drum fillers.
However, listening to their MySpace page the next day, I’m not feeling the same raw fuzzed-out feel I got from the live show. It feels all a bit indie-twee, and seems to be missing its critical edge. Someone put Albini to work on it, and the world shall see peace in our time.
For more noises from The Sea, go check out their MySpace page.
I know fuck all about hip hop. Okay, so I’ve got a few albums lying about here and there from acts both American and British, but I’d be a big fat lying fucker if I pretended they weren’t tokenistic inclusions in my record collection. There’s some Task Force nestling up against some Phi Life Cypher, but it’s got an inch of dust on it. It’s just stuff to play at parties when you want to mug off the responsibility of DJ’ing to go drink’n'flirt with the hot girls in the kitchen.
I’m might know jack shit about hip hop, but I know when I’m having a good time. And on Wednesday night at the Hoxton Bar & Grill, that’s exactly what Kenan Bell made me have. It’s hard to enjoy anything at the Hoxton Bar & Grill. It has the stupidest name of any venue ever. It has the worst bar staff and bar prices in London, a city famed for it’s shittiness of both. It’s always too hot inside, the venue always feels too empty as the ceiling is far too high, and the tiny stage that’s too high up never does anyone any favours.
It certainly doesn’t Kenan Bell and his band any at first once they take to. Intermittently pleading and berating the crowd for not gathering at the foot of the stage, and about how in debt this tour has made them, the Californian and his cohorts seems somewhat indifferent of the fact that London is crunching to a recession-frozen halt. We’re all broke these days, chaps, and moaning about how hard done by you feel will hardly engender you to a be-credit-crunched crowd.
Watch Kenan Bell and his giant sunglasses playing performing ‘Enjoy’:
They’re saved by a gradually swelling crowd, and the fact that there’s talent in his songs, rather than the sub-standard self-aggrandisement I expect from hip hop. Tracks like ‘Save Your Life’, ‘Good Day’ and ‘Enjoy’ manage to be engaging without being unbearably “positive”. You know what I mean - those positive-thinking positive-message types who seem to see the stage as theit platform to preach from, rather than to entertain from. Kenan Bell sidesteps this with hooks that still feel like they’re tugging on my ears when I’m on the tube ride home.
Seeing as the biggest impact the UK urban scene has had on me recently is that they had to abandon their own awards ceremony descended into a mass brawl, it’s a little sad that I’ve had to look across the Atlantic to find something that’s made me want to investigate hip hop again. But if it means exposure to more acts like Kenan Bell, well, I’m all for it.
What is all this about then, I see a bunch of names under the banner Mongrel: Reverend And The Makers‘ Jon McClure and Joe Moskow, Babyshambles‘ Drew McConnell, former Arctic Monkeys bassist Andy Nicholson and MC Lowkey.
A plethora of Indie minor celeb in one band, a bunch more in the audience.The PR looks second to none with a healthy mix of industry faces and random members from The Enemy and Glasvegas making up the crowd tonight.
The excellently monikored Death Ray Trebuchet open up the show, 3 Horns, a scuzzy bass and a shouty man at the back sound fresh until it dawns they another Mr Bungle (first album only) tribute band with a dollop of late night Lost Vagueness field thrown in for good measure. Although anyone that convincingly can rip-off Mr Bungle has to be pretty compelling by association and technical ability, even if stylistically they may be throwing darts in the dark at Mike Patton pinata.
Mongrel themselves are jumping about in the audience building up the vibe and then clamber on stage with a casual accord. We are going to be in for a randomly exciting Wednesday night out. Mongrel are a meeting of minds of black and white, rock and rap a nice human solidarity.
Mongrel’s heart is in totally the right place and in a lot of ways echo that of Crosby, Still, Nash & Young a political supergroup that come together at times of international crisis to talk about, to remind people not to get let their fears and war get the better of them. but that is where the comparison stop with a rather murderous crash.
They start hurling some piss poor lyrics at us. ‘This country is a lie, yer gonna die yer gonna die’ Thanks for that Mongrel. Not quite Ghost Town is it, I hope the album is called ‘GCSE rebellion’.
This is doing fuck all for me, look about and look for the escape route. Try to engage some people about the sheer awfulness of this act. Nobody is wanting to express an opinion seems a lot of people here work on this act looking at their next client, Emperors new clothes it would seem.
They order us to “Put your hands up if you hate racism ?” going on “If you keep your hands down it means you love racism” the MC tells us attempting to guilt trip support for his dreadful band. I feel short of options: I mean what if we hate this music, but also hate racism? Or what about Love music, hate Australians? It would seem we need a whole semophore for the range of realistic prejudices among the crowd. I point to the east with my left leg while holding a blue biro in the air indicating a dislike for budget rap and schoolyard politics.
This playtime rebellion continues and the band were very impressed with their own performance. Fortunately we didn’t realise Mongrel were doing two sets and left the building chose find something more enjoyable to do like having our fingers sliced off at one millimetre at a time like Pauly does with garlic in Goodfella’s.
Seventeen Evergreen land in London for a one-off show and talk to Beren Neale about their debut album, floppy cheese and those lazy Pavement comparisons.
Seventeen Evergreen are a San Francisco band, but their explorative music can be linked to no terrestrial region. Having fed a lifelong passion for all things unearthly, drifted around the West Coast of America when growing up and soaked in influences from their travels across Europe, the delicate, magnificent music of Caleb Pate and Nephi Evans is more akin to finding a spider’s web in the corner of a moon crater than any current trend.
Since the US release earlier this year of their debut album Life Embarrasses me on Planet Earth, the two have visited London only twice. But the band is familiar with the city, as Caleb lived here in 2001. It was during this time, after an enjoyable but fruitless search for new musicians, that he returned to San Francisco with Nephi to regroup, refocus, and “make Seventeen Evergreen a more serious proposition”.
Why the move back to San Francisco? Is there a scene that you identify with there?
Caleb: Maybe if they’ll have us. It’s a very hipster-driven, cliquey scene. There are a handful of really cool psychedelic bands, noise bands, but I’m probably more into some of the indie hip hop stuff in Oakland… A handful of bands we like: Deerhoof, The Papercuts, Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound. They’re a Comets On Fire kinda band - heavy psych, buzz stuff.
It sounds like an All Tomorrow’s Parties line-up…
C:ATP is the best festival I’ve ever seen. I went to the Tortoise one, and it was amazing – Boards of Canada, Television, Yo La Tengo, Lambchop. That was 2001, around the time I lived here.
I regret missing the one Steve Malkmus curated.
C: He should have read all the erroneous reviews that we sound like Pavement, and he would have invited us.
Just googling you guys you see…
C: Pavement 1,000 times!
I thought I’d sneak that in there, subtle like.
C: You did a good job - I normally don’t talk about it. (Journalists) can be very lazy. Like, the Pavement thing is understandable because of geography, and the way we speak possibly. But Pavement is like the older brother of everyone that plays music. We happen to come 90 minutes away from where they come from (Stockton, CA), but I think to say that our music is derived from them… I think that’s slighting.
Nephi: I don’t think that our music has been influenced by Pavement at all. They’re just another band which I like. If we’re writing ideas and I hear something that’s too similar, I’m very aware of that.
C: To a fault we’re this way. Jokingly, I tried to rip of Dexy’s Midnight Runners, cos I thought it’d be funny, and put it in this song and he (Nephi) had such an issue with it that I had to write a completely different part real quick. I’m not self-conscience in that way - he perhaps a bit more so. But, I don’t think we’re particularly good at ripping off other bands, because it’s better what we come up with.
There’s a strong otherworldly theme through the album…
C:I think that the album definitely encapsulates some of my youthful obsessions. As long as I remember I was always really interested in the moon and space travel and aliens and these sorts of things. I have so many illustrations that I did when I was a little kid drawing spaceships.
Talking about illustrations, I remember some questions I emailed you before about zines, and you mentioned something about Floppy Cheese…
C: Nephi reminded me of that actually, cos I showed it to him long after I made it. It was a zine that an old friend and I did together. Basically, really bad music reviews, fake skateboard contest coverage, photocopied vinyl dudes made by Fisher Price (?) Just a really juvenile thing.
What inspired that?
The inspiration was my uncle had written a play called Floppy Cheese, which was based on this (living) blancmange idea - very Monty Python sort of vibe. I was like 11, right. So at one point we recited it and that became the title of the zine. Actually, me and my uncle used to do some really bizarre early electroacoustic music together using reel-to-reel tape machines, glasses and water and all kinds of things. His name’s Eric Simonson. He’s a composer. Why did you ask that? I was interested why you’d ask that.
I’ve got a friend that runs this zine… It was just a shot in the dark. What other art mediums inform your music?
C: Chicks!
Chicks?
C: That’s what’s on my mind at the moment.
Any luck in London?
This time? Not as many. I’ve seen London as virtually a smorgasbord in the past. This time I haven’t really been vibing on it.
Fair enough. Going back to another answer from a previous question - about how you wanted to “give back more than you get.” What did you mean?
C: I think it’s nice to give back, to try to express yourself in a way that you think needs to be expressed. I’m not speaking about giving back to the public or listeners. I’m actually speaking about giving back to the musical canon. Because (assumes mock lofty tone) the people will be enriched eventually by us enlarging the canon… I mean, giving back to ‘the people’ is simply giving them another Strokes. That’s all they want, right? They want another Killers, Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, you name it.
N:We’ve had comments from people, like ‘I was driving home to one of your songs and…’
C: …I totalled my car listening to your record’. We have various stories: ‘I had driven home from my wife giving birth to our first kid, listening to your record.’ It’s kinda like, wow, people live to our music.
That must be satisfying, as that album was entirely your own vision, with no interference…
N:Absolutely. We did everything [on the album] ourselves.
C: We had no label interaction when we made the record. We weren’t signed to anybody. We released it ourselves first and then we found labels coming to us later. They’ll probably be interested in working with us more closely on album number two, but we’ll see if we want to take their advice. We definitely learnt a lot from making it and I think the forty or so songs we’ve written for the next record illustrates that.
End of interview.
It’s time for the guys to get ready for the gig, and Nephi leaves to catch the end of support act Kyte. After some rambling chat with Caleb about psychedelic folk-rock innovator Merrell Fankhauser, we too head over. Entering the venue, we’re both stopped in our tracks by the music being played down the corridor: ‘Bud-ids-no sac-ah-rah-fiees’ wails a disturbingly familiar voice. “Not a good Billy Joel”, says Caleb. “That’s Elton John” I politely correct him. “It’s Billie Joel!” he demands. Although not my finest hour, I assure him I’m not mistaken, as I bought the track on its release in the 90s. “It’s Elton!” he concedes with a grin, and we launch into a unique rendition: ‘Col col heart. Hrr-dun-by-yoo’. “Hey!” exclaims Caleb. “You’ve got to put this in your piece. This is your end.” And so it is.
The last album that arrived in my hands with such expectation as Death Magnetic was months ago - Justice in fact. Metallica really jumped backed into our good books a few years back when they played the entire of Master of Puppets at Download Festival, after years of being out in the corporate cold with their Napster mission and the whole St Anger debacle. Monday night at the O2 Arena, Hetfield jokes ‘Frantic’ is off the “very popular” St Anger album, to a giant groan from the audience. Hetfield laughs: “It still rocks”.
Pleased that the album arrived before the show, nothing is under five minutes and only one under six. This isn’t the The Ramones, but it’s just as fast. A few details seem to indicate this album will be great.
1. Rick Ruben (the lost member of ZZ-top) at the helm of buttons. Whom I would’ve thought cut through their rock star indecision: “Just make it like this, Ulrich, and shut up. I am taller then you have a beard and producedLicensed to Ill, Reign in Blood, Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Johnny Cash’s last record - so listen up midget”.
2. Every magazine that has had the album already has said ‘return to form’, but then every album since Master of Puppets has said that, every magazine wants the interview don’t they?
3. It has the old logo on it.
The album opens with very distinct Metallica sound - it just couldn’t be anyone else - and if it was, everyone would accuse them of sounding like Metallica. This album is so big it won’t work on your crappy computer speakers. Throw it on the Tannoy Speakers, that’s better.
The single: ‘The Day That Never Comes’. Big and anthemic, six minutes into it I’m starting to wonder how these old guys can remember the arrangement. I mean, I can’t remember the password to my computer that I change a few weeks’ back. I want listen in on the internal monitors they all wear. I bet there are arrangement prompts on it. Has to be. Of course, there there is a heavy argument that they are seasoned professionals, and they are playing the O2Arena while I’m just watching. But have you seen Some Kind of Monster? If they were that good, surely LarsUlrich would be a better drummer.
None of this denies that this album is a feat of modern metal, currently sitting at Number 1 in the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic. I feel a sense of metal-pride I haven’t felt since I found out that ‘Bring your Daughter to the Slaughter’ got to number 1 on the walk to school, a vertible feast of riffs and metal headbanging heaven. ‘The Day That Never Comes’ alone must have about 20 sections at least to it and a bunch of words too. Lets count them.
Pre-lude twiddly melody bit
Intro melody,
Intro melody with drums.
Intro melody with first verse
Same melody but rock with stabs - and vocals getting all gruff.
Queen-y twiddly bit
Same melody but solo featurette
Intro melody with second first
Melody has gone all rock - guess this is a chorus, these stabs are cool.
Queen-y twiddly bit
Queen-y twiddly bit 5 more times slightly differently
Intro into Outro
Ooh this bit sounds like Orion.
Ohh this bit sounds like Orion with singing, ‘Love is a four letter word’
Key Change ‘I suffer this no longer’
Lots of sliding to get out of this bit and into
Queeny twiddly bit x 2 into
Fast like ‘Battery’ go apeshit bit
Iron Maiden double guitar solo/riffing
Slow slides
Double guitar riffs, this time not iron maiden.
More double guitar solo runs
Some new riff quite low on the neck.
Fast chugga chugga bit, with a more traditional solo quite shreddy quite long.
Slow slides with some chugga interludes
Slides faster.Go twiddle it is an outro.
26 sections, and I am pretty sure I missed out one or three. The whole album is like this. A masterpiece of arrangement, and we wouldn’t expect anything less from the lost the Great Beard Rubin. It is enough to gives previous incarnations of attention-deficit rock like System of a Down and Mr Bungle a valium and a nice sit down for a minute.
I get the impression from the instrumental ‘Suicide & Redemtion’ that Metallica have been listen to other bands other then themselves this time round. Not because it sounds like anybody, but it just sounds a bit different from them. Maybe they paid attention to The Sword and Mastodon on recent support slots. Actually scratch that… this track fucking rocks because it sounds like the heavy bit in The A-Team theme.
Unfortunately, this instrumental rock opus, that dispenses with trying to put meaningless lyrics sprinkled over the top, was skipped from the O2 show. We were told to expect something ‘different’ and in turn was expecting the whole album of Death Magnetic. Fortunately we escaped another rendition of ‘Sad But True’ or ‘Enter Sandman’. Instead slightly more off the well beaten track like ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’ and ‘Of Wolf and Man’.
The gig feels intimate, even though it has about 15,000 people here, as the band are playing in the middle of the room on a platform, surrounded by mic’s and the drumkit moves ninety degree’s every few songs. As Hetfield says - there is so much front row. The show has no pyro, and barely any lights. It is stripped down and rawer, like a proper race car. No hotdog stalls or support acts to distract us from the ‘tallica.
The O2 sort of has a feeling of going to a gig in Brent Cross, and in turn everyone behaved like they were shopping with their mum. Having a few enjoyable drinks, comparing tickets, we wasted the afternoon away getting the feel for some metal youth revival. Elsewhere in the east of London Metallica had a more enjoyable day and went down to watch the Lehman’s bank redudantees crying clutching boxes of staplers, wondering why they didn’t set up that smelly candle company.
Not that it matters: we headbang away blissfully, ignoring the fact we are not 16 and this is really going to hurt tomorrow morning.
Lets take stock of the 5 days in that Beavis’ guys field this week:
Found
Some new friends
One orange torch
One big smelly but well fitting coat
A Tent (there were a few available)
Someone called Shuan gave me £60 to buy/steal my megaphone then buggered off without it.
Someone gave me £50 for helping them up on stage
Lost or Stolen
One Bakerlight Handset that had been rewired as a headphone for mixing made by my missus she is very very angry about it.
One Mini-KP Kaospad a bunch of leeds and rechargeable batteries
Maybe a very tasty bunch of CD’s (not sure yet, a bit too scared to look)
One hat with horns like the devil or a cow
One set of oversize shades I bought on holiday
Dignity on Dancefloor
This is the reason why I didn’t want to go - it costs so much to go to Glastonbury, both personally and financially. In time effort, hard cash, and your best party kit that gets stolen. I always end up losing out. If you found the retro phone handset/kaospad or CD’s, please get in touch will give you hard cash.
TOP ACTS
Manu Chao
Where have you been all my life, we wanted ‘Bongo Bong’ though.
Black Mountain
Ah someone booked a rock band! Aces! Call out the beardo’s! Loved the end of their set - “We are going to play one more’. Cue enchanting 15 minute pink floydesque physcadelica. With some very pacey stage managers.
Neil Diamond
What happened to ‘Girl You’ll be a Woman Soon’? Or ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’? We don’t care about the god songs on the new album. May I also suggest learning the name of where you are: “hellooo Glastonberry”.
The Banjo Circus
The smallest Banjo Circus in the world ever! Made me believe I can do acrobatics. And remind me why redheads are the boss.
Trash City
The random trance of trash city – imagine finding a flaming mad max baddie headquarters at 4am full of crazy midlanders. Could of done with some Lionel Richie though throw a random smack in the middle of it. Nice to meet a 60 year old raver though.
Newton Faulkner
Until recently thought that white guys in dreads only should be allowed to a) sell falafels b) do the lighting rigging, I will now add c) Sing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to a billion teenage girls with a load of acoustic guitar gimmicks to that list
TOP GRIPES
Glastonbury is full of bullshit and double standards: it’s like getting out of a prison to get in, messages of peace love tidy up and happiness. But all the punters leave it like a dump - disgusting.
Music seems to be painfully music-industry indie-based, not that much experimental music on the main stages. Doesn’t really support the genuine alternative scene in that respect. Feels like a marketing exercise in the same people making the big bucks and getting the exposure.
The big band areas of burger bars and gurning idiots that really need a mirror put in their faces.
Now combine 1 to 3 and you have Jack Penate and friends - (allegedly - legal Ed). They were camped near us. They were rude, self-important on coke (seemingly) and some other camper spotted a lovely crackpipe. They left their camp really dirty and didn’t tidy up anything. Probably got paid a relative fortune and treated everyone around them and the farm with total disrespect. This is the mindset of possibly every fouth camp that didn’t tidy up, got wankered, took drugs and then left everything in a field. Spoilt twats deserved a kicking and offered them it too. Not surprising they snuck off in the morning, one of them even walked off while in his tent so ashamed on his comedown.
Maybe it is time to call it a Day – the Message isn’t working
It is more of an issue now then a spare ticket being sold here and there, of course it is reflection of a wider throwaway culture. But in the build up to Glastonbury I think the touting talk/Jay Z talk/Tent Peg talk all come back to one thing. Respect for everyone on site and that disposable culture can’t be maintained. I would find it hard to justify putting on the festival if I owned it. Why not just have a smaller more sustainable festival?
You can’t organise it and then have some very token gestures on charity donations. There was a sign somewhere that said ‘not just a marketing gimmick’ - but I think Glastonbury’s green credentials are the biggest marketing green gimmick of all time.
How about not having 200,000 burn rubber, fire, petrol, use plane miles, and have endless lines of cars coming to a field? Surely that would be the most effective manner to ‘all do our little bit’, or ‘be kind to the farm’. Maybe I am being grouchy and I have had a lot of great times at Glastonbury, but with every year it seems more hypocritical even having the festival on at all.
So if you have to have another one - this is a festival with almost 200k people every year, about a quarter of them working. So cooking food, sucking poo, performing on stage, making a Wickerman…it seems possibly a third are just there to get ‘tarded up on drugs, steal shit, and then leave it all behind when they pop off back to suburbia. Maybe the festival needs to become a tad more militant?
If everyone was involved, then would they respect what you do more? How about Burning Man’s theme, lets ban money on site, let’s take away the bars, let’s take away the burger vans, let’s take away the headliners and the expensive hitters. Let’s all get involved, get up there on a Wednesday and make some reason to barter for food/drink/entertainment. Let’s ban petrol generators and electricity on site. Let’s all get involved to make it work. Let’s have a production train or two taking the kit off and on site. Let’s make the BBC take down their glittery production. “Get into the festival or don’t turn up” should apply from top to bottom.
Whatever happens, something has to change as the state of the site was unacceptable to do it like this again.
Most of us here at Music Towers are like the Wicked Witch of the West – the prospect of going out in the rain makes us curl up and melt. So when the weathermen predicted dark clouds over London last Sunday, step forward our new guy, Tom Gibbons, for the Love Music Hate Racism Carnival:
Despite a stinking hangover, yours truly dragged his arse to Victoria Park in London on Sunday, to check out the 30th Anniversary of Rock Against Racism – an Anti-Nazi League ‘music festival’ which has renamed itself Love Music Hate Racism.
Upon entering the regal gates we were aurally assaulted by some ANL activists with megaphones, and handed a year’s supply of roach material, cleverly disguised as ‘Vote For Me’ flyers. On May 1st, Londoners will elect both the Mayor of London and the 25 members of the London Assembly, and what better way for ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone to finish off his campaign than with a rally….err….music festival.
It seems that a large proportion of London was camped just outside the entrance to the festival, drinking their cheap booze and such, and after negotiating our way through the midday mayhem we found a friend covered in mud, grinning like a mad man. He’d just been ejected for doing a running ninja slide under the gate, armed with enough booze and drugs to knock-out a small elephant. Surely that’s par the course for a music festival? For an Anti-Nazi League music festival in London, the security were going about their business in an ironically fascist manner. After some full-cavity searches were done with, it was over to the main stage for some music. Except Ken was talking – we were his “brothers and sisters” – and he only just stopped short of “I have a dream……”
When the music did arrive the acts on the main stage didn’t last long. It was one or two numbers and on with the next, and no-one in the crowd had a clue who was playing. So we bought a programme, which gave you a nicely illustrated line-up…but no stage times. Most performances - particularly from The View - were lacklustre and there was a less atmosphere than the aroma of one of Neil Armstrong’s farts trapped inside his spacesuit – mainly down to the bizarre and short performance arrangements, which were interspersed with political sound-bites from Ken and co. Just as the procession of politicos was becoming tedious, it started to rain.
Gigs in clubs are always a difficult affair – the British gig go’ers mindset can’t fully integrate the behaviour of both environments. After al, both have a set sociological procedure to them – at a gig, you hand over your ticket, go buy a drink, browse the merch stand, jostle with strangers to get a good spot, stomach the support acts, watch the main act, go home. At a club, you roll up late doors, have a few drinks, maybe dabble in recreational narcotics, dance like a fupping idiot, before copping off with something you shouldn’t before retreating to the taxi/nightbus/nearest hedge.
Combining gigs with clubnights usually makes everyone feel awkward. No-one wants to dance before the band comes on – their instruments stand unattended on the stage, like a particularly stern parent. At a regular gig they can be ignored – we’re not doing anything other than standing around, we’re not here to interact with each other, and ‘they’ are part of the furniture you expect at a gig. At a club they seem to sneer at us, casting judgement upon our revelry: “Heh! You’re just dancing to someone else’s records, you plebs!”
Well, London indie-student Saturday night stalwarts, the Afterskool club night, have broke with their tradition of just spinning whatever songs get the kids dancing, and last weekend, booked up-and-comers Los Campesinos! to play live. And yes, before the bad comes on at midnight, the place feels just like a particularly crowded gig, rather than a club night.
“Up-and-comers? Shows what you know, Granddad, their album ‘Hold on Now, Youngster’ has been out for ages,” is what I’m currently imagining some of the gig go’ers of last weekend are thinking after reading that. Or perhaps not – any semblance of putting on a façade of indie faux-indifference fades in the face of songs like ‘Death to Los Campesinos!’ It’s just impossible to affect a yeah-whatever-too-cool-for-(after)skool pose when seven people are having such a joyous time onstage.
Of course, fitting all seven members of the band onto that small stage does somewhat focus the fun, squeezing every last measure of juicy chaos out and pouring it out over the crowd in concentrated waves. Keyboardist/vocalists Aleksandra and Gareth have to swap places throughout the gig, depending on which one is singing which song. When lurking back, they each slip into the shadows created by the lighting rig – its not a planned exercise, but it works rather well. They are, quite literally, sharing the spotlight.
When: Thursday April 3rd. Where: Camden Underworld.
Saviours: If you want unashamed guitar heaven, you have walked into the right room. The Underworld is heaving, and Oakland California four-piece, Saviours are on stage. The lead guitarist is a skinny dude with a very nice Explorer, and quite suitably a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt. Metal at it’s purest, some might say, while dissenters may dismiss it all for being way too derivative. But we all know that doesn’t matter here - these hard riff-laden tracks are to be enjoyed for the shameless guitar celebration that they are.
Saviours kind of have a Ricky Gervais timing. Just when you think the Riff Assault should break off, they carry on for an extra few bars. It keeps building the tension in the process, so when that break delivers, it does it with so much more and really does hit home.
Despite the gruff doom mongering and ‘Into Abaddon’ title of their first album, the band are pretty chirpy and excited to be there. After the gig they head straight to the Merch desk, like any good American band should and encourage us to buy some of their marvelous T-Shir
When: Thursday April 3rd. Where: Camden Underworld.