Easily Impressed
28
Jan

MJ Hibbett And The Validators, Wilmington Arms, London

Thursday 26th January, 2012

I’m at the Wilmington Arms in Clerkenwell, Central London, a loverly pub full of chatting media-type people, trustafarians and me and my mate. The Portobello mushroom burger with cheese that I ordered from the bar arrives. Within seconds I realise my mistake. This is not a piece of cow in a bun with cheese and mushrooms on it. This is a couple of big flat mushrooms in a bun with cheese on them. I am slightly annoyed by this but my irritation turns to joy when I bite into it and it turns out to be delicious.

This is spookily appropriate for this evening as it is exactly the sort of thing that Mark Hibbett could turn into a song. It would be called “I Bought A Veggie Burger Once” and despite the mundane subject matter, it would, like, totally ROCK.

Hibbett has been writing and recording his vignettes of everyday life with its minor tribulations with, more often than not, a positive twist at the end, for well over a decade.

He’s produced a fair body of work  in this time and has what is generally known as a “small but devoted cult following”, although to be fair most cults are not this friendly and polite. Can’t see the assembled audience at the Wilmington tonight brainwashing anybody or blowing anything up.

This evening is the launch for the excellent “Dinosaur Planet” album, which is a War Of The Worlds-style musical / concept album / rock opera concerning the fate of the dinosaurs, who as any fule kno, disappeared mysteriously 65 million years ago …

… but now, they’re BACK  in a funny, charming and utterly ludicrous tale involving…

(*** MILD SPOILER ALERT ***)

dinosaurs that talk like pirates, giant robots, and the Battle Of Peterborough.

(*** END SPOILER ALERT ***)

Tonight is also a return to the London stage for full backing band The Validators, who provide the perfect accompaniment to the tunes – indie, a bit wistful, rocky at times, with a superb violin lilt courtesy of Tom ‘Tiger’ McClure, who was once in a band called Lazarus Clamp, which endears me to him.

The set lasts around an hour – WAY too short! – centred on five songs from the new album. Each song has a range of guest stars playing policemen, dinosaurs and giant robots  (look, buy the album, it does all make sense, really it does).

The new stuff is well received although the album works better when heard in its entirety – hopefully once the album starts selling by the truckload we’ll get the full staged version at the Hammersmith Apollo with full cast, guest slots and expensive merchandise.

The FREE plastic dinosaurs handed out during the set were a start, though.

The greatest hits selection goes down best.

“Do The Indie Kid”  is accompanied by appropriately random dancing.

“The Lesson Of The Smiths” always raises a smile – how can you not LOVE a song that starts:

“Morrissey, Marr and Barlow changed my life” ?

Finishing, appropriately enough, with “Billy Jones Is Dead”, a song about reminiscing about The Old Days and what everyone’s getting up to now.

Highlight for me, though is “Easily Impressed”  , which always strikes a chord as it celebrates taking delight in the wonderful small things in life. Like porridge, and cricket, and pot bellied pigs, and free plastic dinosaurs given away at gigs.

Which is what makes MJ Hibbett GRATE! Which is why you should all treasure him and buy the album so he keeps on making more.

Did I mention the dinosaurs talk like pirates?  8=)

Pete And The Pirates
10
Dec

October 4th, Scala London

After years of managing to miss Pete And The Pirates through bad luck, sheer indolence, a bad cold, and simply being in the wrong town or, in some cases, the wrong country, I got to see them twice in two months.

Pete And The Pirates gigs are like buses. You wait ages for one and then when you get on its all crowded and sweaty.

“Its 1979 and Heart Of Glass is playing…”

I take a look around the mosh pit. The cheerful, heterogenous crowd ranges from teenage kids through balding 30-something men who can’t quite kick the gigging habit to, well me. I can’t see too many people who would be likely to even have been alive in 1979 when Blondie were in their pomp, let alone attending the Scala…

This place has memories for me.

I used to go come here often back then with my first serious girlfriend Tessa. She got me into a lot of good stuff art and culture wise.

The Scala was a cinema then, showing art films that triumphantly straddled the line between art and porn.

We saw Jubilee there, Derek Jarman’s legendary punk film which featured a cameo from a young Adam Ant, and a plot involving a just-around-the-corner future Britain in which anarchy reigns and Buckingham Palace has been converted into a giant recording studio. The support bill was a selection of homoerotic porn shorts by the cult film-maker Kenneth Anger, including “Scorpio Rising”, which certainly opened my 17-year-old eyes to another side of biker culture.

Back to the present and a packed and enthusiastic crowd greets Pete And The Pirates. They’ve been around for a couple of years now, touting their brand of tuneful indie, and they’ve built up a devoted following.

They’re from Reading. In their early days they used to go to the Reading Festival every year as punters and plant a Pirate flag in an appropriate location. They would then proceed to play an impromptu acoustic sets and hand round flyers to people. Gotta say, that’s a fantastic marketing idea for any bands reading this.

Unassuming to look at, maybe even a bit reticent to talk to the crowd much, they play a fantastic set comprising much of their two albums. “Come To The Bar” is an obvious highlight. Lyrically they have a way with the wry one-liner lyrics – “Get out of bed, its the wrong one” for starters.

(NB – Incidentally, a quick scout round that Interweb reveals that the Scala I attended back in the day was in fact in a completely different London location. Funny how the memory plays tricks. I’ll never forget “Scorpio Rising” though. And if I ever come across a biker with no trousers on, I always give him a wide berth)

November 22nd, Buffalo Bar, London

The more recent gig was to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Buffalo Bar, and I have to be honest, although the band were great, the crowd were not up to much at all.

Gig etiquette surely dictates that if you get to a gig early enough to take up a position at the front, the least you can do is dance. Or move. Or react in some way to what’s happening on stage, not just stand there in silence.

Don’t get me wrong, each to their own and I know some people like standing and watching quietly. Fair enough. But FFS do it at the BACK of the gig, will you? In the case of the excellent Buffalo Bar, the back of the gig is still pretty close to the stage anyway.

That’s where me and my mate Craig are. Craig is only a couple of years younger than me and another ageing punk. He’s recently come back from four months unpaid leave in LA trailing his missus, looking after their young kid during the daytime and checking out the LA scene in the evenings.

He tells me a great story about his first pilgrimage to the legendary punk club The Roxy.

A large well-dressed man sidles up to him and says “Hey, are you on your own?” “Yes” says Craig. “Well, do you want to come to the bathroom with me?” “No!” he replies. The guy goes to the bathroom anyway and doesn’t come back. Craig spends the rest of the evening digging the bands and not going to the bathroom, ending up having to piss on the wall outside the club. Which I suppose is quite a punk thing to do.

He professes outrage at these events, but I think he’s secretly kind of pleased that he’s still got it. This sort of thing never happens to me, although I did have my bottom squeezed by a woman at the Scala – not in its porn cinema phase but during a Broken Family Band gig – but I suspect she was just trying to annoy her boyfriend.

So, the gig is enjoyable and the band are playing their hearts out but there’s not much to be done about a lot of the crowd. There’s a few people making an effort at the back though.

Afterwards we notice the guitarist outside chatting to a girl. They’re very polite about being interrupted by two large middle-aged men telling him how great the band is. We complain about the audience but he won’t have it and says something like “they were enjoying it in a different way”, which I think shows a tremendous amount of class.

Pete And The Pirates. A great band, and a great bunch of lads.

Genna Marabese
2
Dec

Tuesday 15th November 2011

Well, I’ve never seen THIS before.

There are more people on stage when this gig starts than there are in the crowd.

Even in my own extremely minor musical career I’ve never encountered this before.

By the end of a gig, sure, when everybody has enjoyed the band sufficiently and gone home, but nobody has the heart to tell the band.

There was a pub gig I played in 1990 where we started out with around twenty fairly enthusiastic punters. Two hours of blaring original metal later it was just the bar staff, and I’m pretty sure they were only still there because they wouldn’t have gotten paid otherwise. We even played an encore for the barman.

But this is the Bull And Gate in buzzin’ North London. Yeah, I know England are playing football on the telly, but seriously … if I can make the effort with a dose of the man-flu and a cough that would not sound out of place in a 60–a-day man then so can everybody else.

The gig is a Club Fandango promotion featuring four bands. Its the first act I’m here to see though, so its an 8.00 start in a freezing, near-deserted room for Genna Marabese.

A little research on that internet reveals an intriguing set of influences – Joanna Newsom, the Velvet Underground, Hole, and so on. And in this day and age there’s no excuse for going to a gig without checking out the songs, which I have done and they all sound amazing, intriguing and pretty much original.

GM’s set is superb. Six piece band perfectly complements her doomy yet hummable songs. There are echoes of the likes of Anna Calvi here, and lots of chord progressions that owe less to rock and more to East European folk music.

But … Genna and her band ROCK. And you can dance to them, which is always good.

The key here is the songs, which are ragged and garagey, dark and countrified.The band play a very important part in creating a unique sound – she definitely needs to keep a hold of them. There isn’t a weak song played tonight, which is most unusual for an artist at such an early stage of her career, but We Are Animal and Masquerade are contrasting standouts.

And she avoids all the cornier stereotypes of the alt.girl-fronted-rock genre – if you’re not careful you end up coming over like some horrible big-haired early eighties “alternative” harpy. Much as I like The Machine, for instance, their girl singer Florence does occasionally strays into Toyahland.

Genna Marabese reminds me of early Tom Waits  more than anyone else in terms of song structures and sound. Nearest female  comparison I can think of is Lene Lovich (slightly Gothy, punky singer with a Balkan origin who had three strange and wonderful hits back in 1979, the era when left-field music could still get in the charts. Lucky Number was her big hit)

Its a crowded market, sure, but Genna’s uniqueness should assure her a place in it. There is nobody who sounds quite like this. And I admired the way she and her band didn’t let the sparse crowd bother them and still put on a great show. At least one of the bands that followed didn’t seem to be bothered to be honest.

By the end of the set the crowd has increased to the point where we comfortably outnumber the band. One day we’ll be able to say we saw Genna Marabese before she was famous. And so should you.

Mind you, coming out tonight made sure that the bug really got a hold of me to the point where I didn’t go out again for more than a week. But, had I unfortunately not survived, at least the last gig I ever attended would have been worth it.

 

 

 

Colorama – Acid-folk with a psych twist.
24
Nov

Thursday November 10th, Slaughtered Lamb, LDN

I’ve never heard a band sound quite like Colorama.

Their website describes them as a psych folk / dream pop group, which sounds about right.

It is tempting for people to lump together all new bands without any screaming guitars in the “folk” category but that would do Colorama a grave disservice.

There are only surface similarities to the current folk revival scene, but this band is coming from a different direction entirely.

They sound unique in current music. There are elements of early 70s acid-folk – think Pentangle and the songs running through “The Wicker Man” – but there is also a psychedelic 60s element to the sound. Bandleader Carwyn Ellis’s singing adds yet another dimension, all yearning and pastoral.

The songs are beautiful slow-burning things that get into your head and under your skin. They’re split about 60/40 between Welsh and English. Now despite only speaking English I think I prefer the songs in Welsh – not understanding the lyrics lets me get lost in the music. I don’t understand German either, which is one of the major reasons I like Wagner. The composer that is, not the bloke off of X-Factor last year.

Colorama have been my late night listening of choice for most of what’s been an absolutely vile year on a personal level. The music has an unsentimental beauty that just draws you in.

I’ve been waiting a long time to see them live and tonight’s setting at The Slaughtered Lamb in Shoreditch is perfect. Basement room, people stood around at the bar or sat on sofas and armchairs.

There’s a red on black pentagram adorning the back of the stage, which seems to fit perfectly with Colorama’s sound.

The musicianship is astounding, on their records and also, as tonight proves, in a live setting. Any muso will tell you that is easy to amp it up to 11 and speed everything up on stage. If anything – and I wasn’t carrying a stopwatch so I can’t say for sure – Colorama slow it down. They’re not afraid of playing quietly, and thank God for that ‘cos these songs work best that way.

The band is currently a three-piece with guitars, drums and occasional forays into some weird and wonderful looking instruments that I’ve certainly never seen played live before, including an autoharp Its not a harp at all, as you can see. Its a zither, really. The campaign to reinstate the proper name begins here.

Colorama appear to be poised on the brink of a bit of success, at least in indie/alternative circles. The aforementioned folk revival in which we find ourselves can do them no harm. So if more people get to hear Colorama, I’ll happily put up with the presence any number of Whales and Sons and so on.

They have three albums /mini-albums out. Debut mini-album “Magic Lantern Show” is the most folky of the three. Full-length album “Box” gives more reign to the psychedelic side in places (check out “Candy Street” in particular, the best song Ray Davies never wrote) and they’ve just released “Colouring Book” which on the first couple of listens is well up to standard.

You should listen to this band. And go see them before they get too big. Next LDN gig is at Stokey Records Bar in Stoke Newington on Friday 9th December 2011.

Colorama website

 

 

 

Airborne Toxic Event and me. A love story.
18
Nov

5th November 2011, Shepherds Bush Empire, London

“This band means everything to us, its pretty much all we’ve got”

Every time I’ve seen The Airborne Toxic Event, singer Mikkel Jollett has said this towards the end of the gig.

If you’ve never seen the band then you may well think “Yeah, that’s bullshit” and I can see where you’re coming from – and I guess it has probably become an integral part of the show, like when Bruce Springsteen asks Miami Steve what time it is.

But you get the feeling that he means it.

The Airborne Toxic Event first came to my attention in November 2008 when they did a UK tour covering 30 gigs in 30 nights, including the more well-travelled cities but also places like Yeovil, Derby, Fife, Aldershot, Barrow In Furness, Dundee.

I’d be hard pressed to even GO to 30 gigs in 30 nights, even if they were all round the corner and I didn’t have to work.

I saw the band three times on that tour at their London residency, at gigs promoted by the excellent Club Fandango. (check out the video diary with a slightly bemused looking Steven Chen (guitar and keyboards) coming to terms with the UK)

Their first album had gotten a grey market UK release, forty minutes and ten tracks of sheer rock’n’roll genius, not a superfluous note or a wasted word.

The buzz got louder as to what a great live band they were. The crowd was bigger for each gig, and what a show they put on! In the tiny back room of the Dublin Castle in Camden they pounded out their songs of doomed love and big hooks. It was the closest I will ever get to seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Stone Pony, New Jersey.

And on the third night, when the singer jumped into the crowd for a bit of that old rock’n’roll down with the people stuff, he ignored all the adoring twenty-something girls, stuck his arm round my shoulders and the mike in my face, and I did the best I could to remember the words to “Gasoline”… Proud moment, although the cynical me did have room for the thought that he may have been trying to recreate the famous cover shot to “Born To Run”, and I was the only big fat brown man available.

Great band, great set of gigs.

So then through a series of personal mishaps on their part and having to leave the country for a while on my part (don’t ask), I went through 2009 and 2010 ATE-less. They cancelled a European tour in 2009 owing to ill-health and a couple of UK gigs too and I thought, well, that’s that. They’ve missed the boat now. Great band, fantastic album, at least we have the memories and they didn’t last long enough to get crap.

Early 2011. Back in the UK again, bit out of touch with music, scanning the TV listings and there on Sky Arts is a concert by The Airborne Toxic Event. At Disney Concert Hall (check name). Its lovely shot in B&W (check) with a choir and a marching band! There’s new songs! And a cover of the fabulous Magnetic Fields’ “The Book Of Love”!

Further investigation reveals a new album “All At Once” and, glory be, a UK tour ! They’re doing  a week of gigs in London, revisiting the smaller venues where they made their name locally. These gigs are sold out but I manage to get tickets for an intimate sit-down gig at the Drill Hall via Facebook.

And hearing them for the first time in stripped-down acoustic mode, its like listening to the songs again for the first time. They make so much sense sung quieter and less frenetically, and Mikkel’s extensive between-song yarns flesh out the story, which is, basically, that if a girl called Catherine hadn’t dumped him, all the great songs on the first album wouldn’t have been written.

Thank God for bad relationships. Happiness is overrated. At least when it comes to artists writing decent songs. But that’s a topic for another day…

So I seek out a ticket for any of the gigs in the rest of the week. I’m prepared to pay quite a lot.

Somebody on the fans forum has a spare for the Kings College gig and wants it to go to a fellow fan. I insist on payment, she refuses, so I end up buying her a drink in exchange for the ticket.

The gig is amazing, better than I have ever seen them play.

So up until April 2011 I had seen The Airborne Toxic Event five times for a grand total cost of £15.  Plus a pint of Guinness.

The ticket for Shepherds Bush Empire costs me more than the other five gigs combined – but the band is worth every penny, and then some.

A word about the songs. Lets be clear, there is nothing that original here. The Airborne Toxic Event are alchemists and mixers in the same way Blur and Oasis were. Mikkel knows exactly how to write a song, with the little pause before the whole song goes crazy – It is the utter conviction with which they play that makes the difference, its something that Springsteen has (obviously) and Dexys, and the Proclaimers, and the Hold Steady. None of those acts were particularly innovative, but they all bring a new freshness to the musical styles they plunder.

The stagecraft is superb – you do get that with American bands, they tend to be about putting on a show and less about being “too cool for school” than their British equivalents.

This is an excellent desktop backgroundmade by a far more dedicated fan than me and including some great shots of the gig, and a setlist also. Thanks Erfy. If that IS your real name… 8=)

No “Book Of Love” tonight which is a shame. They covered it before Peter Gabriel, and better than he did it. But check out the Magnetic Fields original , it’s the best version of the three.

And as for the encore… continuing the Brooce theme, they do an extended version of their chugging country rock anthem “Missy” incorporating snatches of “I’m On Fire”, ”I Fought The Law” and “Folsom Prison Blues”.

And its that triumvirate of Bruce, Clash and Cash that defines them, their influences and where they want to be.

There’s a genuine bond that exists between band and audience. I’ve never seen anybody else actually come down off the stage within five or ten minutes of the gig finishing for meet and greets, autographs and pictures. They do give the impression that they actually care about that stuff, and I’m still idealistic enough to think that’s important.

A quick word about the support band, Leeds’ The Chevin. Pretty standard anthemic indie but played well and vigorously and with enough in the songs to hold promise of things to come.

I reckon the best thing for them would be NOT to be hugely successful until the second album at least, lest they find themselves on the Big Pink path of premature expectation and end up writing a second album identical to the first.

In conclusion, as I type this I have by my side half a drumstick that drummer Daren Taylor tossed into the crowd at the end of the gig. Which I then got him to sign afterwards. I joke that it will be up on ebay tomorrow but we both know that I shall be treasuring it forever, along with the pick belonging to The War On Drugs and the setlists from The Broken Family Band. That’s right, setlists plural.

I should be way too old to get excited by that sort of thing – but there’s something about this band that turns me into a teenager again.

And ain’t that the whole function of rock music?