beatworm.co.uk

Second time I’ve seen the Secret Machines now. They played our stage at Glastonbury last year, upon which I noted ‘they make music almost scientifically designed to appeal’. That much hasn’t changed.They have a new album out, which moves them into a slightly more poppy, slightly less belligerent mode, without deviating too far from their fundamental style.

One thing that does irk. When a band is touring in support of a new album release, I try to purchase it ahead of the show, so I can be more familiar with the new material that usually will make up the bulk of the set. In this case, the album in question, ‘Ten Silver Drops’ was only availble to purchase at that time as an ‘iTunes exclusive’. I don’t like buying albums on iTunes, I think that it’s too expensive, especially considering the restricted nature of the files. I’d rather buy and rip a CD. In this case, fanboy that I am, I bought the download, and I expect I’ll buy the disc as well. pwn3d. But slightly annoyed.

Another slight downer is the Bierkeller itself. It’s a horrible hole, with murky sound at best. The layout is peculiarly flat, with a very low stage, minimal space for a lighting rig, and large open seating and bar areas adjacent to the audience pit. For no reason I can ever fathom, these seem to collect milling crowds whose persistent smalltalk reverberates, often audible over the sound of the band.

I can’t really understand why anyone with little or no interest in a band would shell out ten quid or more to go hang around in a toilet and attempt to shout conversation, perhaps drinking expensive, poor quality alcoholic beverages. I’m obviously well on my way to being part of the older generation. Almost as puzzling, there was an indie disco night scheduled for after the gig, although this does seem to be the prevalent modern trend. Presumably all these hangers around had either paid silly-money to turn up early for this affair, or had managed to blag their way in free en masse, for the same. Whatever the reason, it seems to be a constant at Bierkeller shows, and it’s a real spoiler.

The band had a very early start, hitting the stage for around 7:45pm, with no support. I don’t know if this was the normal plan, or was scheduled to facilitate the disco shindig afterwards, but I think it surprised a lot of punters, as the place seemed half-empty for the first three or four songs. The sound was as murky as ever, which the band seemed to decide to attack with volume, which was probably a wise decision given the ambient noise and sound reflection.

I was never closer than about half way to the front, but although there was no real detail to the sound, it was an impressive racket, and combined with plenty of pretty colours and stobe lights to good effect. I even managed to grab some rather impressionistic photos on my Tesco Value digicam.

   

The band really put in the effort, with a long set. I would sum it up was an enjoyable show in a poor venue, pretty much what I was expecting when I bought the tickets. Much as I dislike the Bierkeller, when a band I admire is coming over from the US to play a show in my home town, it’s very much a case of beggars choosing gift horses. I think on balance this was one of the most enjoyable performances I’ve attended there. Certainly cheaper and less exhausting than making the run up to Shepherds Bush. 

dEUS. Belgium’s finest jazz-grunge-art-rock collective. I suppose it’s a sign of aging, favoured bands from your younger days reforming and pulling a comeback. This might well be the first of many such events for me, as time marches relentlessly by. It felt like a peculiar novelty at the time.

I first encountered dEUS on a stage, as the support act for P.J. Harvey and John Parish. I was terrifically impressed. Stretching the then still-current quiet/loud alterna-rock template into surprising new forms, with counter-vocals, and violins, noise freakouts and obvious, but not too obvious musicianship. Searching to find points of comparison I was hearing Pixies, Velvets, Magic Band, Tom Waits and strains of other delightfully challenging jazz-styled wank-rock. Love at first sight really. I ran out the next day and bought their first album -”Worst Case Scenario“. And played it to death.

The second “In A Bar Under The Sea” was released shortly afterwards, and extended the palette a little further, amidst changes in lineup. Perhaps a little of the harder, wilful oddness from the first CD had been smoothed away. Some of the tracks verge towards ballads, usually injected with surprising instrumentation. Singles were released, and bothered the UK charts a little. I saw them at least twice touring this CD, and all my misgivings were annihilated; they were at least as exciting on a stage as before. Maybe more so.

More of a wait before their next release, “The Ideal Crash”. Personnel changes again. This time I saw them playing the set before I’d had a chance to buy the CD, and they were powerful and exhilerating again, the new material fitting in place alongside the old . The CD was a shock. Mellowed further, very clean, almost AOR production with conventional sounding hooky song structures. Programmed percussion and more prominent synths than before. I probably only listened to it a half-hearted handful of times before consigning it to the bottom of the stack.

And then the band split. No more dEUS. A good innings. I find myself giving ‘Ideal Crash’ one more try, more and more often. As I paid it more attention I realised that most of the elements I looked for in dEUS were entirely present; dissonance, counterpoint, surprises in rhythm and harmony, all blended skillfully into a mix that seems to proportionally reward careful listening. Today, it’s maybe my favourite dEUS CD, depending on the day of the week. A real grower.

After sensibly allowing me all this time to appreciate their legacy work, they suddenly reform, with a suitably amended line-up There’s a handful of festival gigs I can’t make, and an internet-only single that’s incompatible with my computer-lifestyle-choice. Then a full European tour is announced, preceding a new album. No way I can avoid this, even though it’s another trip to London to the Empire.

New CD “Pocket Revolution” seems to continue with the now-predictable streamlining of the dEUS sound. I’ve learnt not to be too hasty this time, I’m reserving judgement till I’ve had a good time to let it stew. Arriving at the concert was a little ominous. Not much of a queue. Touts outside selling at lower than face. European accents predominante in the scant queue.

Concert is a blinder though. Support from “Red Organ Serpent Sound” – who came across as a good glam blend with interesting visual appeal. Shades of Manics and Ziggy, they had one of the best t-shirt designs I’ve seen, amusingly only available in kids sizes. Trepidition before the main act. I really don’t want this to suck. All my fears are misplaced, they’re as strong as ever. It’s an enormously successful set. They present most of the new CD, with a generous sampling of older material. The crowd, obviously partisan, surprisingly young, love it all. dEUS are back, it would seem. Predictably, unpredictable; pretty much exactly where they left off. 

I recently had some technical hitches that prevented me from being able to update this site. In the meantime I attended a couple of noteworthy gigs without passing comment. Here’s a back-dated update.First up, Sufjan Stevens and the Illinoisemakers. He now seems to be shifting CDs by the barrow-load, and deservedly so, but I sort of stumbled on him by accident through emusic. You’ve probably heard the soundbite – recording a concept album about every state in the US in turn, which is a conceit that will either make you joyfully bound towards it with a willing embrace at the ready, or cower on reflex, and make some kind of wrinkly cynical sour-face and double up. Myself, I’m firmly in category one – but given that I still secretly think that Peter Gabriel-era Genesis is some kind of pinnacle of western rock music, that’s not really very surprising.

So it’s prog-folk-whimsy-art-rock. With Christian overtones, and very heavy on the banjo. Somehow this assembles to something dramatically better than the sum of it’s parts. Musically dense, complicated, honest yet cryptic, genre-spanning, awe-inspiring stuff. To me, anyway. Enough to make me throw silly-money at tickets when I discovered he was playing a single UK show; already long sold out by the time I met with the bandwagon.

Luckily, given the expense, and the struggles getting there, it was a great show. Largely seated, which I hadn’t realised ahead of committing, I was quite relieved to find out that both my tickets were for the rear stalls, fenced off to form a raised standing-only section, at the rear of the venue. As the front stalls were correspondingly lowered and seated, we were able to lean against the bar staring through to a clear uninterrupted view of the stage framed below the optics. A novel vantage point, and one that I’d be happy to repeat.

The act was framed in terms of a cheerleading routine, with the band dressed up in orange and blue uniforms, engaging in call-and-response and coreographed routines to introduce many of the songs. They also formed a human pyramid, twice. The majority of the set was taken from the ‘Illinoise’ album, which forms the second installment of the scheme, the predecessor covered Michigan. There would seem to be a theme song for the 50 states project as well, which the band use to introduce the set. They emerge performing it, somewhat in the style of a marching school band.

Musically, they never failed to disappoint the material, which is possibly a challenge considering the musical depth, especially the vocal complexity, of the perfomance they are combining with theatrics. While the showbiz elements never really climbed higher than the sort of thing you might expect from an endearingly ramshackle school-play, the music was performed and presented to a quite flawlessly high standard, still managing to be raw enough to be obviously a live band at work. It was an excellent and inspirational evening’s entertainment, I’m really glad that I managed to catch them before they went gigantically global. 

I’d not actually been to the Louisiana before, though I thought I had. I also thought it was in a different part of town. It’s a young person’s pub, the venue is a tiny room upstairs with a barely raised stage at one end, and a bar large enough to serve maybe three people at the other end. Official capacity is 120 people, this show was a fast sell out.

King Biscuit Time is Steve Mason, former front singer with the recently split Beta Band. On this occasion accompanied by another multi-instrumental gentleman, providing bass, extra percussion, keyboards, and other flourishes. KBT existed already as an ongoing side project distinct from the BB, now presumably it’s his main gig.

The back catalogue is modest, just two ‘EPs’ to date; the liberally named ‘Sings Nelly Foggit’s Blues in “Me and the Pharaohs”‘ from around 1998, then a followup ‘No Style’ from around 2000. Tip to the would-be purchaser, the ‘No Style’ CD EP contains the previous EP as a bonus disk, buy one, get both. And now there’s a single ‘C I AM 15′, which is good fun, and presumably the reason behind this current micro-tour.

It was hot, and packed close. Support was from Pip Dylan, in a pedal steel and fingerpicking solo-folk-country sort of set, which bored all but four of the punters to find other distractions, prompting complaints about the conversation noise from the stage.

The main set was around an hour and a half, almost entirely new material, save a couple of highlights from the ‘No Style’ EP, a pair of subtly chosen Beta Band songs chucked in in the middle, and the single, twice ( well, it was being released the following day ) . And a surprising reggae-lite reading of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ which brought a smile and didn’t outstay it’s welcome.

It all sounded great, a big sound from what may have been a duo (I have a suspicion that there was a drummer tucked in in the back, but I couldn’t really see much, having loitered towards the rear of the crush where there was a pretence of aircon). Regardless, it was a full sound, and all the songs were focused, melodic, and quite possibly radio-friendly, given sufficient promotion. I’m not sure if there’s a big media campaign planned, although we were informed during some stage banter that he was shortly going to be filming a contestant appearance on ‘Never mind the Buzzcocks’ alongside Lionel Blair.

On the way out, I picked up the customary t-shirt from the stand from a familiar looking vendor. It was Pip Dylan, who advised me against the pink, and also sold me one of his own CDs. Low-key, and presumably low-cost, touring. I think the the first King Biscuit Time album is scheduled for sometime in the summer of 2006. I’m looking forward to it. 

Freakish weather catastrophes, great music line up. Probably one of the best I’ve ever been to. 

I was onsite Wednesday afternoon, with only a few minutes to spare before my first shift. Working away from the fearsomely hot afternoon sun proved to be a blessing, by the evening time it was pleasantly cool and I enjoyed myself as a spectator, marching around the fringes. Thursday proved to be even hotter, and I gave up after the morning and spent the rest of the day hidden, baking under canvas with a radio tuned to long wave, listening to us struggling towards a loss against the Australians on TMS. I worked the evening shift that day, and mostly filled it with the second half of the one day game and Guardian Quick Crosswords. 

On the Friday morning the rains came. Sequestered away in the compound with the backstage bar, I watched it quickly develop past the obvious point at which we were going to be granted another mud-heavy year. For a while it looked as if it wasn’t ever going to stop, and I watched the lightning storm show with a bit of a sinking feeling that it would be another disappointing wet year. It was fairly obvious that there were direct lightning strikes all around the site, there were a handful of ominious explosive noises that followed these now and again. The Vodafone mobile phone signal disappeared on cue right after a particularly loud bang. Things weren’t going according to plan. 

At around 10 am there was a gap in the rainfall, and I ventured out, waterproofed, to find a fair amount of ground water and mud and tales of lightning-struck stages and evacuated fields. I made it back to the John Peel bar just in time before it all started up once again, only this time with seemingly double the rainfall. The JP stage enclosure became something of an island, surrounded by a wide lake, several feet deep. We were stranded. I have to say it almost seemed like an ambition fulfilled for me, to be stranded on an island with a well equipped pub, and so accompanied by some happy members of a band called “The Boyfriends” and some of my party, we opted to get the beers in and prepared to sit it out. On very comfy dry sofas. Cheers. 

News filtered in, all the other main music stages, bar us were closed for various reasons, the dance village had been evacuated, Radio 1 had lost power, people were swimming out of drowned campsites. Turns out The Boyfriends had been the only act playing on site at the time they were on, and the reason they were so happy was this had probably netted them more media coverage than they ordinarily might have expected. I like to imagine they completely deserved this extra attention, for they were jolly nice people.  

Eventually the storm abated, our moat quickly drained away. The rest of the day was overcast, but dry. The next two were progressively hotter once more. The mud made random wandering a bit too much of a trial, so I mainly concentrated on hanging out with friends, catching performances, and rubbernecking at the casualties who’d come under-equipped or camped naively expecting no weather trouble. Bless. I do think it might be helpful to offer basic camping tutorials on arrival to many of these people.

I had a great time. 

Things I saw, grouped into in vague quality buckets

The Great

• Rilo Kiley – as quirkily brilliant and thought provoking on stage as they are on CD
• Dresden Dolls – daveh recommends decent band shock!
• Art Brut – Top Of The Pops ! Best thing all weekend, according to me.
• The Magic Numbers – one of those career-defining gigs where you watch a band hit the big time right in the moment. Never seen a crowd react so warmly. Lovely.
• The Secret Machines – they make music almost scientifically designed to appeal to my listening template, I was an easy win
• Stewart Lee – if not the best stand up I’ve ever seen, definitely something very close to it. About the twentieth time I’ve seen him make the same jokes funny
• Goldielookinchain – You knows it

The Not Great

• Athlete – I walked past some of this. Ouch
• Jem – Did the hit. Then the one that wasn’t quite a hit. Then a Coldplay cover.
• White Stripes – crap sound, two inches of mud, didn’t convince. And I like the White Stripes.
• Sons and Daughters – I was prepared to like them from what I’ve read, but it fell a bit flat to me
• James Blunt – although I admit the muzak styled warblings made me nod along pleasantly enough in the sunshine as I wandered past
• Bright Eyes – Ugh, spare me.
• LCD Soundsystem – seemed a bit of a waste of two drummers, from what little I saw
• The puppet show man – I think the worst act I’ve ever seen at a festival. By a long margin
• Sucker – fairly dull, even with both Trevor and Simon on board. Perhaps too early in the morning for me
• Garbage – not really my bag

Sorry to have missed

• Cake – they cancelled, I’m sad to say
• Brian Wilson – my fear of watching legends and the pyramid stage put me off at the last minute. By all accounts, this was a bad move
• Broken Family Band – It was just too much of a trek to manage at the time
• Beta Band – Ok , they weren’t scheduled to play. In fact they don’t exist anymore. But I miss them anyway