more gig reviews
So, despite a fairly crazy and punishing weekend, I think I am actually better. My appetite seems to have come back with a vengeance, after being all over the place for three weeks, and I'm not waking up with a swimmy head anymore. My ears are still ringing, though.
Hunting Lodge at The Macbeth
The Hunting Lodge gig on Friday night was pretty mental. They were supported by two other bands who sound quite similar to them, Men of Unitus and Collapse. The vocalist of MOU behaved the way Dan C, the vocalist of Hunting Lodge, is prone to behaving; jumping all over the place, diving into the audience, attacking other band members. It was quite amusing to watch, though our place by the bar was not very safe and we nearly lost our drinks several times. The band themselves sounded pretty tight, and very loud, though there was a disturbingly high number of plaid shirts on stage. (Actually, there was a disturbingly high number of plaid shirts in the audience. Is there a grunge revival going on amongst hipsters at the moment?)
Collapse were yer basic bog-standard noisy indie rock band, with emphasis on the rock, but pretty dull. I suppose that might have been because they didn't have a madman with a giant red beard terrorising the audience like Men of Unitus or, indeed, like Hunting Lodge.
Usually, when I've seen HL play, the musical focus has come from Rock God Seth, who sets up a pounding rhythm on the drums which provides a fulcrum for the other guys to rally round, but the visual madness mostly comes from vocalist Dan C, who gets shitfaced and goes mental. Some of the visual madness also comes from Clive, who goes into his own little zone of physical insanity, striding and wobbling back and forth across the floor, but Dan C is the unpredictable element, sometimes climbing the walls, sometimes rolling on the floor, sometimes diving into the audience.
This time around, Dan C was pretty restrained; his crazy antics were reduced to kneeling on the floor and pounding it with his fists. It was Seth who did the bonkers shit. First, he stripped off all his clothes apart from his pants and shoes, thus going one up (or one down) on the vocalist of MOU, who had taken his t-shirt off, but never came through on his threat to take his trousers off, too (thankfully). Seth bashed the crap out of his drumkit, sometimes standing up, sometimes shoving his hands down his pants, sometimes shoving his drumsticks down there instead. He mooned the audience with a sexy wiggle, and dived off the stage and onto the guy next to me to snog him. I think the guy was too surprised to react.
Towards the end of the set, Dan C and Seth started dismantling the drumkit, fighting over which bits they wanted to play with. Clive had abandoned his instrument and was screaming into the mic, which meant that people could actually get past him to go to the toilet (there was a funny moment earlier when the massive hulk of a doorman got trapped into a space a couple of feet square, cornered behind Clive's elbow movements as Clive jabbed and pounded his guitar). Seth took the bass drum and wandered out into the middle of the crowd, Dan C pounded various bits of the dismantled drumkit, and the floor of the stage, as a cry came up from the people behind us, "Get the bin! Get the bin!"
Out came a metal trashcan, and a guy started pounding a rhythm on it, as the crowd went mental too. People were slamming barstools into the floor, clapping, stamping, cheering and whooping, banging on the pillars and the top of the bar. The only people not joining in were the barstaff, who all looked rather bemused, and the other Dan, who had started packing up his cables.
Suddenly, almost as if with one mind, it stopped, everyone cheered and I went home, satisfied I'd seen another stonking set from Hunting Lodge.
Morning Bride at The Others
On Saturday evening, it was down to Stoke Newington for the first time in a couple of months, for the Morning Bride gig to launch their second single, This Place Is No Place For Harbouring Angels/Blue-Eyed Boy. Luc Owl read a couple of his stories, which were twisted tales of jungle exploration and treasure-hunting bravado. I'm not always a fan of Luc's spoken word performances, sometimes he tries too hard to be weird, but this time he was pretty good. He certainly does have an enviable way with a sentence (example: "her bones were an architecture of sadness"). I think most people there didn't really know what to make of him, though.
Next up were a couple of guys from a band called The City Farmers, who played an acoustic set, which was quite pleasant. They seemed to take a little while to warm up, but I expect it probably wasn't helped by the fact that there were lots of people talking very loudly through the whole set as though they weren't on stage. I think they would have been a perfect band to watch on a Sunday, nursing a hangover (especially their last song, which I really liked, and was all about nursing a Sunday hangover), but they weren't ideal for warming up a party crowd on a Saturday night. They had quite a few friends in the crowd, one of whom was featured in an interview I'd read in NUDE magazine earlier that day. (I'd been starting to wonder if the people from that mag had a Stokey connection, because of the ads and people featured, and it seems they do indeed.)
The people who'd been chatting loudly through the first two sets continued to do so through the Morning Bride set, too, which caused the band to play the rockiest show I've ever seen them play in an attempt to shut them up or drown them out. Amity looked amazing -- and very country -- in a vintage wedding dress and retro hairstyle complete with baby's-breath flowers. They seemed to play quite a short set, though, and only played one encore; a particularly raucous version of their last single, Replica, which had the entire front row screaming along with the chorus at the tops of their voices -- even me, and I've had a sore throat on-and-off for nearly a month.
I thought my throat would be worse for having to wait around in the rain for night-buses home, but I felt surprisingly okay on Sunday, too.
Sunday: Jason Webley at SouthLondonPacific
cleanskies and I having been talking about going for cocktails together for about three months, and on Sunday we were finally able, as we went to SouthLondonPacific to see Jason Webley. We arrived early enough to perch on a sofa, have the crazy woman with the fluorescent pink eyelashes try to sell us her broken detritus from a box, and the man in the leopard-print bondage trousers attempt to charm us with badly-performed magic tricks, and asking us what we wanted to be if we came back as something else in another life (cleanskies wants to come back as a blue parrot in her next life: cue inevitable Monty Python joke). It didn't work; I remain resolutely uncharmed by things like that, especially when you're rude enough to interrupt a really good conversation I am having with my friend, your card trick is played with mismatched sets, and you have a tail because you "want to be a cat." I spent summers as a child travelling around the country with circus folk, it takes more than that to impress me, and the rudeness of such an interruption doesn't impress me at all!
Jason Webley, on the other hand, he impressed me. I kind of felt that, after the previous two nights of bonkers music and freaky stories, there was a chance I might not be so impressed with his performance, but it was pretty damn good. You can't really go wrong with audience-participation songs about aardvarks, or drinking songs that involve getting the audience to spin themselves around 12 times before you agree to perform them. Not to mention the "traditional American folk song" which turned out to be Hey Ya played on an accordion (and which I now am on a quest to find a recording of, along with the Ukulele Orchestra's cover of Wuthering Heights, and the Bikini Beach Band's surf-guitar medley of Don't Fear The Reaper and Love Will Tear Us Apart).
My one disappointment with the gig is that, because he went on stage quite late, he only played a short set, and I could have happily watched a longer show. We stayed for one showgirl doing an ostrich feather dance, but then we had to go -- the weekend had taken its toll on me, and cleanskies had to get back to Oxford, so we missed the snake dancer.
Some things I learned over the weekend:
Hunting Lodge at The Macbeth
The Hunting Lodge gig on Friday night was pretty mental. They were supported by two other bands who sound quite similar to them, Men of Unitus and Collapse. The vocalist of MOU behaved the way Dan C, the vocalist of Hunting Lodge, is prone to behaving; jumping all over the place, diving into the audience, attacking other band members. It was quite amusing to watch, though our place by the bar was not very safe and we nearly lost our drinks several times. The band themselves sounded pretty tight, and very loud, though there was a disturbingly high number of plaid shirts on stage. (Actually, there was a disturbingly high number of plaid shirts in the audience. Is there a grunge revival going on amongst hipsters at the moment?)
Collapse were yer basic bog-standard noisy indie rock band, with emphasis on the rock, but pretty dull. I suppose that might have been because they didn't have a madman with a giant red beard terrorising the audience like Men of Unitus or, indeed, like Hunting Lodge.
Usually, when I've seen HL play, the musical focus has come from Rock God Seth, who sets up a pounding rhythm on the drums which provides a fulcrum for the other guys to rally round, but the visual madness mostly comes from vocalist Dan C, who gets shitfaced and goes mental. Some of the visual madness also comes from Clive, who goes into his own little zone of physical insanity, striding and wobbling back and forth across the floor, but Dan C is the unpredictable element, sometimes climbing the walls, sometimes rolling on the floor, sometimes diving into the audience.
This time around, Dan C was pretty restrained; his crazy antics were reduced to kneeling on the floor and pounding it with his fists. It was Seth who did the bonkers shit. First, he stripped off all his clothes apart from his pants and shoes, thus going one up (or one down) on the vocalist of MOU, who had taken his t-shirt off, but never came through on his threat to take his trousers off, too (thankfully). Seth bashed the crap out of his drumkit, sometimes standing up, sometimes shoving his hands down his pants, sometimes shoving his drumsticks down there instead. He mooned the audience with a sexy wiggle, and dived off the stage and onto the guy next to me to snog him. I think the guy was too surprised to react.
Towards the end of the set, Dan C and Seth started dismantling the drumkit, fighting over which bits they wanted to play with. Clive had abandoned his instrument and was screaming into the mic, which meant that people could actually get past him to go to the toilet (there was a funny moment earlier when the massive hulk of a doorman got trapped into a space a couple of feet square, cornered behind Clive's elbow movements as Clive jabbed and pounded his guitar). Seth took the bass drum and wandered out into the middle of the crowd, Dan C pounded various bits of the dismantled drumkit, and the floor of the stage, as a cry came up from the people behind us, "Get the bin! Get the bin!"
Out came a metal trashcan, and a guy started pounding a rhythm on it, as the crowd went mental too. People were slamming barstools into the floor, clapping, stamping, cheering and whooping, banging on the pillars and the top of the bar. The only people not joining in were the barstaff, who all looked rather bemused, and the other Dan, who had started packing up his cables.
Suddenly, almost as if with one mind, it stopped, everyone cheered and I went home, satisfied I'd seen another stonking set from Hunting Lodge.
Morning Bride at The Others
On Saturday evening, it was down to Stoke Newington for the first time in a couple of months, for the Morning Bride gig to launch their second single, This Place Is No Place For Harbouring Angels/Blue-Eyed Boy. Luc Owl read a couple of his stories, which were twisted tales of jungle exploration and treasure-hunting bravado. I'm not always a fan of Luc's spoken word performances, sometimes he tries too hard to be weird, but this time he was pretty good. He certainly does have an enviable way with a sentence (example: "her bones were an architecture of sadness"). I think most people there didn't really know what to make of him, though.
Next up were a couple of guys from a band called The City Farmers, who played an acoustic set, which was quite pleasant. They seemed to take a little while to warm up, but I expect it probably wasn't helped by the fact that there were lots of people talking very loudly through the whole set as though they weren't on stage. I think they would have been a perfect band to watch on a Sunday, nursing a hangover (especially their last song, which I really liked, and was all about nursing a Sunday hangover), but they weren't ideal for warming up a party crowd on a Saturday night. They had quite a few friends in the crowd, one of whom was featured in an interview I'd read in NUDE magazine earlier that day. (I'd been starting to wonder if the people from that mag had a Stokey connection, because of the ads and people featured, and it seems they do indeed.)
The people who'd been chatting loudly through the first two sets continued to do so through the Morning Bride set, too, which caused the band to play the rockiest show I've ever seen them play in an attempt to shut them up or drown them out. Amity looked amazing -- and very country -- in a vintage wedding dress and retro hairstyle complete with baby's-breath flowers. They seemed to play quite a short set, though, and only played one encore; a particularly raucous version of their last single, Replica, which had the entire front row screaming along with the chorus at the tops of their voices -- even me, and I've had a sore throat on-and-off for nearly a month.
I thought my throat would be worse for having to wait around in the rain for night-buses home, but I felt surprisingly okay on Sunday, too.
Sunday: Jason Webley at SouthLondonPacific
cleanskies and I having been talking about going for cocktails together for about three months, and on Sunday we were finally able, as we went to SouthLondonPacific to see Jason Webley. We arrived early enough to perch on a sofa, have the crazy woman with the fluorescent pink eyelashes try to sell us her broken detritus from a box, and the man in the leopard-print bondage trousers attempt to charm us with badly-performed magic tricks, and asking us what we wanted to be if we came back as something else in another life (cleanskies wants to come back as a blue parrot in her next life: cue inevitable Monty Python joke). It didn't work; I remain resolutely uncharmed by things like that, especially when you're rude enough to interrupt a really good conversation I am having with my friend, your card trick is played with mismatched sets, and you have a tail because you "want to be a cat." I spent summers as a child travelling around the country with circus folk, it takes more than that to impress me, and the rudeness of such an interruption doesn't impress me at all!
Jason Webley, on the other hand, he impressed me. I kind of felt that, after the previous two nights of bonkers music and freaky stories, there was a chance I might not be so impressed with his performance, but it was pretty damn good. You can't really go wrong with audience-participation songs about aardvarks, or drinking songs that involve getting the audience to spin themselves around 12 times before you agree to perform them. Not to mention the "traditional American folk song" which turned out to be Hey Ya played on an accordion (and which I now am on a quest to find a recording of, along with the Ukulele Orchestra's cover of Wuthering Heights, and the Bikini Beach Band's surf-guitar medley of Don't Fear The Reaper and Love Will Tear Us Apart).
My one disappointment with the gig is that, because he went on stage quite late, he only played a short set, and I could have happily watched a longer show. We stayed for one showgirl doing an ostrich feather dance, but then we had to go -- the weekend had taken its toll on me, and cleanskies had to get back to Oxford, so we missed the snake dancer.
Some things I learned over the weekend:
- Never underestimate the effect of striking eye make-up.
- Or of colour co-ordination.
- The pear-and-raspberry Danish pastries from the Monmouth Coffee place in Borough Market are rather yummy.
- Beer from the Market Porter has restorative properties.
- Sunshine and the company of burge, stu_n and chrisisiddall also helps.
- People still ride pennyfarthings in London!
- A Canon Ixus is surprisingly and reassuringly heavy, for such a teeny camera, and I'm definitely leaning towards one of those (thanks for letting me play around with yours, Chris!)
- Leaving the country to live in South America makes you a Bad Friend.
- So does leaving the party early.
- Fish have longer memories than a few seconds.
- Watching fish in a tank is more fun than Sky Sports
- Spinning around 12 times whilst watching your own index finger will seriously disorient you.
- Standing still in the middle of a crowd doing the same thing seems to work just as well.