Please make your way to the glitter dancefloor
Mostly what I have learned this week is that you lot are much more into jam jars than you are gig reviews. Still, I shall press on :)
Saturday saw a fine list of obscure twee pop bands on at the Lexington. I like the Lexington, it's a decent pub with reasonable beer and an upstairs room-with-bands, and I'd go to much worse venues to see Helen Love :)
We missed the first couple of bands because we were at the British Musem looking at mummies, but arrived in time to scoop up drinks and see The Fireworks. I'd never heard of them, and they were nearly defeated mid-set by some technical difficulties involving a guitar (or possibly the bass), but I liked them. Shoegazy guitars, but with slightly more upbeat vocals, rather like a low budget Veronica Falls if you like that sort of thing.
We amused ourselves with our usual games of celebrity spotting among the audience, although admittedly for even smaller values of 'celebrity' than usual.
Tyrannosaurus Dead have a great name, but didn't really grab me. I think one of the problems was that I couldn't really find anything distinctive to grab on to, which also makes them hard to describe :)
Even among the rather thirty-something-and-up demographic of twee indie pop The Wolfhounds stood about a bit as an older band. Calling their latest album Middle-Aged Freaks, they are four blokes-with-guitars playing fairly solid pub guitar music. They were enjoyable, but not outstanding (although they did have a moment or two of sounding like Idlewild, which is a good thing).
I think it was during this set that something quite exciting happened, but I'll put that in a separate post because this is already quite long enough.
The School are lost in time; they patently belong in among the girl-pop groups of the 60s. Their songs' boy-meets-girl storylines, oooh-y backing vocals, brass riffs and clap-alongs are infectious pop fun, and if you think that sounds appealing you should definitely check them out. I really enjoyed them.
We nipped downstairs to grab burgers, hoping we'd have time to fit them in between bands. We didn't, and we missed all but the last song from Hyperbubble. I thus can't really comment on them, except they do a mean vocoder-and-theremin cover of Better Set Your Phasers To Stun. The burgers were adequate, but not exciting.
The "surprise guest" listed on the line-up turned out to be Porky the Poet (the pseudonym used by Phill Jupitus when perfoming as a poet). The man's a bit fan of Helen Love, and maintained that doing a support slot was the only way he could get to see her play.
I didn't enjoy Porky as much as I expected to. The poems were decent, but inbetweentimes the put-downs of hecklers seemed just a little more vicious than they needed to be, and comments just bit too crass and sweary.
And on the subject of crass and sweary, The Lovely Eggs. Still possibly the world's weirdest band, they opened with a new song which alternated White Stripes-esque guitar wig outs with nursery-rhyme style lyrics about "sensible people". And they went on to tell extended stories about life in Lancaster, and how it inspires philosophy while you're eating a deli sandwich, and they swigged cider like it was going out of fashion and were entertainingly raucous and shambolic.
Helen Love, who after avoiding gigs for more than a decade has now played enough in the last 18 months to almost merit a tour t-shirt (4 - or 5 if you count this one) appears to have almost begun, very occasionally, to enjoy being on stage. She definitely smiled. More than once. And even said something at one point - though admittedly it was an aside to someone in the front row rather than speaking into the mic.
Ricardo Autobahn, the relatively-recently acquired keyboard and twiddly-knobs bloke, looks to actively like being onstage. Shona, the guitarist, still looks as if she hates absolutely every minute :(
I'm pretty sure anyone reading this (who cares ;) already knows exactly what Helen Love sounds like. Crazy bubblegum pop that sounds like it should have multicoloured cartoon artwork (it does) and should be jumped up and down to (it is) by teenagers (ah well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad).
Lots of the songs, live, sound totally different from the recordings. Mostly because of the Extreme Sampling that seems to be going on, with everything from Madonna to readings of Dylan Thomas making their way into the electro backing. Excellent bounce-up-and-down fun. With glitter cannons.
Once the bands came offstage I more or less went flop, paused briefly for a drink, then demanded that we go home. We walked down to Kings Cross, and then suddenly it was a bit late, and getting into last-tube territory.
Never mind, on the way in a whiteboard said that the last train to Cockfosters was 00:42. Not that we wanted to go to Cockfosters, but I was hoping that the time of the last train eastbound was vaguely equivalent to the last train westbound. Inexplicably there was no "last time" on the board for the train we wanted.
ChrisC (and his app) reckoned that blue line[*] + red line was the quickest way home. The blue line platform had a suspiciously vague notice on the screen that usually displays how many minutes it is until the next train arrives. It said "Victoria Line Westbound[**]".
"Last train's gone," said the cleaner conversationally as he walked past. Right. Well, thanks for letting us know. We (and all the other people on the platform) looked a bit grumpy. And they milled about, and we hotfooted it to the Piccadilly line[***]. The screen there also had a suspiciously vague notice on it.
Lots of people were milling about there, too. Including a six-foot-tall man in a kangaroo onesie. "Stuff this," said the kangaroo. "Let's get an Uber". "What's that, Skippy?" asked his friend. "You want to bound home?"
Anyway, I pressed the info button on the help point, and got the sound of a ringing phone. People and kangaroos clustered round me. After two minutes or so of ringing, they got bored. So did we. Then there was an announcement over the PA.
"There are no more trains from this station." It is worth noting that it was around 00:35, and so well before the advertised time of the last train.
I can't believe how poor the information at Kings Cross is upon this topic. It's not like people wanting to catch the last tube home is a new thing, or anything. It'd be nice if, for example, platforms whose last train has departed displayed that on their info boards. It'd be nice if the times that were displayed were correct. It'd be nice if the info points were staffed.
Anyway, out of the station again and my app reckoned it was two-bus journey home. We found a stop, caught a bus going the right way, and got off at Russell Square to catch the N7. Except stop K denied all knowledge of the N7. Check app. Check surroundings. Check TFL N7 bus route page. Right, Citymapper, you are usually ace but you are frankly deluded about the route of the N7. Is there a bus that we can catch to the right stop? Oh, sod it, it's only 15 minutes walk.
Then it began to chuck it down[****].
We eventually arrived home, very damp and cold, around quarter to three. There is a reason I am usually a wet hen about leaving in plenty of time for the last tube :)
[*] Apparently Londoners never say this. Obviously I am not a real Londoner.
[**] Or possibly Southbound, actually. It gets a bit arbitrary in places.
[***] A line of a sufficiently peculiar dark blue-y-purple-y colour that it's just easier to call it Piccadilly colour.
[****] As ChrisC pointed out, we had spent some time waiting in Russell Square for the night bus, but the night bus never came. We were 8 miles from home, and it was starting to...
Uh oh.
Saturday saw a fine list of obscure twee pop bands on at the Lexington. I like the Lexington, it's a decent pub with reasonable beer and an upstairs room-with-bands, and I'd go to much worse venues to see Helen Love :)
We missed the first couple of bands because we were at the British Musem looking at mummies, but arrived in time to scoop up drinks and see The Fireworks. I'd never heard of them, and they were nearly defeated mid-set by some technical difficulties involving a guitar (or possibly the bass), but I liked them. Shoegazy guitars, but with slightly more upbeat vocals, rather like a low budget Veronica Falls if you like that sort of thing.
We amused ourselves with our usual games of celebrity spotting among the audience, although admittedly for even smaller values of 'celebrity' than usual.
Tyrannosaurus Dead have a great name, but didn't really grab me. I think one of the problems was that I couldn't really find anything distinctive to grab on to, which also makes them hard to describe :)
Even among the rather thirty-something-and-up demographic of twee indie pop The Wolfhounds stood about a bit as an older band. Calling their latest album Middle-Aged Freaks, they are four blokes-with-guitars playing fairly solid pub guitar music. They were enjoyable, but not outstanding (although they did have a moment or two of sounding like Idlewild, which is a good thing).
I think it was during this set that something quite exciting happened, but I'll put that in a separate post because this is already quite long enough.
The School are lost in time; they patently belong in among the girl-pop groups of the 60s. Their songs' boy-meets-girl storylines, oooh-y backing vocals, brass riffs and clap-alongs are infectious pop fun, and if you think that sounds appealing you should definitely check them out. I really enjoyed them.
We nipped downstairs to grab burgers, hoping we'd have time to fit them in between bands. We didn't, and we missed all but the last song from Hyperbubble. I thus can't really comment on them, except they do a mean vocoder-and-theremin cover of Better Set Your Phasers To Stun. The burgers were adequate, but not exciting.
The "surprise guest" listed on the line-up turned out to be Porky the Poet (the pseudonym used by Phill Jupitus when perfoming as a poet). The man's a bit fan of Helen Love, and maintained that doing a support slot was the only way he could get to see her play.
I didn't enjoy Porky as much as I expected to. The poems were decent, but inbetweentimes the put-downs of hecklers seemed just a little more vicious than they needed to be, and comments just bit too crass and sweary.
And on the subject of crass and sweary, The Lovely Eggs. Still possibly the world's weirdest band, they opened with a new song which alternated White Stripes-esque guitar wig outs with nursery-rhyme style lyrics about "sensible people". And they went on to tell extended stories about life in Lancaster, and how it inspires philosophy while you're eating a deli sandwich, and they swigged cider like it was going out of fashion and were entertainingly raucous and shambolic.
Helen Love, who after avoiding gigs for more than a decade has now played enough in the last 18 months to almost merit a tour t-shirt (4 - or 5 if you count this one) appears to have almost begun, very occasionally, to enjoy being on stage. She definitely smiled. More than once. And even said something at one point - though admittedly it was an aside to someone in the front row rather than speaking into the mic.
Ricardo Autobahn, the relatively-recently acquired keyboard and twiddly-knobs bloke, looks to actively like being onstage. Shona, the guitarist, still looks as if she hates absolutely every minute :(
I'm pretty sure anyone reading this (who cares ;) already knows exactly what Helen Love sounds like. Crazy bubblegum pop that sounds like it should have multicoloured cartoon artwork (it does) and should be jumped up and down to (it is) by teenagers (ah well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad).
Lots of the songs, live, sound totally different from the recordings. Mostly because of the Extreme Sampling that seems to be going on, with everything from Madonna to readings of Dylan Thomas making their way into the electro backing. Excellent bounce-up-and-down fun. With glitter cannons.
Once the bands came offstage I more or less went flop, paused briefly for a drink, then demanded that we go home. We walked down to Kings Cross, and then suddenly it was a bit late, and getting into last-tube territory.
Never mind, on the way in a whiteboard said that the last train to Cockfosters was 00:42. Not that we wanted to go to Cockfosters, but I was hoping that the time of the last train eastbound was vaguely equivalent to the last train westbound. Inexplicably there was no "last time" on the board for the train we wanted.
ChrisC (and his app) reckoned that blue line[*] + red line was the quickest way home. The blue line platform had a suspiciously vague notice on the screen that usually displays how many minutes it is until the next train arrives. It said "Victoria Line Westbound[**]".
"Last train's gone," said the cleaner conversationally as he walked past. Right. Well, thanks for letting us know. We (and all the other people on the platform) looked a bit grumpy. And they milled about, and we hotfooted it to the Piccadilly line[***]. The screen there also had a suspiciously vague notice on it.
Lots of people were milling about there, too. Including a six-foot-tall man in a kangaroo onesie. "Stuff this," said the kangaroo. "Let's get an Uber". "What's that, Skippy?" asked his friend. "You want to bound home?"
Anyway, I pressed the info button on the help point, and got the sound of a ringing phone. People and kangaroos clustered round me. After two minutes or so of ringing, they got bored. So did we. Then there was an announcement over the PA.
"There are no more trains from this station." It is worth noting that it was around 00:35, and so well before the advertised time of the last train.
I can't believe how poor the information at Kings Cross is upon this topic. It's not like people wanting to catch the last tube home is a new thing, or anything. It'd be nice if, for example, platforms whose last train has departed displayed that on their info boards. It'd be nice if the times that were displayed were correct. It'd be nice if the info points were staffed.
Anyway, out of the station again and my app reckoned it was two-bus journey home. We found a stop, caught a bus going the right way, and got off at Russell Square to catch the N7. Except stop K denied all knowledge of the N7. Check app. Check surroundings. Check TFL N7 bus route page. Right, Citymapper, you are usually ace but you are frankly deluded about the route of the N7. Is there a bus that we can catch to the right stop? Oh, sod it, it's only 15 minutes walk.
Then it began to chuck it down[****].
We eventually arrived home, very damp and cold, around quarter to three. There is a reason I am usually a wet hen about leaving in plenty of time for the last tube :)
[*] Apparently Londoners never say this. Obviously I am not a real Londoner.
[**] Or possibly Southbound, actually. It gets a bit arbitrary in places.
[***] A line of a sufficiently peculiar dark blue-y-purple-y colour that it's just easier to call it Piccadilly colour.
[****] As ChrisC pointed out, we had spent some time waiting in Russell Square for the night bus, but the night bus never came. We were 8 miles from home, and it was starting to...
Uh oh.