Thanks Mogwai for rescheduling your Glasgow ABC show and not telling me. Luckily a friend mentioned it two days beforehand so I didn’t waste my ticket (which I had to RUN across town for previously).

Anyway, my first time in the new ABC. I was never in it when it was a cinema – although the ABC in Aberdeen was the shockingest awful cinema ever with a certain run-down, £2.50 a film charm – and I like it. Well, I liked it when it was half full. I liked it less when I’d been standing in it for 3 hours peering round tall people. Mostly I liked the disco ball the size of THE MOON. I’m almost not exaggerating as this is the biggest disco ball I have ever seen in my life – truly about 10ft tall and capable of killing many people should it ever fall before hurtling its way down the twisty stairwells crushing hundreds of indie kids under its massive bulk. We afforded it the respect it deserved and gave it numerous looks of awe throughout the evening. I dearly hope this is the zenith of Mogwai’s disco ball collecting career although, if so, I think they’ll have to split up now as there’s no topping that.

The infamous Trout opened proceedings and were fun in an indie punk pop way though their banter was indecipherable. Were they ever signed to Guided Missile? They should have been. That’s a compliment by the way.

“WE’RE AIRWOLF!” mumbled the next band. “WHAT?” we said. I soon figured out they were actually ERRORS mainly through the application of logic + bands connected to Mogwai. Errors are my new favourite band. They were awesome, hella awesome. Imagine The Faint if they weren’t eighties goths. Or if they were eighties goths in a good way. Proper nasty squelchy synths, clattering beats, guitar and vo-co-der. I’m going to pester them.

So, Mogwai. I spent the time beforehand trying to count how many times I’ve seen them live but got stuck at 11 after being unable to remember seeing Mogwai in any Glasgow venue other than the Barras. It’s been at least a year though, hasn’t it? Maybe even two! They always still make me sigh and laugh and break my heart and this was no different. I felt spoiled by the wealth of old, nostalgic tunes (Tracy! Summer with the xylophone bit!) and stupidly happy with the first few shots of RARR noise. By half way through I was listing to myself all the reasons Mogwai are my favourite band (yes, I’m that fickle. Sorry Errors) and Rock Action my favourite Mogwai album (that during a phenomenal 2 Rights Make 1 Wrong) but by ye olde Mogwai Fear Satan I was dead on my feet and yawning throughout and silently wishing for them not to do an encore. They deserved it but how much do I wish they’d played a short quiet song to finish up. Come on, Mogwai. Don’t give them what they want – finish a set without the feedback and then I’ll still be standing there bewitched by the disco lighting instead of edging my way out of the room while the feedback fades so I can beat the crowd down the stairs and on to the bus. I’m old, I know.

(I just checked on Bright Light and this was my 13th Mogwai gig! And I haven’t seen them play any Glasgow venue other than the Barras unless you count their 15 minute set at the ChemU birthday party)

We played with Wolf Eyes last night and it was FUN. The Wolf Eyes soundcheck was a thing of hilarious wonder as they started up something that made the noise of a revving motorcycle and then did a mic check of “CHECK CHECK WAAAAAAAAAARGH WOOOOOOAAARGH CHECK!” over it. Awesome. We seemed to go down pretty well although it was very weird playing in daylight and my hands were shaking all the way through even though I didn’t feel that nervous. Our egos were bruised somewhat by every single person in the venue immediately getting up and running over to the stage when Wolf Eyes started.

I’d been hearing varying things about the Wolf Eyes live show ranging from head breaking scaryness to lameass noise and unsurprisingly it turned out somewhere in the middle. They started off building up some quite mesmerising washes of subdued electronic noise that almost put me to sleep it was so relaxing and then had me sitting with a stupid smile on my face. After that they added in some heavy riffery and waves of searing feedback which was fantastic for a while and then got a bit dull in its unchangingness. They should stop trying to be scary and just make noise.

(wrote this at work and then forgot I wrote it so it’s a bit late)

HOT SNAKES – Nottingham Cabaret

My friend Joey Chickenskin has, on numerous occasions, expressed hardcore homosexual desires about John Reis, guitarist for San Diego’s Hot Snakes and a life in maximum prison lockdown as cell mates. Tonight, this very straight Henry Rollins lookalike is practically wetting his big girly knickers every time Reis lands another massive mountainous power chord.
There was a time when Hot Snakes were regarded in the shadow of Drive Like Jehu, the band Reis and vocalist Rick Froberg teamed up in previously. Which, in turn, was always in the shadow of Reis’ day job as Speedo in Rocket From The Crypt.
Maybe it’s the fact Hot Snakes have now made more records than Jehu. Or that Rocket seems to be in self-imposed limbo. Or that Reis has assumed the role of genuine bona-fide punk rock legend giving a stamp of quality to everything he does. But Hot Snakes seem to be less of a ‘project’ and more of a band these days. A fucking righteous one too.
Last time they came over some people expressed a preference for Jehu. In light of bands like At The Drive In – who definitely borrowed some of the forceful clang n scrape of Jehu – it’s unsurprising that the more direct approach of Hot Snakes wasn’t seen as much of a progression in certain camps. Fuck em. If you want to listen to Jehu, go listen to them. That’s the early 90s and this is now and what was once a triumphant display of confusing, technical ferocity would now come across as math rock grandstanding thanks to the watering down process administered by the band’s direct, lamer descendants while the Jehu went quiet.
What could possibly be better than marrying thumping guitars with impossible downstroke-per-second figures to the hamburger-throated vocals of Froberg? NUTTIN. That’s what.
So here we are at Cabaret for the biggest show Damn You! has ever attempted (guarantee-wise anyway). Hot Snakes 05 is a different beast to the one that made the early records – the keyboard bass of the first record remains (more of that later) but it’s doubled up with Gar Wood on electric bass. And with original drummer Jason Koulkarnis committed to Burning Brides and Scout Niblett, Mario (Clikatat Ikatowi, RFTC, Sea Of Tombs etc etc) takes his place.
They are loud, fierce, punk rock mecca.
They barely pause between songs and anyone who thinks getting older blunts a person’s commitment to live performance should watch Reis attack his Les Paul sometime. Let’s get this straight, Chickenskin is so right. I am GAY for John Reis. He is without doubt in the Top 10 guitar players I can think of. The man is a machine. LOUD LOUD LOUD. Thick globs of chunky wholesome KLANG straight into my eager eardrums.
But not as loud as the sub bass that rips my arsehole apart every time it cuts in. I think it’s being done on the desk from a synth but I couldn’t take my eyes of Reis long enough to check.
They plough through several little medleys of tunes from the records, in order as they are on the record. People fall on the stage. The band seem to be loving it. It gets quite warm. Froberg attempts a Nottingham accent.
They encore with Bullet Train To Vegas and Luau by Jehu. In this context the songs rip. BTTV is probably the most Hot Snakesish of the Jehu tunes but the complexity of Luau is morphed and extended and jammed with Reis’ guitar cranked right up and all 4 of them looking like there’s nothing on earth they’d rather be doing.

My Cat Is An Alien (Mincing around with laser guns)
Haeti (Three times! Lovely)
Elephant Micah (Twice! Also lovely)
Last of the Real Hardmen (Chris something)
Hot Snakes (Great! See comments below)
Metal Gear Solid Madonnas (Loud!)
MV+EE (Fantastic, nicest folks ever)
Cos (Veteran weirdo)
The Magic Band (Decent, but glad I didn’t pay £18 for the pleasure)
Magnolia Electric Co. (Played Farewell Transmission. I was happy)

Haven’t had a good night’s sleep or an actual meal in roughly forever. Today is my last day of work after which I will become a unemployed pauper. Tomorrow is Strawberry Fair, Hawkwind are headlining. After this I plan to never leave the house again.

PS. Giz a job.

I am somewhat obsessed and naturally drawn to the idea of ordinary people making extraordinary music. I relate to it. Recently I have seen lots and lots of gigs where extraordinary people make very, very bad music. By ‘extraordinary people’ I mean people who have made an effort to be larger than life. People who dress so well it can’t be anything but a statement and therefore the pressure is on me, the observer, to react to it. This intimidates me and I admit it. It’s because I don’t relate to it. The way I figure, it’s music that binds together the people I am talking about. If you spend longer working out your image than you do thinking about what you’re going to sound like then you’re side stepping the point. It’s possible to do both of course and I love a sharp band or performer but when the balance squeezes out the music I feel short changed. Like going into Asda for some ice cream and coming out with a magazine. It’s not what you went in for, good though it might be.
If this ‘intro’ serves to make Blackhorse sound boring I can assure you they are not. Neither are they particularly earnest which is what this kind of talk usually leads to. Don’t think I’m getting all Noel Gallagher – “it’s about the choons maaaaan”.
Far from it.
It’s all about the riff. Blackhorse pound the riff. They hammer it. It’s tribal at times. Like Lungfish they believe in making their point comprehensively and that if something’s worth playing it’s worth playing for 10 minutes; and like Can they have an ability to push the riff to new parts of the brain so it reverses and changes and harmonises while staying exactly the same.
By manipulating the sounds with a multi tracker, samplers and a laptop, unique clashes are created that are at times dark and at other times wonderfully harmonious. Considering I think the band Primal Scream are a bunch of total chancers, they were almost on to something good on Vanishing Point (especially when Kevin Shields started remixing them) and when a harmonica is introduced and looped in the first song I conclude Blackhorse may share this opinion. The first half is instrumental, the second has female vocals and this difference suggests a band in embryonic stages, which they are, but their ability to morph parts into each other and maintain a level of intensity for 30 minutes means that even though they’re still growing they can present something that never looks under formed or slight.
If these folks had a band uniform and some public-transport-unfriendly hairstyles they would be proclaimed as the revolution. However, the fact they don’t and they don’t care and most importantly they are THIS GOOD is a small revolution all of it’s own.

Hi all. I know Chris wrote extensively about Damo about this time last year but I thought I’d break my main blog duck by telling you all about his gig the other night.

It was ace. Damo’s ‘sound carriers’ for this gig were Joe and Neil (Polaris / Bilge Pump) on guitar and drums respectively , Stu (Leeds DIY PA guru) on bass, a keyboard player who was having the time of his life, and a percussionist with a snare drum, cymbal and a box of tricks including a whistle, a football rattle and a baking tray full of pennies. He was my favourite.

For those who haven’t seen Damo recently, he is about 5 foot tall, with long grey hair and a goateee beard. He was wearing a gojonnygogogogo tshirt at least three sizes too big for him. At the start of every ‘song’ he’d point at the person he wanted to start it. They’d play a bit, then the others joined in and Damo sung. He’s got two voices, one is his Can voice and the other is this Tom Waits-like gruff howling. Sometimes he’d swap between these voices during the song, so it was a bit like watching a 60 year old Japanese schizophrenic.

Good job I like 60-year old Japanese Schizophrenics.

I think the band perhaps were a bit nervous at first. Not that it wasn’t ace, it’s more that they started out sounding a bit like Can, but then slowly gained the confidence to do things their way. By the end of the set they were in full flow, doing free jazz bits, spacey bits, krauty bits etc etc.

After every ten minute song (they probably did about 8 pieces, they were on stage well over an hour) Damo would applaud each member of the band in turn, applaud the audience and then point at the guy he wanted to start the next song.

When they finished there was the longest, loudest call for an encore I’d ever heard, so they came back on to do two more pieces… I think the band may not have been sure whether people were enjoying it up to this point because during the encore they were having the time of their lives, laughing, playing with / off each other, the keyboardist looked like he was high, the drummers were having call-and-response battles on the drums. The second to last song was awesome – faster and groovier than everything that had gone before it, and the previously reverential crowd indulged in a bit of dancing down the front.

When they finally, finally finished, Damo announced he was ‘going to bed’, but then shook hands with most of the audience and then sat down signing autographs etc.

Feh, you can call it self-indulgent or arty or whatever (couldn’t find anybody to come with me!) but I thought it was ace, and it was never noodly or muso-ey (apologies to any musos or noodlists reading this).

Damo! Damo! Come back on, and do another song!

On Wednesday night I visited the legendary Fillmore East Muni Arts Centre in Pontypridd. It’s a nice enough place, housed in an old deconsecrated Welsh Methodist chapel, and there’s a vending machine in the foyer selling baked corn snacks for 10p a packet. I was in two minds whether to go for Tangy Toms or pickled onion Space Raiders, but the sun had been out all day and I was happy, so I had a packet of each.

I was there to see two friends of mine supporting some guy I’d never heard of. I don’t think they’d heard of him either. We didn’t really know what to expect. There was a stack of promotional postcards next to the ticket office, and they were intriguing – a moodily lit close-up of an androgynous person in tragic-cabaret style with glitter paint lazily seeping from one eye, all done in tastefully deep purples. Very camp, very classy. The reverse was similarly intriguing: ‘a techno-traditionalist’ we were told. Great! ’21st century folk music’. Awesome! ‘Radio 2 airplay’. Fantast- wait, that didn’t sound too promising! But, you know, I’ve got an open mind. And I’m a big fan of Desmond Carrington.

Halflight (the friends of mine) were on first, and they were great. They always are. But I’m not here to talk about Halflight. I’m here to talk about Jim Moray, the 21st century techno-traditionist folk musician.

Jim shuffles onstage dressed in Strokes-lite. Slim-fitting black trousers, black shirt (sleeves rolled half up), 80’s new wave red tie. The geeky offspring of Dennis Pennis and Elvis Costello. His first song is an acapella ‘folk tune’, and is probably about some Merrie Maiden or Olde England’s Forests Green or whatever. It’s nice enough, but he doesn’t have the strongest voice I’ve ever heard. It’s Tesco Value Glenn Tilbrook. Kwik Save Elvis Costello. But the brilliant thing about it is – get this – he’s got a gadget. It’s a small silver box! With a cable coming out of the back! And it makes bits of his voice repeat over and over again! So that he’s doing backing! Vocals! With! Himself! The small audience (mostly 40-somethings sitting comfortably at tressle tables) love it. Couples look excitedly at each other, and squeeze each others hands. Look, it’s that lovely young lad! The one off of Radio 2! He’s singing a nice song! And he’s got a gadget!

Jim’s band enter the stage. They’re geeky new wave lite, too. And things suddenly get very bad. Now, I appreciate folk music as much as the next man. I have two Robbie Basho albums. I think Woody Guthrie was a genius. I have an Anne Briggs CD. I’ve seen the Albion Band live. My mum knows Ashley Hutchings. I’m a big fan of the new wave of world folk sweeping across the land: Avarus, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Hala Strana, Islaja, Lau Nau, Six Organs of Admittance. Ah, you say, then it’s Jim Moray’s technology you don’t like. He’s got a sample-and-hold box, see. And an Apple Powerbook. But no – as that legend of electronica Adamski once said, I love technology. What I object to, and in the strongest possible terms, are beautiful, traditional English folk tales repackaged in slick, bland, melodramatic, sub-Coldplay soft rock and cynically marketed to boring, meat-and-two-veg slackjawed morons for them to play in the Vectra while they’re driving to Carpet World, on the apparent premise that it’s an exciting and unprecedented marriage of tradition and technology, and on the actual premise that it’s mildly pleasant, easy-to-listen-to background music for tasteless idiots. I hate Jim Moray for the same reason I hate Kenny G. Jim Moray is not a folk musician in the same way that MacDonalds do not sell hog roasts.

For what seems like the next three hours, Jim and his band plod through Runrig-esque rock-pop tune after Runrig-esque rock-pop tune, all devoid of any passion, soul, or respect. Respect for the source material, or respect for modern music. The guitarist shuffles around self-consciously with his shiny new stratocaster and looks like he’d probably be able to instantly tell you the square root of any 7-figure number. He does smooth, American RockFM-friendly solos with a tasteful amount of reverb and overdrive. The bassist has an expensive bodiless upright, and he plays it smoothly and proficiently. The drummer, well, he’s no Elvin Jones. But he doesn’t have to be. As Owen, my companion for the night noted, it’s the first time in a long time he’s been to a gig where he could have played any of the parts. And we’ve been to lots of gigs recently. And of course, because this is a folk gig, the songs are all about Cuckoo’s Nests, Bonnie Black Hares, Raggle Taggle Gypsies, Rose-cheeked Milkmaids and the like. There’s a constant stream of urine flowing from each of the band members, and it falls collectively upon the corpses of everyone that’s ever written, performed and enjoyed listening to these songs in the days before recording, in the days when songs were sung and handed down through generations purely to entertain or to educate, with no marketing bullshit and no desire to get rich at the public’s expense. In the days before Pro Tools could sequence clinical, reverbed glockenspiel to add colour to a live track.

And in some ways, it was the glockenspiel and synthesized string quartet that made me the angriest. Here are four guys on tour, playing live. Presumably they have glockenspiel on some songs from their album. Presumably they also have a string quartet, playing sweeping, but slightly lame string sounds. Great. They have every right to those things. But if they want to have a glockenspiel in their live set, I’d prefer them to have a glockenspiel player. Not an Apple Powerbook trotting out a few simple notes of accompaniment. Why does this make me angry? Because it smacks of the fear by the marketers of the live sound deviating too much from the songs that people have heard on the radio, at all costs. As if the audience will walk out of the gig and demand their money back if they don’t get a perfect reproduction of the song they heard on the Ken Bruce show. You don’t need me to tell you that this is NOT what live music should be about.

It turns out that Jim Moray is only 21. We all have different ideas of success, but I would not be happy to think that I was being mildly championed by Ken Bruce to a nation of musically apathetic 50 year olds at any age, let alone when I’ve only just got the key to the door. Is this any worse than a bunch of 21 year olds starting a Green Day tribute band? I’m inclined to say that yes, it is.

But then – am I being reactionary here? Were the same things said in the 60s when Fairport Convention and their contemporaries started melding English folk and rock into one significant new sound? They were simply taking traditional song forms, and melodic ideas, and bringing them up to date by incorporating them into a modern rock framework. Isn’t that what Jim Moray is doing? Is Jim Moray, in actual fact, a visionary genius bringing people’s folk heritages bang up to date? Reminding them of things that would otherwise be forgotten? And if Jim is seemingly only popular with ordinary, common people, isn’t that what folk music was all about in the first place? Giving the common people a voice?

I get so confused. Now, where did I put that tankard of mead?

Behind me, a man wearing an Australian Rugby shirt cut down into a sleeveless vest as a fashion item is yelling
‘PLAY YOUR F*CKING DRUMS!’
His friend has a quite nice two-tone dye job on his hair and is wearing a blazer with a military vibe to it. He is yelling far more random outbursts but in a similar vein:
‘NICE SONG!’
and
‘LEARN HOW TO PLAY!’ are two of them.
There is a girl standing behind me with her back to me and she is punctuating everything she says with weird muscle spasms of either her cigarette hand or the hand clutching a glass of white wine, which is pissing down my back every time she says anything.
Despite this I am grinning like a fool.
Just an hour earlier all these people were dancing to the opening band. I don’t remember what they were called which is sort of stupid because I am reviewing this. They had guitar, vocals and drums. The female singer had an amazing voice.
Amazing because it was Siouxie Sioux’s and she must have stolen it. It made me hope Siouxie was having a quiet night in and not out at a party where she was supposed to be the life and soul, as without her voice it would have been hard for her. I hope she has called the authorities. Anyway, people were dancing in a sort of robotic way with fag hand outstretched, occasionally stopping to pull out a camera phone and record the moment.
This is Liars Club and despite the overwhelming sensation of being someone’s Dad at a disco, I always have a decent time.
Everyone is dressed in a way that proves they must have some disposable income. Not because their clothes are expensive but if you’re wearing a lemon golf sweater with matching visor, a Columbo rain mac and spats then you best not be getting public transport back to Bulwell.
So anyway, if I was going to create a band that best typified the worst parts of Liars Club then it would be the first band, name not known. One girl in particular who always reminds me of Princess Di for some reason, strutted back and forth in front of the stage so often checking herself out, I couldn’t even deal with being in the room.
When they finished, there was a sudden influx of not-quite-so-well-dressed folks waiting for the second band. NYC’s Magik Markers. Not often a band on Ecstatic Peace gets to play Liars Club.
Even when they were setting up there seemed to be a gulf between them and the environment. I mean; they look sharper than I do (not hard) but they seem out of place. It endears them to me. As does the roadie for the last band (name not known) who is so obnoxiously in-their-face when they are setting up that I can physically feel the tension between them.
He brushes the bassist aside to search for something he dropped with about 6 Maglites and prevents them from starting playing. It’s a pretty weird scenario.
The DJs were still playing as they started up but they didn’t f*ck about. They are immediately amazing. I don’t know how much of that is to do with the band and how much of my enjoyment they engineer or how much comes from the sheer weirdness of the situation. My favourite gigs have so little to do with the band and if they’re on form and so much to do with surroundings and little coincidences and events that transpire. This is the perfect example.
The change that has come over the singer is empowering in itself. She has her foot on the monitor, glowering at the crowd and spouting forth fast jabber preaching while punctuating this with tons and tons of guitar noise’ less played, more wrestled. I spend the first 10 mins crouched down at her feet before feeling supremely uncomfortable and having to move back a bit. They deal less in the build up and more in the total crescendo in immediate form. The guitar and bass are set up to give no time to notes and everything they do on them spews forth differing tones and noises (but never notes). It’s hard to tell whether they are unschooled or if they’ve managed to liberate themselves from any knowledge they might have had. Or if they are just plain furious.
They clear the back of the room pretty quickly and as I move back myself to get a good view the gig gets better and better as their howling and slashing mixes with people’s heckles and utter confusion. I can’t stress this enough. Magik Markers are f*cking BREAKING some of these kids. They don’t know what to do ‘ I don’t know what to do either except just laugh my ass off. It just serves to highlight how much of a ritual most of what passes as alternative culture has become that something can baffle so easily.
It just keeps getting better, reaching a peak where the guitar breaks down, leading to impassioned ad lib lyrics about guitarists with no hands but a big heart. Princess Di stands up in this part and in some kind of drug induced stupor begins trying to catch her own tail and latch onto a beat or something familiar, clutching at the singers face and feet and her own camera phone. It’s ghoulish and perfect. At times it’s like she’s about to cry and she looks really lost. I am caught between horror and crippling laughter. She is looking back at us all, not sure what to do, looking completely vacant and behind her the singer from MMs is going absolutely apeshit on her twenty dollar guitar with an electric toothbrush.
The drummer seems to want a better vantage point and climbs onto the bass drum leading uber male roadie man to rush onstage mid song and physically pull him off. It looks for a moment like a fight is going to happen between them but roadie dude is a mountain of a man and the howling noise continues to soundtrack blank shrugs and ‘what the f*ck is going down?’ expressions from the band.
Finally the bassist takes off her bass and lies it down to begin pounding it with any available object. I genuinely feel this is on the verge of getting properly out there and uncontrolled and that Magik Markers will play all night when the tech dude runs on and turns the bass amp off ‘ obviously borrowed gear. It’s a perfect end. I am moved to heckle the roadie without even thinking and the whole thing leaves me feeling super energised.
I missed the last band but nothing was going to top that, it was incredible. Half of the people I went with hated it and half loved it. I don’t know ifI loved the band but as a gig it was unbelievable.
The only thing that could have made it better was to find out the roadie and Princess Di girl were part of Magik Markers all along thus making it the best piece of theatre ever acted.

Addition! March 2006 – James Smith proves himself to be a god amongst men by putting footage of this show on You Tube. Click here!!!

I wrote a review of ATP and found most of it concentrated on Slint so I scrapped it and decided to write this piece about why I love the band instead.
I can’t understate how important Slint ‘ or the idea of Slint ‘ was and still is to me.
I have always made and been fascinated with (largely instrumental) sparse, dramatic music. I come from the Fens where any car journey, even between the closest 2 towns, means time spent looking at absolutely nothing and somehow wordless music fits it perfectly. There’s so much on the horizon that’s packed with stories but yet remains totally unspoken. The first band I was in rehearsed in 2 places ‘ a theatre in the neighbouring town 12 miles away and a cattle shed on a disused railway track that was literally in the middle of nowhere. It was supremely bizarre but at the time it seemed normal.
If you’ve ever been to the Fens you know it’s a place of maximum weirdness. One night I was driving my friend Nick out to his house (where the cattle shed rehearsal space was) and a puma ran across the road in front of the car. No shit. We sat there in the car at his house for an age before either of us dared bolt in through the door.
We mentioned this to Nick’s mum. She calmly told us that when opening the curtains in the mornings she had frequently seen big cats in their back garden. A local farmer told us he loses sheep regularly to a black panther and told us he keeps quiet about it because he doesn’t like a fuss.
I went to a party in Nick’s only neighbours house and ended up locked in a bathroom while the host went apeshit with a hedge trimmer, Texas Chainsaw Massacre style.
My neighbours were much worse. I grew up with the Yorkshire Ripper, the Krays and Dennis Nielson in my town, thanks to the major industry being a maximum security prison.
There was a spate of UFO activity one summer. I saw a white light bolt across the sky above me in early evening light. I was pretty stoned. A crop circle showed up two days later which we spent a long evening laying on our backs in the centre.
I’m talking about a place in the world where everything’s really visual and taken as read without much need for clarification. People talk endlessly in the Fens but they just go over and over small details about nothing much. The big stories are taken as read and never verbalised. Local gangsters floating face down in drainage dykes, bloated to twice their normal size. The happy couple and kid running the local bar have the same surname and they’re not married ‘ know what I mean? And it’s their kid. Or the whole town closing on a Saturday because of fear of rioting when the National Front comes to town in support of Tony Martin (remember him?).
Instrumental, dramatic music makes sense in this landscape. Especially when the only time you listen to music is in the car, looking out at all this quiet, mysterious land. It’s what unsaid that gives the drama.
I was already into Mogwai, having seen them with Pavement at the Astoria. Then going to see them on tour I got to see Aerial M a few times and they made perfect sense to me. The weird chords, the euphoric but sinister sounds. Everything was a little woozy and unusual and it seemed to fit with my life somehow. This was pre-internet for me so it took a while for Slint to filter down and the connections to be cemented between them and the music I was starting to like but when I got Spiderland it was a real revelation. This music was so expansive and creepy ‘ creepy is the key ‘ that it was custom built for living where I lived.
The pace and the air between the notes coupled to the genuinely unsettling vocals seemed to sound so amazing played at night driving along the A47, or sitting on my friend Kevin’s car bonnet one night as the Whittlesey Wash had flooded and the road was off limits, illuminated by moonlight as owls flew overhead. Slint seemed to be about the unspoken stories and rumours and plain unsettling quality of the small community. The music itself had a real narrative; the notes were saying something and the vocals just reinforced it. It was perfect.
It was impossible for it not to have an effect on me as someone learning to play guitar and just starting to make music of my own.
I remember the first time I went to a real recording studio the engineer asked us to bring in records we liked the sound of and one of them was Spiderland. I think Shellac was another and maybe King Crimson’s Red. I don’t think any of the music I have ever made necessarily sounds like Slint but there are certain parts I can remember being directly influenced to the point where it was in tribute.
The irony was that right at the time I was starting to play music, Pajo from Slint was living down the road in Norwich. That seemed to further confirm some sort of link and when bands like Navigator (from Norwich) popped up on the radar it seemed like a lot of people were having the same ideas.
When I moved to a city it seemed like Slint disappeared from my listening tastes. I did not stop liking them, Spiderland and Tweez and the EP were there but they weren’t listened to as much. That was maybe around the year 2000. I kept up with the post Slint releases. Aerial/Papa/M especially. It seemed perfect that a heartbreak weekend spent going mental in Scotland was soundtracked by 2 gorgeous Papa M shows in 2001. The For Carnation and Palace too had a profound effect on me. I had heard them before but it seemed like moving to a city was the catalyst for them making sense as they were so intimate that they offered a place to escape to that was completely insulated. I am such a geek I even used Pajo’s old Palace/For Carnation guitar to record the last Reynolds album as it belonged to my housemate who bought it from Pajo a few years before.
So when Slint announced a reformation I was surprised and a little disappointed. Looking back now I think maybe it’s because I’d just forgotten what Slint actually sounded like. They have unwittingly become the flag bearers for a particularly odious, head music coming out of cities (mainly Chicago) that I got wrapped up in and then got repulsed by as gigs became more and more like Dungeons & Dragons fanclub conventions. I think I was lumping Slint in with the bands that followed them.
I don’t know anybody from Slint but I emailed Pajo anyway. It went along the lines of:
“Don’t do this. It undermines the stuff you’re doing now which is amazing. However, if you do do this I will be at the front cheering you on because I am a fan and I am also a cocksucker”.
Unsurprisingly I did not get a reply.
So, like a cocksucker, I bought a ticket and I went. The event wasn’t much of a party. It was arctic in it’s weather conditions and much of the weekend was spent getting battered by snow of biblical proportions. It got to Friday and I still hadn’t thought about Slint’s music at all. I think in my head I had an idea like
“Slint? They’re a math rock band from Chicago”.
Then all of a sudden I started to think about the band and why I liked them and I began thinking about their songs. Even surrounded by drunk students in Slint hoodies I started to get excited.
I did not even drink on Saturday and got to the front for Slint. Sure enough everyone else who 2 days before had said
“Yeah, Slint are OK but I’m not that fussed about seeing them”
was down the front pressed against the railing with dribble coming out of the corners of their mouth.
The tension, not only of the moment but of the whole weekend with the weather and the slightly down feel, was unbearable.
There were no “hello”s or “thank you”s. The 4 band members edged onstage, on time, in total darkness and started with “For Dinner”. The sound was great. Maybe it was because I was so close to the front but it was plenty loud, especially when it seemed The Melvins were playing on half power the night before.
The first surprise was that Brian McMahan handed guitar duties over to his brother Michael for songs where he sang. It proved to work well as the intricacies of the vocals on the records were replicated perfectly, even over the din the band could cook up. Second surprise was that certain vocal duties were handled by Britt Walford (whilst drumming for the verses of Nosferatu Man and sitting with guitar for Washer), leaving McMahan side of stage to interject where needed but largely to stand still looking awkward in the half light. Each song ended with the lights being taken down to total darkness and complete onstage silence. Rather than seeing it as being a cold emotionless recreation of the records like many criticised it for it seemed more to me to be completely in keeping with the creepy, sparse mood that made me like Slint in the first place. I think maybe people were judging Slint by their supposed contemporaries stage show (Shellac, Jesus Lizard, Mogwai etc) when in fact the key to what makes Slint amazing is that they had no contemporaries.
Unreleased song Pam managed to wipe out the math rock genre with one foul swoop. It was stupidly heavy. It was missed from the second London show set list.
Glenn was a real “hairs on the back of the neck” moment. It too was heavy but only in it’s pondering, sluggish, malevolent manner. I had forgotten how amazingly heavy Slint are.
The Tweez tracks were played faithfully, even the processed guitar sound which sounded incredible blaring out of the PA.
The people around me were insane. One guy shouted and whooped constantly, which is cool because I was excited but there’s something weird to me about cheering on songs that have this level of menace. It seems perverted.
They closed naturally with Good Morning Captain. It sounded amazing. Photographers scrummed with each other at the end to capture the precise moment McMahan yelled “I MISS YOU!”. The band all looked visibly shaken to be playing the music and for once I felt a myth was bizarrely kept in tact by a reformation.
Even when the couple next to me whooped at the opening bars and began slow dancing I found it easy to lock it out and enjoy it, if that’s the right word.
Other ATPs have been curated by party bands of a certain nature (maybe not Autechre but I missed that one) and people’s criticisms seem to come from the sombre mood of Slint’s performance. I personally can’t believe that a music this wilfully odd could attract as many people as it did and so I felt a lot of people simply did not like Slint full stop, rather than thinking the gig was bad.
I am a cocksucker, they did a great job. They reminded me of what a unique and personally important band Slint were to me which is surely the point right?
It took me back to a time and a geography that I won’t get back. I think it’s notable that when bands like Slint and Mogwai and Navigator etc moved away from the countryside they began to change their sound ‘ Mogwai within the band and Slint by breaking into different sections each a polar opposite to Slint.
It happened to me too. As soon as I got a city I found my musical tastes veered towards vocal music, or angry music, or dense music. Slint no longer made sense. That’s also why those Chicago Slint variants and the whole math genre fail so miserably to inject their music with any of the other worldlyness Slint had. They’re city people, their music is out of sorts with their environment and somehow misses out on a kind of truth that comes with being in touch with your surroundings and a language you can build up with the people you play with if you’re on the same wavelength. The post-Slint bands frequently took the bustle of Slint but took it as being evocative of their lives and surroundings. They extracted something from Slint’s music that wasn’t the key element. The aggro in Slint’s music is more of a calm and storm approach. It’s not about busyness or anger or aggression. It’s about tension and drama and a suppression of the things other bands scream about. It’s timeless. It’s real country music. Slint could never have come from Chicago, they are totally rural. Like me, which is why I love them.

We went to see Joanna Newsom last night, partly because I like her album lots, partly because it was free (ahem) but mostly because it was at Glasgow’s Grand Ole Opry which I have been trying to go to for years. As Glasgow’s premier Western themed venue I had heard tales of unbelievable decoration including abundant cacti and cowboys. So you can bet I jumped at the chance to go there without having to endure the weekly line dance night (or whatever they do there normally). It turned out to be much smaller than I expected but that made it even cuter, like a mini-Barras. We were immediately overwhelmed by the padded, neon lit saloon bar and stars and stripes bunting but soon became aware of the enormous wall murals of, yes!, cowboys and cacti! Even greater was the 3D cacti and cowboy boots stuck to the walls. Joanna Newsom was rather overwhelmed by it all. Maybe she thought it had all been decorated in her honour.

Anyway, decor aside, there was bands to see. I missed most of the first guy but White Denim seemed pretty cool although sadly we used them as background music as we were too tired to stand up and there were comfy seats and people I had not seen for ages. Joanna was great though. Coming onstage like a kid in a school play, simultaneously shy and delighted by the attention, she just started singing unaccompanied and it was lovely. Then we got pretty much all of her recent album and a few other songs, some just with the harp and some with a flautist. You can forgive her anything, even the lyrics about wizards and fairies, for her harp playing. Such a playful instrument, it suits her childlike vocals perfectly. And she’s no wispy pixie girl once you see her supergluing her fingers up so she can keep playing. She finishes up with an exuberant Inflammatory Writ on the piano and disappears off the cloud painted stage, grinning like a loon.