So, Audioscope 06 took place last weekend and I have just about recovered. My state of ruin was possibly not helped by a free bar the night before in Glasgow and a much delayed, sardine packed debacle of a train journey (so bad the staff announced over the system how we should go about making a complaint!) but it’s always good to see Simon and Stu at the other end and catch up on everything while watching ridiculous films. Hustle and Flow does indeed teeter on the hilarious/terrible knife edge. Believe me, I shall be thinking twice before I throw any more demos down the toilet.

Anyway, Audioscope was upstairs at the Zodiac this year which was entirely preferable – tons more room to set up the merch stall, a proper high up stage, an incredibly loud PA and an offputting walk downstairs to the cakefest (which stopped me eating even more raspberry muffins than I did). I wasn’t jumping up and down with overenthusiasm at the sight of this year’s line-up for once, but it turned out there wasn’t a single band I didn’t enjoy which made the ‘best/worst band of the day’ thing even more difficult than usual. So, here’s my four favourites:

I’m Being Good – being very good indeed. Starting with possibly my favourite IBG song, they hollered, scraped and bounded through their set in perfectly timed precise abandon. Lovely to see Our Tomipus back on stage too.

Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element – still getting better and better and nothing went wrong this year! It’s been a whole year since I saw them and although they’re playing mostly the same songs, they all sound so much bigger and more confident, so much so that I didn’t even recognise half of them to begin with.

Piano Magic – sighingly lovely post-rock tinged sadness which went down surprisingly well after the Trencher/Rock of Travolta/I’m Being Good/Kids in Tracksuits string of exuberance.

Parts & Labor – I was tired and they were ear-bleedingly loud so mostly their set was like having a brain aneurysm. But, y’know, in a good way. I need to spend some time with their recorded output I think and hope for the opportunity to see them again. They also stayed over and were some of the nicest people I’ve hung out with in a long while. I’m hoping Stu will post some more photos of The Tattoo Game which they introduced us to with evil glee. Luckily my drawing skills are passable enough that I didn’t have any new tattoos to explain to my workmates on my return.

If I did have to pick a worst band, it would be Clinic who were merely slightly experimental indie and thus enjoyable without being very exciting.

Manning the merch stall was as fun as always although I was in continual fear of Clinic coming up with 7 tons of multiformatted, multidesign merch but thankfully that never happened. All the bands were really well organised and lovely and I came away with a whole armful of free stuff gifted to me (although I seem to have gifted as many box sets in return).

If you missed it, you’re a fool. I’m already looking forward to next year.

(The less said about my flight home from Birmingham, the better. Although, my train to Birmingham actually went on to Glasgow apparently not arriving there for another EIGHT HOURS! There are no words for this madness. I am now in a quandary over how to get to ATP without wanting to kill myself).

I took a few photos which are here.

I’m just home from this gig. My ears aren’t ringing as much as I’d anticipated, but man, my face is sore from grinning.

I nearly saw Lightning Bolt at ATP 2004. Something was clearly happening behind that whipped-up throng. Something loud and interesting, but something I was a bit disconnected with, partly because of the crowd, partly because I was a bit noised out by that point. I still bought a copy of their album “Wonderful Rainbow” at the merchandise stand, though. As I did so, a bystander looked at me, his eyes burning with a kind of religious mania. “Track three, man,” he said, indicating my new purchase. “The only song you’ll ever need.”

That track, “Dracula Mountain”, is pretty ace. A rich, thick slab of grotesquely melodic noise and hyperkinetic drumming. I continued to listen to other songs, and other albums, however, only revisiting that CD occasionally, remembering, for a while, how good it is, and putting it away again until my ears had cooled.

I did, however, continue to wonder what I was missing behind that wall of heads, so when I heard that they were playing Glasgow I was keen to see them. And even more so when I found out that they were playing at the Grand Old Oprey, a venue more used to Tuesday-night line-dancing classes and pretend shootouts between Govan cowboys, than extreme noise bands. Realising that if we stayed downstairs we were likely to have similar difficulty in actually seeing the band, we headed up to the balcony and secured a good spot.

First, though, Gay Against You, two young lads wearing their PE gear who scream about unicorns and the pains of being lactose intolerant to the sound of cheap Casio beats turned up to deafening and distorted volume. What could turn into a lot of awful, pretentious performance-art nonsense is saved by being tremendous fun, handing out cakes to the audience, and being carried around on the backs of (rightfully) enthusiastic fans.

Of course, they play on the floor surrounded by the crowd, as Lightning Bolt eschew stages and the Oprey’s is curtained off, leaving the bands to perform under the twin confederate flags mounted above it. This is good for Gay Against You. They like a bit of audience participation, and this particular audience, while a little bemused, are generally game for a laugh. After their set I descended to floor level to buy a cheap CD and a round of drinks, and noticed an unusually smiley atmosphere about the crowd.

This good mood carries through to Lightning Bolt’s set, but the uneducated observer might have seen the pushing, elbowing mass that formed as soon as the first distorted bass chord was struck as an angry mob. Not a bit of it, of course. Where the support act still had room to move, the space around Lightning Bolt contracts whippet-fast. The lone bouncer, looking, in his nice smart coat and tie, more like a school headmaster, tries gamely to keep order, but surrenders about ten minutes in. Inter-song requests by the band themselves to give them some breathing room have a bit more power, but as soon as they start playing, the crowd moves in again, particles excited by the energy of the Lightning Bolt, subservient to physics more than anything else. The hardest of the hard-core invite physical injury in addition to hearing loss by placing their hands over Brian Chippendale’s cymbals, drawn like moths to the flame because while Lightning Bolt hurt it’s only because life hurts too and reminds you that you’re still breathing and…

Oh, I’m overanalysing.

All you need to know is that Lightning Bolt are fucking awesome, man!

And they are the only band you’ll ever need.

Lightning Bolt
Gay Against You

“Spinspin the dog? Being the pervayer of high culcher that I am I can onlistly say iv neaver seen anything so GOD FUCKING AWFULLY SHIT in my HOLELIFE! ..and iv seen the fucking Marzvolta! oh but ther just so weard and creative!”
“spin spin the dogs are WANK. the only reason i wasn’t there last night was cos of my exam but any other day and i would have slapped the singer quite happily”
“Why are people making such a big deal over that piece of shit band (Spinspin the fucking cunt dog)? They are fucking gay and thats that!!!!!!”
“Id forgotten about Spin Spin The Dogs. I fucking hate the drummers smug gitface of “we’re making music you couldnt possibly contemplate, understand orappreciate.”
“Maybe Im not quite advanced enough to understand it. To me it came across like an excuse for not having any SONGS!!!!”
“FUCK OFF.”
“Got there to see Spin Spin the dog(s) to see if they really were that bad… I wasn’t disappointed. They truly are the biggest pile of try to hard to be weird turd I’ve ever seen. How about learning to sing and/or actually writing some music. Why did I let curiosity get the better of me…..? Everyone deserves a chance I suppose. except them”
“FUCKING ARTY TWAT SMUG SHIT! YOU’RE NOT FUCKING FUNNY! ARRRRRRRRGHH! PLEASE SAVE YOUR BEEFHART IMPRESSIONS FOR YOUR LITTLE BROTHER. YOU MIGHT FEEL IMPERIOUS THEN BUT EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOUR A TWAT. YOU TWAT.”
“I don’t even CARE about what music SSTDs play. I don’t care how groundbreaking or original they are. I just think they are RUDE“
“kill kill the twats”

Over time, SSTD have earned a coveted title: The Most Hated Band In Derby.
No mean feat considering they come from Nottingham. The folk at the other end of the A52 can’t deal with the Dogs at all. (See the thoughtful internet comments above that were so good at the time I had to find an excuse to include them: spelling and grammar author’s own).

The main criticisms I can decipher among the death threats are: they can’t play and they are some sort of art prank. The first point is not up for debate. SSTD can play. John might look as comfortable with a guitar as the Queen holding a 15-inch hard-on but he can play the arse off anyone. Someone should change his name to John ‘Fingers’ Wilson.
In fact, I just did.
He seems supernaturally linked to bassist Dean like some governing hand is controlling them both simultaneously. Drummer James provides the perfect foil in a way, in that his drumming means it’s never powerhouse but more like The Fall in that it’s always urgent and never brawny.
What makes people think they can’t play is that no amount of precision and sixth sense can counter singist Vincent’s desire to reek havoc wherever he goes like a child smearing poo on the bathroom walls.
Which brings us onto the art prank accusation: if it were an adult smearing poo anywhere it’d be an art statement. Everyone would look for the meaning:

“Perhaps the poo is a METARFUR for his inner feelings that he is unashamedly revealing?” “Maybe the poo is a SIMBOLLIC protest at life?” etc.

I could be wrong but I think with this band (like a child): a shit’s a shit. And if it’s funny to smear it then it’ll get smeared. They’re not an art happening because there’s no underlying pre-decided message. It doesn’t mean they’re vacuous, it means they’re of the moment and not contrived. Most importantly, they’re all willing to make an ass of themselves to express the moment – a long forgotten virtue if you ask me.
Too many people aren’t willing to compromise themselves for what they believe in because all they’re really doing it for is to establish and emphasise their own ‘cool’. You go see screaming hardcore bands and its bullshit, they stick to a plan, they mock-confront, they throw themselves into the crowd in a manner that is contrived and it just perpetuates this crappy act of theatre that people have seen for so long they think it’s real. Vincent’s willingness to make an ass of himself, the thing that so annoys people, just shows how desperately hard he wants to break that state. One of my fondest gig memories is Vincent stepping on a milk crate onstage in Newcastle and then hobbling around for the rest of the gig with it stuck solid on his foot as though it wasn’t a problem at all.
Tonight it takes him about 40 seconds to clamber into a small space between a shelf and the air conditioning unit. A female punter yells “You’re shit!”which is met with the retort “SEXY!” from Vincent. Later on the woman seems to think it’s her mission to get things sensible when everyone else just wants to go crazy. She keeps shouting, headmistress-style, “GET DOWN FROM THERE!” and “STOP BEING SILLY!” to Vincent, who has decided he likes the ledge/air conditioner position so much he’ll spend the gig there. “SEXY!” he replies.
They seem to delight in the chaos of it all, John seems especially animated, whacking his guitar into the cymbals and when he swaps with James they both seem to relish getting to attack an instrument that doesn’t belong to them.
Much as I am sure they would recoil at the word, SSTD really rock. They always have done. Not to be confused with some sort of macho swagger, which they definitely don’t have. It’s no sausage party. It’s like ‘Container Drivers’ by The Fall with every other note being one you don’t expect. The Jesus Lizard and Scratch Acid minus the pelvic swing. It’s twitchy and insect-like. Spiny.
Having said that I was pretty leathered by this point so my memories are blurred. I don’t add that as a kind of Lester Bangs / Hunter S Thompson gonzo-journalist comment but more as a resigned admission that I can’t booze properly anymore and I am essentially a 2 pint screamer.

Which is pretty irresponsible seeing I am supposed to be telling you what the gig was like.

But that’s OK, I can do that – the gig was brilliant.

If this really was their last gig I’m going to miss them.

Opening up in the big room at Rock City is not an enviable task. You get about 10 mins to sound check, about 4 inches of room to play in as you squeeze yourself around the headliner and other support bands’ massive amps and every noise you make echoes straight back at you off the walls of the slowly filling room.
The chances of a band rising above this are slim. The chance of them playing one of the best gigs so far this year is next to impossible – which makes Stinking Lizaveta‘s efforts all the more superhuman, as they were amazing at 8 o clock on a Sunday evening.
I’ve seen these Philadelphians before in small rooms and they always put on a show and I always enjoy it but it’s surprising how much sense they make on a massive stage at a ‘proper’ rock gig. Surprising because they have an upright bassist, no vocals to speak of, a female drummer and a guitarist (brother of the bassist) who resembles something from Lord Of The Rings. Interesting enough to fill a small room but not the typical set up for an 18 year old in cut-off denim and a peach fuzz moustache sipping on a nervously-bought cider and waiting for the mosh parts. But people seemed to really get into it.
It’s hard not to though, when the band themselves are so committed. Guitarist Yanni is especially animated, balancing precariously on his amp, leaping around, screaming into his guitar pickups and at one point traversing the whopping Rock City ‘moat’ to strap his guitar onto an unsuspecting girl (after prying it from the hands of a gaggle of wannabe male guitossers) in the front row before returning to the stage to dish out wah-wah apocalypse on us while the girl stood there pawing the instrument. Lizaveta are super arranged, technical metal but by putting so much of themselves into the performance you forget about it, things seem natural, you don’t really try and follow the changes because you follow the people.
Clutch are a band I’ve heard on record plenty but never seen live. On record they have an unnatural heaviness that’s replicated tonight in volume but not in overall sound somehow. They are massively loud but the guitar especially sounds croaky and blubbering. Not to say Clutch don’t rock. They resemble a compressed, more aggressive ZZ Top with Dan Higgs from Lungfish on vocals – complete with bizarre shamanisms and facial hair. But whereas the mighty ‘Top have an elasticity to their rhythms that means I could listen to Frank Beard play a shuffle beat all day, Clutch rely a bit too much on a straight fonky rhythm that never allows them to break out and run. Couple it to the sometimes-overbearing New Orleans-y keyboard sound and it makes too much Clutch a bit hard to take. It’s lucky the sheer vocal presence of Neil Fallon is commanding enough to make it seem like they’re not repeating themselves even when maybe they are.
It was Stinking Lizaveta’s night though.
(Corrosion Of Conformity headlined but I tried to review two gigs in a night and didn’t see them. Here’s what my friend Annie thought: “Dark loud raw R-n-R, played old and new – heavy sounds from the deep” so there you have it!)

In the case of most gigs I go to, I do so because I’m genuinely interested or excited by the music. There are a handful of bands, however, whose shows I attend more out of a sense of duty than anything else. These are generally artists who were extremely important to me when I was much younger, but who don’t play locally too often. While I might not actually listen to their records much any more, it would seem wrong to let them pass through Glasgow without making an appearance, for old time’s sake.

Bob Mould is one such artist. I was too young to be into Husker Du (And no, I can’t be bothered scanning the character map for a “u” with umlauts. You may draw them in yourself, if you wish.) while they were still a going concern, but the brief NME-lead hyping of Mould’s subsequent outfit Sugar provided a gateway to his back-catalogue which, as an angsty teenager, I devoured keenly.

My tastes have moved on, as tastes tend to do, and I didn’t really bother with his last couple of solo albums, so I wasn’t expecting to know too much of the set last night. It was surprising, then, that it was largely made up of older material. Lots of old Huskers songs (“Hardly Getting Over It”, “Chartered Trips” and “Celebrated Summer” being particular highlights), and a large pile from the first few solo records and his Sugar output comprised the bulk of it. In the end I counted only two that I didn’t know, despite not having purchased a Bob Mould album in years. One has to wonder if this indicates a lack of confidence in his newer work, or simply an acceptance that his audience largely consists of aging Huskers fans. His recent electronic sideline warranted not even a mention, despite the fact that the format of this tour – just Bob on his own – might have been the perfect opportunity to bring both facets of his output together without having to dismiss a band from the stage when it came time to do some laptop-twiddling.

For nostalgists, then, this gig is about as perfect as could be expected without the Huskers getting back together and the associated freezing-over of hell. (Though a recent charity appearance with Grant Hart suggests that hatchets may have been buried in that area.) The songs, and Bob’s voice, have both aged well, and his performance is a pleasing reminder that he is a songwriter who can endow his lyrics with a rare sense of originality and honesty, even while allowing himself a relatively narrow thematic palette. It’s incredible how many songs the man can write about relationships going wrong, without sounding like a one-trick pony. But I can’t quite decide whether to be disappointed that someone who tried so hard in recent years to reinvent himself seems to be so dependant on his past in order to keep an audience, or to take it as a sign that he’s more at peace with his own history and be happy for him. It’s possible that this tour is just one step in a larger game-plan – a clever reclaiming of goodwill after a long absence. So while this was a night of retrospection, for the first time in years I’m curious about what Bob Mould will do next.

Back when I was 10 years old (approximately), I got hold of Utter Madness, by Madness, on cassette. After listening to that, all other music that I heard at the time seemed ridiculous because it was too sincere and earnest. Why the hell would you want to listen to Spandau Ballet crooning about love when you could jump around the room to One Step Beyond, or Night Boat To Cairo? It’s doing Zuinosin the greatest possible disservice by mentioning them in the same sentence as Madness, but the relative emotions they conjure up for me are uncannily similar. Why the hell would you want to listen to Keane singing about love when you could watch Zuinosin jump around the room, screaming and flipping the bird to the audience? Zuinosin render most other music obsolete by nature of the fact that, among other things, they are:
a) insane
b) fantastically costumed
c) from Japan
d) brilliant musicians
e) having a lot of fun
If I was in a conventional band, I’d be emailing the other members right now to tell them that I quit. The only way that you can possibly follow Zuinosin is if you are a member of The Psychic Paramount, or a member of Hella.
Here are some other FACTS:
If you saw The Psychic Paramount walking down any street in any town in any country, you would instantly know that they were from New York.
The Psychic Paramount are responsible for the best album released in 2005.
The Psychic Paramount are responsible for my hearing loss.
Zach Hill is the world’s greatest drummer*.
Spencer Seim is the world’s most dexterous guitarist*.
Spencer Seim now resembles the ‘Juniper Bush’ character played by Terry Jones in Life Of Brian.
Hella are less thrilling with four members than they were with two.
Hella are still very thrilling.
Tonight was the best gig I have been to in a long time.

*I’m fairly confident that this will be difficult to disprove. If I press the Sun (the star at the centre of our solar system, not the newspaper) to your left cheek, and then Alpha Centauri to your right cheek, would you be able to tell which was the hottest?

I didn’t get to see Bob Dylan. There seemed to be about 20 gigs on in Nottingham on one night and even though I tried to lay plans to get into the fortress that is the Ice Arena, Bob doesn’t do guest lists for anybody apparently – let alone me pretending to be someone I am not in order to sneak in.
Next door to the Ice Arena is Bunkers Hill where Yelp Of Sords is playing. When the Dylan crowd begins pouring out of the Ice Arena at 9.30 I can only assume that he’s either reinvented himself again so comprehensively as to drive away his fan base, or that he wants to get packed up in time to pop in and see the Bunkers gig. It is unfortunately neither.
The bar downstairs at Bunkers is rammed with Dylan fans. There are a lot of folks who enjoy the mythology of music as much as the music itself. When you ask them what their favourite album is they quote reviews back at you. So it’s hardly surprising that someone who self mythologizes and invents as much as Dylan has such a huge fan base. Or that their interest in the words and opinions of others means they assume that the rest of the world is just as interested in theirs. So the bar is rammed with failed music journalists shouting their personal reviews of the show at no one in particular.
“A good bar band spoiled by a guy on the side of the stage playing out of tune piano and mumbling” was one. “I had to stop him (points at friend) from leaving” was another. A work colleague told me it was “bizarre”.
It seems quite apt to me that Dylan is in town as, in terms of truly popular culture, he was the first person to really actively seek to undercut an audience’s expectations or to drag an audience to where he wanted them to be – regardless of whether or not they wanted to be dragged. His electric conversion sounds positively pleasant to us these days but back then it was viewed as nothing short of total war by the folk crowd that hung on his every word (nowadays he seems to divide crowds in equal measure for different reasons).
Audience comfort level is something that’s at the forefront of my mind when watching Yelp Of Sords, the solo guise of Dan who previously played in Brighton’s Cat On Form. I don’t think any of COF would object to me saying that their sound was related closely to old school (mainly American) emo. YOS stretches this even further into territory so cathartic and stripped that it raises all kinds of questions as to exactly what the purpose of the music is in a live setting and I all I can conclude is that either Dan wants us to feel as awkward as he presumably does or he hasn’t considered the audience in the first place.
We’re all happy and comfortable to hear a person pour their heart out onstage: what used to be considered to be ’emo’ is pretty much mainstream pop these days and even the more extreme examples of the genre (Moss Icon, Indian Summer, Navio Forge) are relatively palatable due to the osmosis of that ‘twinkly-guitar-with-loud-bits’ style into mainstream chart music. But strip it down to a man with an acoustic guitar screaming his guts out and contorting in his chair and you have to concede that YOS at least proves there are ways of making ’emo’ music that are still too uncomfortable for most folks to handle.
Melbourne, Australia’s Justice Yeldham has a similar effect on his crowd. Yeldham’s live performance consists of grinding his face into a sheet of mic’d up plate glass. It is hideous for a variety of reasons.
One is that the transparency of the glass means you get to view his face all squished up against the other side of the glass like a kid on a special bus wiping his nose down the window as you overtake them on the motorway. Another reason is the sound really is quite nasty. The resonant properties of the glass means as he yells onto/into it and then pulls and squeezes at the sheet, the pitch of his voice wildly varies and wavers and this in turn is run through some truly ugly processing that makes it sound like a Dalek in it’s death throes.
I also have a real aversion to Savlon antiseptic cream too so I was pretty freaked out just 15 seconds after he took to the stage at Cabaret and elaborately squeezed half of a family sized tube of the stuff into his mouth in preparation for his performance.
Quite often, involving objects that have their own subtext in a live performance is gimmicky to the extreme. What I mean is that it could be considered fairly wild to play a guitar with, say, a baby’s head. It would be less wild to play it with a cauliflower. The wildness comes from the object being a signifier of other things – not from the sound created, as the sonic properties of both objects are pretty similar. I could be wrong but it seems to me that maybe Yeldham made a decision to use glass for sonic reasons first and foremost and that the finale of smashing his already bloody face through it is some sort of logical conclusion to his work in the field. I mean this in comparison to deciding outright that itwould be wild to smash glass on your face regardless of what it sounded like – purely for shock effect.
Because after all, we’re in the realm of sonics here right? This is a ‘gig’ even if it’s a strange one. Jonny, who promoted the night, said he was disappointed that more people didn’t turn out and it made me think about what Justice Yeldham’s set really was. It is sonic exploration and improvisation but it also performance art and the performance art has a definite, pre-determined conclusion (that he will smash his face through the glass – I guess the only undetermined part is when it will happen). I guess Yeldham sees what he does in the non-gimmicky category. Otherwise,why mic it up at all? Why not just smash the glass over your face?
Someone I work with said something interesting when they asked me what I did last night and I told them about this gig. They seemed very unsurprised by what I recounted and just said
“Oh, right. Like the Jim Rose Circus?*”
And I thought, well, yes it was – ultimately.
And the weird thing is if you just advertise it as
“TONIGHT A MAN IS GOING TO SMASH HIS FACE INTO A SHEET OF GLASS – £4”
– I reckon the turn out would be colossal. But is that what the guy wants? But even those there (who have an interest in free noise and avant garde music) were there for the pay off – the spectacle of watching this guy injure himself. The gore. How is that different to watching a man pump his own stomach or stick pins in himself?
I guess for him the physical part of things is a partly cathartic process, like performing his songs is for Dan in Yelp Of Sords. It seems with Yelp Of Sords that Dan wants to let out some primal scream style energy release. In fact he says as much when describing the reasons for one song (strangely the one song where he sang conventionally) as being connected to expressing the death of a loved one in a pure release of energy.
So even though they’re unconnected and on different bills if you look at it, Yelp Of Sords and Justice Yeldham have a lot in common – as an audience member at least. In terms of challenging an audience and provoking a reaction I found it fascinating that Yelp Of Sords was harder to watch and deal with than a man bleeding from his face and screaming. And what’s even more fascinating is that, because he plays guitar and sings, Yelp Of Sords is the ‘conventional act’ whereas Yeldham is the ‘left field’ act. But in actual fact the sonic aspect of Yeldham’s performance is more considered and crucial than that of Yelp Of Sords (because it’s what stops Yeldham being purely a freak show) and in turn the cathartic release that you’d think would make up Yeldhams show in it’s entirety is harder hitting from Yelp Of Sords.

Weird.

And even weirder is that whereas Dan and Justice managed to confuse a handful of people with their art, Dylan seemed to piss off several thousand people without injuring himself, or even trying. Seems if challenging your audience is the most important thing then the originator is still the king.

“I don’t get it. Is this a happy ending or a sad ending?”
“It’s an ending”

* Touring freak show from the early 90s featuring Mr Lifto, The Human Pin Cushion and the legendary Bile Beer.

Young man, early 20s, goes to see semi-popular American touring band. Said band offer up partly improvised music: noisy, rhythmical and a total assault on the senses. Two of the members of the band are dressed as koi carp.
This is officially a

and is

and

In fact, it’s almost too much to take on board. So our man doesn’t take it all on board. In fact he only takes the surface in at all. The equipment, the sounds and the omnipresent bullshit gimmicks that the Yanks keep laying on our asses EVERY FUCKING TIME. He adds this up and comes to the conclusion this band are speaking vitally to him and about him and the human condition he empathises with because that is, after all, what liking a band is about -understanding them and feeling they understand you – right?

Our young man places an advert on the modern internet. It says

BAND MEMBERS WANTED

It talks about noise, freedom, Voivod, Wolf Eyes and the burgeoning London Grime scene (because our man is open to all culture – he’s no narrow minded punk rocker no way no how).
He finds a bunch of other like minded souls. They form a band called

and they garner between 3 and 4 hundred friends on the Myspace. They book their first show before they’ve even rehearsed and lots of people have bright pink badges on their coats, shirts and knapsacks with the image of an erect penis on it. The words COLLISION! PANTHER! NOW! are arcing out of the wee hole.

They finally get their shit together to rehearse a couple of days before their first show, at Bardens in Stoke Newington, opening for

from Rhode Island.

No one really knows what to play at the rehearsal. They realise that in fact they have 4 guitarists and nothing else. But it’s cool, they have some little mini mixers and some contact mics and before you know it they’re all strapping mics to their ball bags and screaming into Electro Harmonix filter pedals that have gaffa tape over the logo that reads

RADICAL ACTION BASTARD

They do this for about 20 mins and it doesn’t seem enough. One of the guys suggests they dress up and you know what? They’ve all seen bands do that too and it’s been

and

and

so they all go and buy matching orange tie dye leggings and hotpants and sort of crazy turban styled headgear they make from towelling nappies. They are ready.

ULTIMATE / (HORSE) DESTRUCTION? : ! are quite a draw and by the time of COLLISION! PANTHER! NOW!’s entry into the live arena there is a large crowd. COLLISION! PANTHER! NOW! take the stage by force and whip up severe terror on the crowd who are by and large loving it. They kind of peter out after 10 mins or so but one of the guys runs into the crowd brandishing his guitar like some kind of bayonet device, spilling pints wherever he goes but you know, fuck it, this is the NOW, dude and you have to live with it. If COLLISION! PANTHER! NOW! are too

for you then go to your stupid rock gig – loser!

No one really knows when the set is over, least of all the band members until the guy playing the white Fender Jaguar that his Mum and Dad bought him throws it face down onto the floor and the band run off, their towelling headgear falling off and onto the floor as they dash into the toilets. It is a wild success. Afterwards a guy who runs an internet webzine called MASSIVE MEAT SNAKE who is reviewing the gig asks our young guy what influences COLLISION! PANTHER! NOW!’s sound.

“Oh, you know, free noise, improv, danger, love, death, John Cage, Steve Reich, hip hop” they answer.

A girl called FLAPJACK speaks to the band about putting a CDR out packaged in a sanitary towel on her label simply called

filled with water in which the drummer (who only plays 8 sets of hi hats), the bassist (playing an amplified cycle tyre) and the guitarist (who plays his 19 string guitar with a floret of broccoli) writhe around in while the singer pulls chunks of offal out of his pants and throws them into the crowd who are delighted to find the offal is contact mic’d and running through a filter bank.
By the time the set finishes lots of people have thrown caution to the wind and are in the paddling pool too. A series of rabid online photo bloggers are snapping the action on digital cameras in the hope that someone’s nipple falls out of their dress. People are really

Somewhere in the crowd, another young man is trying to take it all in. He decides to form a band, inspired by the events and the way they spoke to him. He understood them and they understood him. Even though no words were sung, shouted or spoken he feels the bands got through to him though he isn’t sure exactly what was said. It’s more of a feeling right?
The next day on his internet blog called

he reviews the gig and marvels at the freedom displayed, the choice of amazing sounds, the forward thinking, the improvised nature, the wonder, the revolutionary approach.

Later in the week he also reviews a show by The Unit Ama and he says they are

We played a gig last night with Findo Gask who were tremendous – well-dressed young men playing electro-dreampop. Lots of chiming but nicely dirty guitar, swooping fragile vocals and some awesomely great drumming. They reminded me very much of the Electro Group whose album I still dig out regularly. They sound a little less dreamy and a little more rocky on their MP3s but that’s in no way a bad thing. I look forward to records.

I have never gone onstage at 1am before but it was surprisingly good (next morning booked off work rather key though) and there was a great atmosphere and some brilliant records being played, so much so that I stayed out til 3am and walked home in giddy abandon. I’m glad I am getting over my fear of clubs but disappointed for the second time that no-one will dance to the Yummy Fur with me. I hate you all.