This was Quiet Day and we needed it after Hijokaidan, especially with the sun shining outside. I had to tear myself away from my usual Sunday walk and head into the bowels of the Arches once more but I was suitably rewarded.

INGAR ZACH & RHODRI DAVIES
A collaboration between percussionist Zach and harpist Davies, this was perfect Sunday afternoon fare. Ingar Zach had the air of an inquisitive garden shed inventor picking up various objects and trying them out on his drum kit. Electric fans, metal chains and ping pong balls (hopefully purloined from Sun City Girls) were a few of the things used to create fluttering, pattering, juddering rhythms. In perfect accord Rhodri Davies pulled out extended drones and short plucks of sound from his harp using various bits and pieces of his own.

LOREN MAZZACANE CONNORS & ALAN LICHT
This was a delight from start to finish – beautiful, intricate guitar interplay between the two with an array of pedals to tweak the sound and noisier bursts of feedback to stop you from quite drifting off. There was an attentive hush in the room and only the discomfort of the floor made me want them to stop. Quite lovely.

JANDEK AGAIN
Looks like Jandek had been reading my post about Friday and this time we did get a stripped down set with just Loren Mazzacone Connors on guitar and Jandek’s mournful poetics. It was really quite affecting especially when the words were interspersed with interludes of sighing harmonica with the lights slowly changing between the two. The second half of the set saw Jandek take to the drums along with Alan Licht on guitar and (so Alex says, I wouldn’t know) Heather from Taurpis Tula on pedal steel. Jandek’s booming simple drumming was wonderful and this was surrounded by swathes of noise and Heather’s primal wail which grew to be one of the most impressively soul-destroying things I’ve heard in my life, gnawing away at my soul and filling my heart with nightmares. After about 20 minutes the intensity of this was almost too much to bear. Afterwards we emerged blinking and stupified and I sat in a befuddled daze with StewBeard for half an hour while we talked disjointedly and tried to shake off the sound and effect of that voice. By that point I had pretty much lost it.

But that’s the great thing about Instal, hearing things you might never dream of listening to in your own home and can never play loudly enough for full appreciation. Sure, I found myself scrabbling for pop music as soon as I left the building to restore some kind of equilibrium but it’s an honour to be able to challenge my ears in this way and see the many ways people can create new and inspiring sounds.

From the strangest and simplest means. Long may Instal continue.

BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL
There’s something a bit sick about enjoying this kind of stuff so much. I’m sat uncomfortably on the floor with my hand going numb and enveloped in densely layered treated noise at ear damaging volumes. It’s clearly not sensible and yet I’m stupidly happy. Just one guy and a table full of electronic doohickeys to warp and subvert the distorted drones but he’s creating enough noise to fill The Arches and probably push out some of the oxygen as well. I came to from my reverie at one point to realise some awesome thudding drums had appeared which quickly brought everything together to a fevered climax. My favourite set so far and short enough to feel like there wasn’t a second wasted.

SUN CITY GIRLS
Arriving onstage disguised by masks and costume brandishing chairs Sun City Girls were somewhere between performance art and theatre. Spoken word pieces, odd percussion and general gibberish were slightly overshadowed by lion taming, book reading and a round of golf with ping pong balls. While generally entertaining it was often incomprehensible nonsense. As the crowd thinned later I discovered they had ditched their costumes and when they broke into some straight-up folk songs it was as if the first part of the set had been merely a figment of my deranged imagination.

HIJOKAIDAN
Think of the most intensely exciting, idiotically loud 30 second pinnacle of live music you’ve ever experienced. Hijokaidan just start at that point and continue it for 40 minutes. They just ignore all the build-up, the winning over the audience and just get straight in there like a kick in the face, throw themselves and their instruments about in euphoric abandon and demand your fervour like they’ve been thrilling you for an hour instead of 2 minutes. And, hell, did they get it. Half the audience were on their feet punching the air and going nuts. The other half were getting the hell out of there before they damaged their hearing permanently. This was squalling, screaming madness and I loved it.

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3

I’ve missed Instal. My first time back since 2002 and really nothing’s changed. More seats thankfully although it really doesn’t seem like Instal if I don’t spend half the day sitting on the concrete floor contemplating my shoes and gazing happily at the brickwork and metal while trains rumble overhead and noise rumbles through me. I don’t have the stamina to see or write about everything on this weekend but I will collect my thoughts as I go and post some of them here. (Also, massive thanks to Barry for getting me in).

JANDEK
I spent most of Jandek’s set hovering up and down the fun scale, unsure of whether I was enjoying this and, maybe less importantly, whether it was good. Though, whenever I decided it was tedious tosh (about 5 separate occasions in over an hour) he always managed to do something to bring it back and make me re-assess. I liked things in isolation – Jandek’s mournful lamenting, his intuitive guitar playing, the gorgeous echoing bass – but rarely thought they worked all together, wavering between unstructured and cluttered. I think I’d like it better stripped down to bass and vocals.

JOJO
Simply one guy and a guitar making a racket. At times fighting with his guitar, at other times cradling it, this ordinary looking guy whipped up some awesome sounds – waves of feedback punctuated by bursts of noise, whispers and screams. I’m looking forward to seeing him with Hijokaiden today.

BLACK BONED ANGEL
This was sheer spectacle, the stage beautifully lit with clear colours lighting up the fog of dry ice through which you could glimpse the silhouettes of 2 men with guitars. They built up their piece from quiet doom to full on apocalyptic terror and it was mesmerising. The guitar onslaught was interspersed by minimal, powerful percussion leading to me trying to make the case for them as the anti-Low. By the climax, god knows how many minutes or hours later, it was like sitting in a wind tunnel of noise with my clothes flapping and the slow creep of deafness threatening my ears. At the end they did devil horns to the crowd and then had a big hug. Aw.

Day 2
Day 3

(Please note I am not calling this IGGY POP & THE STOOGES at the CARLING APOLLO)

I had a discussion last night coming back from Leeds about the validity of these Don’t Look Back shows. I’ve never made a record that anyone called a “classic” so I don’t know for sure how I would feel if someone asked me to play something I made in the past in its entirety. I think I might ask myself what was wrong with my current output. Surely it’s just like saying
“What you do now sucks so play what we like”.
Maybe it flatters a performers ego enough to be part of it? It makes me feel weird that’s all I know. Mudhoney (by their own admission) never made a good record until Tomorrow Hit Today. I wonder how they feel about playing Superfuzz Bigmuff? Or more precisely I wonder how they feel about pulling more people in for that than their normal shows? It’s a good idea don’t get me wrong. The average music fan who was a drunken teenager when Touch Me I’m Sick hit is probably earning enough in 2005 to have enough disposable income to be able to afford to relive their youth. But it seems like the nail in the coffin for a band to have to go backwards like this. To look back. The Blues Explosion’s Orange is by far my favourite record in their back catalogue. If I went to see them and they played every song off it I’d be beside myself but paying to see them do it (guaranteed) is a little like admitting what I already know and I don’t WANT to write them off. I want the next JSBX record to be killer because I am a fan. I wanted the last Mudhoney record to be killer and it WAS but there they are doing something nearly 20 years old. And the best Dinosaur show I ever saw was J Mascis & The Fog! There’s plenty of proof that these artists are making the best music of their lives but unfortunately the money is in nostalgia right now. But I do concede at least You’re Living All Over Me or Superfuzz could be considered classic albums but Cat Power’s Covers Record? Mum? Ocean Songs? Hmmm.

So anyway, never one to not be a hypocritical cocksucker, I took my 30 quid and bought a ticket for the Stooges.

I figure The Stooges is different. Mainly because Funhouse really is a classic record. And also because the Asheton Brothers never really got their dues. And because (as far as I know) The Stooges only played once in the UK originally and since then it’s just been festivals too big to enjoy and too pricey to get into. And also because Mike Watt is on bass.
But still, I never expected it to be anything other than good entertainment. This is because I know, despite being the real wild child etc etc, Iggy Pop would do anything for a tenner and any decision to reunite with the Ashetons (of whom he stated “they couldn’t put together a home aquarium”) is surely motivated by the payout. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not paying £30 to sneer, I just had a pre determined limit to how much I thought this gig was going to affect me.

Which makes me CAPTAIN FUCKING CHUMPY as this was probably the best gig I have witnessed.

No shit.

They take the stage guerrilla style, super quick and with no fanfare and blast into Down On The Street and the sound is just mindblowing. God knows how long they soundchecked for but it’s like Ron and Watt’s amps are strapped to your head. For a bunch of old guys this is shockingly, urgently loud and heavy. OK, it looks like Scott Asheton died in 1987 and has been brought back to life by Jim Henson’s puppet workshop but fuck it, the man is on form. They are tight as hell. Iggy leaps onto Watts cabs early on in Loose and the tasteful surroundings of the Odeon shake. As Iggy hits the
“LOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRDDDDD!!!!”
on the start of TV Eye, it’s like Ron Asheton’s entire life has built up to the moment where every person in the Odeon just waits for the riff to TV Eye and he obliges and it smacks everyone louder and harder than we could have ever dreamed. I admit it, I cried. I was just overwhelmed. That song is the most amazing , full-on beast in the rock cannon – anyone’s cannon. I have tried this song in every band I have ever played in, I have seen The Fog play it (brilliantly), I have seen The Stooges Project play it, I’ve seen Ron play it with J Mascis, I’ve seen Iggy play it on TV with some lame ass poodle rock backing band. Hell, I’m playing in a Stooges tribute band at Christmas JUST so I can play TV Eye through a massive amp stack but nothing’s going to top seeing the Stooges play it at the Odeon. Not even Mark Arm singing Kick Out The Jams with the MC5 (or MC3 as it was). Or Sabbath doing Into The Void at the Birmingham Hummingbird. I stood there and let myself recover from the riff before making an educated decision to go fucking apeshit like a 12 year old girl at a Robbie Williams concert. My gig partner Ian Scanlon had already been in the pit from the start and I’d seen his grinning head surface about 3 times so I decided to head in after him. I don’t like moshing or crowd surfing or pits but if they were all this gleeful I might change my mind.
1970 and Dirt pass in light speed and I have one of those wonderful moments of clarity where I realise that this really is a great gig and I’m in the middle of it. Steve Mackay comes on for Funhouse to blast sax (at stupid volume I might add) and by now I have been wormed to the front and Watt’s rig is blasting my face off. I wouldn’t want it any other way. I keep having these bizarre realisations that the guy leaning over screaming in my face is IGGY FUCKING POP. As if to confirm this he shouts

“I AM IGGY FUCKING POP!”

between songs in case we had forgotten.

They segue into LA Blues like it was supposed to be on the record and whip up a shitstorm. At this point we’re only about 35 mins in and everyone is completely freaking out. Earlier on I swear we were standing next to Eric Clapton. If it was him I like to think that, at the point where Mackay and Ron Asheton battle the high notes at extreme volume while Iggy mounts the PA stack and dives in the crowd, old Slowhand made the decision to retire.
I would have gone home happy there but they rip into Skull Ring from Iggy’s new record and it’s beefy and in keeping and a damn convincing argument that if there’s one classic band that could make a new record it’s not The Pixies.
We get more than we could ask for in the majority of the first album too. For No Fun Iggy instigates a very controlled stage invasion but Watt still takes a tumble and gets up laughing as people mob him to kiss him as he plays. The receptionist dude from I’m Alan Partridge winds up with his arm around Iggy trying to take a pic on his phone as the rest of us in the crowd pelt him with beer cups and Iggy tries to worm his way loose. I Wanna Be Your Dog brings about a mass bonding experience and the weirdly friendly-yet-nuts moshpit erupts as Iggy goes in again. Even the Ashetons are grinning.
2 encores and Iggy comes back out. I think he would have played the whole thing again if they’d let him. The final encore consists of a victorious Iggy introducing the band – “The undisputed heavyweight champion of the world – Ron Asheton” being the one to raise the biggest cheer.
The highlight for me was the last person to be introduced. Old Watt stands back respectfully apart as Iggy introduces the Stooges and turns to leave as Iggy finally introduces himself. Iggy grabs his arm and proudly marches him to the front of the stage with his arm aloft and introduces him as
“From San Pedro, the Minuteman – Mike Watt”
to the biggest cheer of the evening and Watt looks on the verge of tears as Iggy gives him the spotlight as a genuine Stooge.
It was Watt and Mascis that brought the Ashetons back in the limelight and made a platform for this reunion and it’s so apt that a man so unfussy and humble as Watt (and not David Bowie for example) should be the one responsible for bringing someone like Iggy Pop what has to be his finest moment to date. It feels like a victory for the normal guy. As a Minuteman fan I feel part of it somehow, which I guess is the point of the Minutemen, even now, watching The Stooges.

Me and Ian sit on the train back to Sutton, piss drenched in sweat and yelling at each other over the insane whistling in our ears. We are two miserable old men but for that one evening I don’t think I could have been happier.

I went to see The Go! Team at the QMU last night. I was going to write a full review, but what can I say about how great The Go! Team are that hasn’t already been said, and better, by someone else? Suffice to say, they make me grin from ear-to-ear; quite an achievement at the best of times.

I do have to wonder, though, how much of their appeal is simply down to them knowing how to press my particular generation’s nostalgia buttons. Will they have the same effect on someone who wasn’t born in the seventies? Someone who didn’t grow up watching The Littlest Hobo and the A-Team? Who didn’t drink from a Sodastream? I suspect that it was an over-14’s night, based on the little yellow wristbands they were giving out at the door to anyone who was over 18 and declared that they would want to buy alcohol once inside, but I didn’t see too many people who looked more than a few years older or younger than me in the crowd.

Or am I thinking about it too much, and they’re just a good band with good tunes which just happen to be cannibalised from the pop-culture of my childhood? Is the fact that they make me feel like I’m eight years old just a happy but unessential accident?

I dunno. But I do know that I want “Everyone Is A V.I.P. To Someone” played at my funeral, just as my coffin is moving down the conveyor-belt towards the crematory flames. There won’t be a dry-eye in the house.

That, or the end-theme to “Taxi”.

Evil. Funny how attractive it is when you’re not the victim, at least in it’s more dramatic forms. Enough too keep the horror movie and serial killer book industries quite comfortably afloat, anyway. It’s even more potent still when it’s pretending to be its own polar opposite, though not hiding so well that we can’t spot it and pat ourselves on the back for being savvy enough to see through it, while still being affected by the contrast.

Misty’s Big Adventure have a song called “Evil.” (Look – the point! At last!) It’s introduced as being about GW Bush and his cronies. Ho-hum, so what? Bush is a cock, and it’s not like anyone really needs it pointing out any more. But what would otherwise be fairly inconsequential indie-pop tunes that can only snipe at easy targets they know everyone in the house will agree with (Because, yeah, discos are rubbish, aren’t they?) are saved by a vein of the black stuff which hints at something far nastier. Of course, the creepy Bez-as-satanic-clown character they have jumping about and beatboxing while covered in blue paint and rubber gloves might have something to do with that. (One has to wonder what a Top of the Pops appearance would be like, given the fuss over The Magic Numbers and the fact that they – shock! – have a few extra pounds on them.) But even taken on a purely musical basis, there’s something ever so slightly wrong about this band, but it’s this wrongness that makes them good.

But there is an evil that is any many ways worse than anything hinted at by Misty’s. “Big” evil – the sort that bombs civilians – tends swoop into your life and fuck it up in a sudden and devastating way. It’s awful, but at least it’s quick, and you are usually aware of it when it happens. Far more insidious are life’s many subtle, everyday evils – commercials for hair products, soul-crushing office jobs, ITV sitcoms – that slowly grind us down and leave us dull and soulless before we’ve even noticed. It gets under your skin and seeps out your pores and affects those around you as well. It’s this far more awful evil that seems to have gotten to M.Station. The usual sensitive white boys with guitars (and white girl with keyboard and xylophone, though they were so low in the mix it’s hard not to jump to the conclusion that she’s only in the band as eye-candy), the majority of their set had already faded from memory a few moments after they left the stage. Undoubtedly competent, but dreadfully dreadfully unexciting.

But of course everyone’s here for The Magic Numbers, and here they are with their happy songs about love and stuff. Woo! Yay! This is sunny pop music that it’s ok for indie kids to like. And that’s fine. They’re good at it. A reaffirmation of pop’s ecstatic and redemptive qualities. The crowd loved it. Drunk girls sang along at the top of their lungs. The forces of darkness were exorcised from the room. Hooray! Everyone was delighted, except possibly a few miserable old gits like me who have spent too much time sitting about listening to grim depressing music that we just don’t have the palette for something quite so sweet and innocent. But even if you spend every minute of the rest of your life listening to awful tuneless dirges made by beating the carcasses of dead dogs, you’re never immune to the power of a catchy hook. And you have to admit, The Numbers have one or two of those.

It could be argued that it’s only really in a live context that The Magic Numbers make sense. Their jolliness makes them seem like genuine children’s party entertainers, rather than sinister clowns, and as such they are exactly right for the depressingly interesting times in which we live.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a dead dog to mic-up.

The Magic Numbers
Music For Ears (Home of M.Craft)
Misty’s Big Adventure

Nottingham’s Bologna Pony are interesting for 3 reasons:
1. They’re not bad
2. Their first record was their first practise which means they have evolved onstage over the course of the few gigs they have done and, as an audience member, watching a band evolve in front of you can be exciting
3. Their name throws up some eye opening shit if you type it into Google Image search.
Tonight the normally 2 piece Pony are 3 with the addition of drums and sometime accordion. The increase in quality is evident right off the bat. It isn’t so much that the drummer improves them, it was more that it seems to push them further towards what they rightfully are – a rock band – and so the guitar playing is more focused as a result and they seem to communicate slightly.
The only lull in the (long – for them) set is when the sound is stripped back to a single guitar in favour of some microphone feedback which only serves as some kind of reference to the type of band the Pony might want to be but aren’t. They don’t seem to know what they are or why they do it until it’s too late and their time is up. I don’t know if that’s a criticism.
But tonight when they let their uptightness go they are a thundering rock band. Imagine Sunn O))) without the schtick. Some people would say that’s the point of Sunn O))) but Bologna Pony seem to think otherwise, even if they haven’t worked it out yet.
Fuxa was supposed to play this evening but got involved in some government lockdown due to a lack of work visa, before being sent back to Detroit. Instead we get Sonic Boom doing his Experimental Audio Research solo work. I’ve seen him do it before and couldn’t immerse myself enough to dig it and I figure tonight will be no different, in the surroundings of The Social with me being very tired.
But it works. I think the reason is that he set up with his back to us so we could see what he was doing. If you’ve never seen EAR before then it’s worth saying here that Sonic uses oscillators and tone generating devices that are beyond my comprehension. On top of this add a circuit-bent Speak & Spell (actually a Speak & Maths I later found out) and what seems to be a reverb unit of some sort.
The reason I mention this is that when someone uses ‘magic boxes’ it throws up all kinds of complex questions about the validity of what they do and this can be applied to all 3 bands this evening. Is it ‘real’? How much involvement does the person have? I think this is because we analyse things that are musical on technical merit, even if we don’t mean to. There is still the question of spectacle in live performance – that is the spectacle of the virtuoso playing to the people and demonstrating a higher gift. So we don’t like people miming and sometimes the presence of ‘magic boxes’ makes things close to the mime.
Me? I just figure if it has human elements to it I don’t care if they’re miming or not.
Anyway, this relates to EAR, as by turning round you can see exactly what he is doing and rather than being fake because of the boxes seeming to play themselves it actually feels as if it were much more real somehow. I mean, drone music and music that uses tones as it’s basis is all about the ‘hang’ not the ‘attack’ so when guitars are used every effort is made to suppress that physical attack of a pick hitting a string and instead it concentrates on the point after that, the echo hanging in the air, the note left to linger. At that exact point, there is no human contact, it is the after effect of human contact you listen to.
So EAR is the purest form of this – it is just tones set up to oscillate against each other creating pulses and rhythms, it is the most direct drone, the most undiluted. It doesn’t matter that the visual side of things is non existent and you almost feel you need to move around when he plays, it’s just there and you get the feeling when the power is turned off the sounds are still there, trapped in the boxes until he lets them out next.
The Telescopes operate in the same field in that they work in the ‘hang’, although it’s tempered with the ‘attack’ more than with EAR. In fact they represent a half way house between the acts that open the evening. The type of pulses that subtly shift in and out of EAR’s set are used again but latched onto and built around until they become overpowering. The guitars linger for sure but at times it is at extremely loud volume.
The contrast between the 3 members gives it its vital human element. Steve appears wilder than the other 2 and constantly dissatisfied with the sounds being made, he seems itchy (and occasionally violent) in search of something he doesn’t have.
This contrasts perfectly with Jo, whose meditative guitar style adds a backbone to everything that happens around it and just shimmers throughout. Lorin exists somewhere between the 2 and it seems his activity defines the context that Steve and Jo are heard in. He batters bed springs, mics his projector, bows a bass in it’s stand and dances with a home made theramin. His role is that of the conductor, or better still – the translator.
It’d no doubt annoy them but in shaking free of the ‘shoegazing’ tag they have actually managed to condense the best parts of that genre into something new. I mentioned Sunn 0))) before and what their mission statement seems to be (condense metal into the rip of the power chord and the doom imagery) and it can be said to be the same here – except The Telescopes condense shoegazer music into a series of drifts, pulses, washes and fiery noise beats and clatters. They basically cut the chaff out of their own genre and in doing so now exist in this weird vacuum where old Telescopes fans are puzzled and people who might like what they do now wouldn’t necessarily think to seek out their music. Not that they care.
It’s worth pointing out that on the first night of the tour Lorin fell asleep at the wheel of the band car and ploughed into the central reservation of the M40 before executing several 360 degree spins and landing, with no lights, facing the oncoming traffic in a Ford Escort about 4 ft long and 2 ft wide. They all delighted in telling me how they thought they were going to die, how the doors to the car wouldn’t open and how they spent 2 hours wrapped in tin foil on the hard shoulder of the motorway. Steve was particularly impressed by the slow down calm of the car crashing itself. I think a recorded description of the event read by the band members needs to be played before each of their shows.
I reckon by accident (literally) The Telescopes may have found the perfect context for their music.

It was a cold September evening and I was travelling across town to see Misty’s Big Adventure play King Tut’s. Unsure of what to expect, I had hoped to get a listen of their debut LP, The Black Hole, beforehand but I forgot. The free newspaper which litters Glasgow’s buses these days had given them a brief but curious write-up. I had seen it that morning and read it again as I crossed the city on what was my 5th bus journey that day. “Eclectic-Jazz-Brummies” was the gist of the worrying description…

The first band on were called El Jugador, an entertaining four piece consisting of two guys and two girls. As they hit the first chords of their opening song I wondered how long it would be until I thought they were rubbish. As it turned out, I didn’t have time to finish that thought and was quickly trying to stop myself from laughing out loud. Despite this I thought they were good fun, a bit daft and perhaps a bit casual. I don’t know if it was lack of rehearsal or confidence but there seemed to be a certain energy missing. Although they did have a matey charm that made me warm to them a little and feel mean for not liking them more.

Misty’s Big Adventure was everything I feared and more. Overtly smug and painfully eccentric, I was nauseated by the over-riding pretension. Inventive and catchy arrangements, that owed a significant debt to classic Hanna-Barbara cartoon scores, were overshadowed by pithy lyrics and live ‘sampling’ of electronic nursery toys. In the interest of fairness I should point out that the most of the audience seemed to be able hear something I didn’t and were on the whole receptive to the front man’s dour, deadpan delivery.

I got so angry that the unhappy little man wouldn’t shut up about George Bush, having two brains and ‘tapeworms of love’, and therefore ruining the great music produced by the rest of the highly talented band, that I had to sit at the side and hold my head in my hands. I guess I didn’t get it then, the buttoned down square that I am.

How To Swim in comparison were like a hot water bottle on a winter’s night. A multi layered melt of sounds and instruments, the band teased some great melodies out of what could be easily be an overcrowded mess. There were at least 9 folk on the small stage, the fact that they all could fit was almost as impressive as their beautiful songs.

I had seen them live once a couple of months before and was disappointed to see that, whilst still putting on great show, the band were not enjoying themselves as much as before. I couldn’t help thinking that there must have been some reason, perhaps nerves due to being the last band on, that enthusiasm was not always as it could be throughout the set.

So, all in all, an interesting night. Misty’s might be the more polished band but How To Swim are the ones that I’m looking forward to hear more from.

This was actually the first time I’d been in Oran Mor despite it easily being the nearest venue to my house. It’s quite badly designed for this kind of gig as it was very easy for everyone to stand way way back and leave the poor bands technically playing to five people. The sound was pretty rubbish as well. Anyway, first up were The Needles who I’d been astonished to hear were still going after them being Aberdeen’s highest hopes quite a number of years ago. Worryingly they still looked and sounded exactly the same as I remember. They’re still highly entertaining to watch but they just don’t have the tunes to justify their performance meaning they ended up looking a little silly (in my eyes at least). It’s the sort of thing that endears you to a bunch of naive teenagers playing for the first time but not a well-established band. Shame though, with some actual tunes they’d really be on to
something.

Next up were Beat Trap – a crap band masquerading as a good band. Initially seeming to fit somewhere in the Rapture/Faint axis of dodgy greatness they soon showed themselves up as just being dodgy new wave. I almost started to warm to them when Alasdair started making ridiculous guesses of their stupid-sounding lyrics until we realised those actually were the lyrics. Then I started to hate them. It’s a while since I’ve been shouting for a band to please, no, don’t play another song, just GO, NOW but they weren’t listening anyway. I can’t deny sniggering when they messed up the end of their last song and had to shuffle off like losers. Entertaining in the wrong way.

Hurrah and hurrah, now it was time for Data Panik. Sound problems abounded and so we were treated to Stroppy Data Panik, giggling and fuming in equal measures. Things did sound a little awry but their melodies are so strong and their enthusiasm so great that they just about carried it off. At the end of their shortened set (a tremendous Cubis, owner of the burbliest bassline in history) Steven got so mad he threw his malfunctioning mic off the stage closely followed by the monitor. The sound man tutted loudly and shook his head.

Lucky Luke headlined and I’d heard good things about them but I wasn’t really feeling it. It was too much of a change of pace, especially for the end of the night. With their folky tinges and multitude of odd instruments they reminded me at times of the underrated Suckle but lacking their poise and sadness. I’m sure I’d like them better on a more sympathetic bill, or on record.

The Plan B all day party was ace fun and I really can’t add much to Alistair
Fitchett’s review (and nice photos) as he’s pretty much spot on. I thought Jens Lekman was adorable but his songs were so cute and heartfelt that I had to leave fairly early before I melted into a puddle of goo. I had enormous amounts of fun and these things should happen more often, even just for getting a bunch of fantastic people in one place at the same time with sensibly volumed excellent tunes playing so you can just talk.