Hello, good evening and welcome to my Review Of The Year 2009. I don't claim to be in any way objective, but I don't consider myself any less so than a great many people who actually get paid for writing about music. Indeed, 2009 was the year in which I stopped buying NME after 23 years because I consider my own opinions on all things musical to be vastly superior to the majority of hair-gelled chipmunks who hang around the supposed Next Big Thing in trendy parts of London. So here goes then, this is the music I was listening to in 2009, along with 17 gigs you'll wish you'd been at (unless you were, of course).
It's a year in which five of the best live bands I saw comprised two men and a pile of electronics, but spanned the decades in terms of both physical age and musical longevity: Orbital could easily be worriedaboutsatan's dads, with Fuck Buttons their mates, Maps their slightly older cousins and The Pet Shop Boys their strange uncles. Meanwhile the likes of Air Cav, Daniel Land And The Modern Painters, various insane Japanese people and trusty perennials British Sea Power proved there was still life in guitars if you knew what to do with them. All potential contenders for band of the year - so I awarded that to someone else entirely, being the contrary sort that I am.
This was 2009, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did...
ALBUMS OF 2009
Don't know about anyone else but I genuinely reckon this was either the best year for albums (a) since 1989 or (b) ever. Given that unlike the lucky souls who write for professional media outlets I actually have to buy most of my albums, the pool I have to choose from is somewhat limited to stuff I thought I'd like anyway (or stuff friends forced on me) - I could spend three hours a night on Spotify chasing up recommendations but I'd rather be out watching bands and finding the next generation. But whilst I might not agree with the actual albums rated by every other review page, there's one theme that's crossed genres and tastes this year - as I wrote in Incendiary in September, reviewing the album which I already sort of 90% knew was going to be my album of the year, "Unless you've been living under a rock, you might have noticed that the music press has already crowned 2009 The Year Second Albums Stopped Being Shite. We could pontificate for ages on the accuracy or otherwise of this typically sweeping generalisation (and its resultant increase in use of the ghastly word "s*ph*m*re") but you all know the much-cited examples already. But let's be honest, how hard exactly was it going to be for The Horrors to make a better album than Strange House? The average llama could have made a better album than Strange House...."
The aforementioned Horrors album came out relatively early in the year, and I rashly declared it "probably top five of 2009". That's how unprepared I was for the year's rich pickings. It's here, not in the top ten but somewhere down in the 10 to 20 rankings - and I still maintain that in pretty much any other year of the past decade or two it would have been top five. As would, possibly, quite a few of the rest of these...
NOT QUITE THE TOP TEN
The Phantom Band - Checkmate Savage
Engineers - Three Fact Fader
The Horrors - Primary Colours
The Duckworth Lewis Method (self titled)
Flowers Of Hell - Hell Or High Water
Rival Consoles - io
Grammatics (self titled)
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart (self titled)
The Twilight Sad - Forget The Night Ahead
Wooden Shjips - Dos
Morton Valence - Bob and Veronica Ride Again
SO WHAT DID MAKE THE TOP TEN THEN?
10. Sad Day For Puppets – Unknown Colors
Courtesy of Sonic Cathedral, who were on something of a roll following their also excellent compilation of their first 11 single releases, Sad Day For Puppets arrived in Manchester on a rainy Wednesday, carrying their instruments on their backs because they couldn't even afford a van for their UK tour. Chorlton Irish Club, venue for that evening's gig, was just clearing up after a wake. Far from being deterred by this somewhat disconcerting welcome, by the time we arrived with the amps they were borrowing from support band Air Cav they were happily tucking into the left-over sausage rolls. So began my review of this album for Incendiary and in a way it does matter, because you probably couldn't give a better illustration of the sunny, optimistic vibe of this lovely young Swedish pop band. More Sarah Records than shoegaze, they sounded like shrebet dabs and picnics and sunshine; it might have been a year dominated by electronics but if there was life left in guitar indie, Sonic Cathedral was going to find it.
9. Liam Frost - We Ain’t Got No Money Honey But We Got Rain
It would take a very special "one man and his guitar" act to get past my filters in 2009 - and this is that man. Admittedly with a band, and indeed Martha Wainwright helping out vocally on one track, but this is still basically man-and-guitar storytelling in the finest Mancunian tradition . Yes, I know, other cities have troubadours, but they haven't got George Borowski or Johnny Bramwell or this lastest addition to the esteemed list. Which is interesting, because on one track he sings "I'm not doing this to join my city's leading lights and luminaries" - just one highlight of an album packed with some of the most evocative and poignant lyrics you'll hear anywhere this year. To some of us, Liam, you already are.
8. Brakes - Rock is Dodelijk
It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that live albums are crap, so what the hell's a live album doing here, especially when Brakes also released a studio album this year ("Touchdown")? Well, basically, Brakes are a live band. One of the very best. And amazingly this album captures all the fun and energy and borderline insanity of a Brakes gig (two, actually) and just listening to it makes me happy. For added experience, get extremely pissed before listening, jump around the living room, and get a mate to throw a whole real pineapple at your head. Whilst dressed in a Mexican poncho.
7. British Sea Power - Man Of Aran
In which the most original and inspired indie band of the 21st century follow up the relatively commercial "Do You Like Rock Music" with a largely instrumental ambient post-rock album crafted to soundtrack a 1930s film. Some more traditionalist fans initially refused to countenance it as a "proper" BSP album (so, um, what is it then?) but the idea itself - the refusal to conform to a straight path - is what makes them great. As a piece of music alone it demands comparison with the greats of the genre (my 2008 album of the year, Laymar's "In Strange Lines And Distances", for example) and doesn't quite measure up, but still stands rather better than most.
6. Doves - Kingdom of Rust
If there's one thing more exciting than a new band making an amazing album, it's an old band making an amazing album - and this was the sort of return to form every established band should aspire to. From the title track's amazing blend of Johnny Cash and Ennio Morricone to the mad funk of "Compulsion" it's Doves at their very best. Even if it did take them about a million years to make it. It's a faintly depressing thought that we'll probably be three years into a Tory government by the time they release the next one.
5. Daniel Land And The Modern Painters - Love Songs For The Chemical Generation
As I have said before, 2009's stunning haul of long-players means anything from hereon in would have probably topped the pile in previous years. Described by NME as "Slowdive reimagined by Phil Spector" this is basically an hour-long flotation tank trip of traditional shoegaze which manages a feat almost unheard-of in genre-revival stakes: it's actually better than most of what inspired it. Think about that for a minute. It's like if Interpol had been better than The Chameleons. This sort of thing just doesn't happen usually, does it? All the more remarkable for the fact that it was made without a studio, label or any financial backing. In fucking Northenden. Truly astonishing.
4. Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport
OK - first things first: of course there is nothing on here quite as amazing as "Sweet Love For Planet Earth". This is OK, as there have probably been less than 25 tracks as amazing as "Sweet Love For Planet Earth" made by anyone ever. And "The Lisbon Maru" and leading single "Surf Solar" are actually not far off. The best thing about it is that it sounds exactly like what it is - an album by one of the most creative and imaginative bands of the decade stuck through the Andy Weatherall machine. A match made in Heaven. (Literally, in October. The club, that is. More on which later...)
3. worriedaboutsatan - Arrivals
Yes, it's another band comprising two slightly bewildered looking young men and a table full of Stuff. This is a quite outstanding journey through modern electronica, touching on techno, abstract, ambient, dubstep, glitchy and atmospheric variants. It is the sort of album that makes it hard not to use words like "glacial" and "dystopian" and I am guilty on both counts. Best experienced (and yes, we have tried this) in a darkened room accompanied by the film "13 (Tzameti)" - which is how the boys have generally played live this year. Probably more than anyone on this list I'm thoroughly excited to see where they go next.
THE FINALISTS
And it's a close call on the top two, which between them have probably had about 30% of my stereo time in the second half of the year. Considering the high quality that makes up the rest of the top ten that's saying something. I'm going to reproduce my own reviews for both of them - courtesy of my regular online homes ManchesterMusic and Incendiary - so you can see why.
2. THE LONGCUT - OPEN HEARTS
(Review from manchestermusic.co.uk, 29 June 2009)
You've got to hand it to them, haven't you? Sometime on Sunday night, four words appeared on the computer screens of anyone who happened to be looking: me I'm checking my own Myspace page, and where it used to say The Longcut by the little picture in my favourite bands panel are now the words: "The Longcut - New Album Out Tomorrow". Sorry, what? It's three years almost to the day since the trio released "A Call And Response"; three years in which they parted company with their label and - well, there have been live shows, although these have been pretty sparse the last couple of years. Some demos which unexpectedly found their way into MM's hands following a particularly deranged night out in late 2007 sounded promising, and then it all went worryingly quiet again for most of 2008. 2009 started with a glorious live return sometime after midnight at the Friends Of Manchester all-dayer; opening with three new tracks, there was evidence of a progression, a shift towards a more electronic sound; that second album was going to be good, we knew then, but when we'd actually get to hear it was anybody's guess. Another quiet Sunday night wandering round the internet, and... no, refresh the page, I didn't imagine that did I? No. Here we are less than 24 hours later with a serious contender for that albums of the year list.
It's like The Longcut we knew and loved, only more so. Angrier, harder, more fucked up but more heartfelt. Beats that could blast holes in concrete, brittle guitar lines, quiet sections that ache with poignancy - and that's just the first track. It's called "Out At The Roots" and it takes everything that's ever been great about The Longcut and doubles it. As indeed does the rest of the album. There's so much more ambition here: lyrics seem less vague and more personal - I guess the clue is in the name, and the title track itself is almost anthemic; there are great towers of fuzz and distortion in "Mary Bloody Sunshine", whilst "Something Inside" and "Repeated" link back to the debut, only with a load more squalling white noise in the former and acres of that bleak post-industrial atmosphere in the latter. You want something even more epic? "Tell You So" starts with the sort of spiralling guitars popularised by the likes of I Like Trains (who of course were barely out of the, er, platforms three years ago) then there's one of those moments where it suddenly shifts direction, all thundering drums, and you just know this is the bit where onstage Stuart will make one of his legendary microphone to drumkit sprints, but rather than leaving it there it slips off into some sort of widescreen post-rock landscape worthy of 65daysofstatic. Elsewhere, "Evil Dance" should be pretty well known to anyone who's been at one of those gigs; it's the one that goes "I thought that I was lost and I was scared as hell, I'm happy I was wrong" - a sentiment which might well be widely echoed tonight as those files are unzipped.
The thing is, it gets even better. Throughout, "Open Hearts" feels like it's building up to something. And it seems it was. In these days of isolated tracks and cherrypicked downloads, where some bands (hello, Ash) can't even be bothered to make proper long-players any more, credit is due to any band who remembers the ancient art of album closure. And here, in the stunning "The Last Ones Here", The Longcut unveil what could be their finest moment yet, a fractured elegy of love and death and defiance all wrapped in rippling electronics and stadium-sized chord structures which soar across the senses before melting away with a whisper. Recent times have seen the phrase "long-awaited" applied to pretty much every move the band have made, but it doesn't matter now. This is more than worth the wait.
1. MAPS - TURNING THE MIND
(Review from Incendiary Magazine, September 2009)
I started, as you read somewhere near the start of this section, by saying that some artists were going to find it rather easier to exceed their debut albums than others....
For Maps, however, there was a somewhat higher watermark to exceed. Trailblazing from a Northamptonshire bedroom via Iceland all the way to the 2007 Mercury nomination list, We Can Create was about as perfect a debut album as anyone's made in recent years, so a few months back when James Chapman started firing off blog posts about how this one was going to basically walk all over it, we so wanted to believe him, but... well, nine times out of ten when someone starts saying things like that you steel yourself for some indulgent folly. Thing is we always had an inkling this wasn't going to be like that. And then he walked out on stage at (Liverpool's long-running electro night) EVOL and slipped his coat off to reveal the album's title tattooed bold and black down the length of his pale skinny forearm and it was like yep, he means it all right.
"Oh my god, where are the guitars!!?" - the voice of a retreating clutch of shivering shoegazers, as the download-only single Let Go Of The Fear slipped out quietly in May. We downloaded, we pressed play... and four minutes of glorious Technicolor techno later we scraped ourselves off the ceiling. Then there were live shows in July - the response to which was kind of mixed. Going all electro-rave was fair enough, said the general consensus, but what about the genius pop anthems? Where's the descendant of, say, You Don't Know Her Name? Yeah, whatever, blah, blah; actually, pop kids, it's right here, it's called Everything is Shattering and it is capable of breaking your heart into little pieces and making you grin like an axolotl (Google it) all at the same time. And the rest of the album? Well, he was right. End to end, this is stunning.
Better than We Can Create? You better believe it. However much Incendiary loves that debut (which is a lot) it did seem just a little bit, well, flavoured. As in, there was quite a bit of Valgeir Sigurdsson going on in there. This, however, is the unfettered musical manifesto of one man and his vision (co-producer Tim Holmes serves only to enhance and help realise the ideas), of stunningly beautiful songs interspersed with deliciously vibrant techno pieces. Twelve tracks, not a turkey among them. Start at the beginning - the title track opens with a vulnerable near-whisper, and the raw emotions come flooding out followed by washes of synthesised euphoria, and that's this album all over, really. States of mind and glorious symphonic electronica, sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes coinciding, but all melting together beautifully. Valium In The Sunshine is as lyrically blissed out as the title suggests whilst musically almost elegiac - it's a trick he pulled before on early single Don't Fear and nobody does it better, whilst lead single I Dream Of Crystal has some harsh words for someone set to a sun-blazed trip that recalls the wide-eyed wonder of Primal Scream's Come Together. In fact the highs and lows of Turning The Mind as a whole echo Screamadelica; here too you'll find thundering calls to the dance-floor (the trance-infused Love Will Come) alongside lonely journeys into the soul (Nothing). By the time it fades out with the forward-looking Without You no emotion has been left uncharted.
We hear there are still people out there who do not consider music made with silicon chips to be "real" or as valid as that made with guitars, and this album is unlikely to change their viewpoint, especially as they're probably all sat in their caves mourning Oasis whilst trying to craft rudimentary tools from bits of flint or something. For anyone who's still not quite sure, though, this is your way in: amongst the chips and wires and beats and bleeps is one of the most human records you'll hear this year.
The Finalists: maybe this entire venture was just an excuse to post this picture again - taken after the Shelter benefit gig in Oxford in October - because it never fails to make me smile.
NOT ALBUM OF THE YEAR AT ALL
My good friend and man of taste Liam reckons Julian Plenti Is Skyscraper has redeeming features; I've not found them. It is now over seven years since Interpol made the stunning "Turn On The Bright Lights" and probably about five or something since the decent follow-up "Antics" - maybe I should just let go. Why I spent actual hard cash on Paul Banks's pseudonymous solo effort is a mystery to me, although not quite as much of a mystery as who exactly told him it was worth releasing in the first place, and why.
And while I'm in cynical mode (don't worry, I'll cheer up again soon)...
I JUST DON'T GET IT!
You love music, I love music. You love these bands, I'm left looking around for whatever it is I clearly missed.
The Boxer Rebellion. Much beloved of a great many of my music fan mates, especially in the Chameleons, Puressence and Exit Calm crews: me, I can't understand how anyone who loves the true greats of indie/guitar music can even be arsed with this bunch of me-too's. Nice back story, certainly: I'd go as far as to say it's a blueprint for any band dropped by a label and still loved by fans - just a shame about the really average and uninspiringly derivative tunes.
Editors - see above, only minus back story and plus several zillion units shifted. The ultimate photocopy band, or at least I thought so until they sprung their own photocopy in the form of White Lies. The latter are not included here on the grounds that I don't think I know anyone who takes them seriously.
M83. A band so unfeasibly boring I can't even think of anything to write about them, except that after several years of being completely underwhelmed by their recordings following recommendations from a great many people whose taste I respect I finally ended up seeing them live. Or at least seeing them on a stage. "Live" would imply some form of spontaneity, diversion from the recorded material, humanity or performance - there wasn't.
Animal Collective. Doesn't the very mention of their name make you want to yawn?
Them Crooked Vultures. Supergroups were possibly acceptable in the 1970s when someone had the deluded idea that if you got a load of people who were all amazingly technically proficient on their instrument then the result would be a really great band. When anyone with half a brain could have told them it would actually be the most unbearable pile of muso-wank ever as it's the flaws and the humanity that makes great music great. So it's hardly surprising that this particular trio's multitude of talents resulted in really boring heavy metal, only that so many people - some of them even under the age of 40 - gave a shit.
La Roux. Looks ridiculous, in a good way, like pop stars did when we were kids when they were like some sort of exotic alien beings and not just the dim girls who work in Top Shop. Plus there's the inherently funny June Ackland Off The Bill Is Her Mum thing. Oh, I so wanted to like her, but the weak nothingy voice and below-average tunes prevented this.
All these, however, can be put down to personal taste. You have to dig somewhat further into the depths of when I had to put up with between the good bits this year to find the truly awful....
WORST BAND OF 2009
Oh god, there are a few contenders here. Innumerable mate-rock bands with a copy of the Noel Gallagher Book Of Cliches and 30 pals who wouldn't know decent music if it popped out of their held-aloft pint pots: for the most part these acts are hidden away in provincial pubs and the pay-to-play circuit but the odd one has cropped up here and there, both Air Cav and Exit Calm have suffered the indignity of sharing a bill with them, but I can't remember their names and that's half the point. What's worse is those bands that clearly believe they are a notch or two above such dross, and then get on stage and do something so shockingly bad it almost defies belief.
This happened, somewhat memorably, very late on the second night of a rather underwhelming In The City when like various other scene commentators I wandered into Ruby Lounge because it was the last place with a band on, and the band in question had quite a funny name. God Is In The TV Zine's Simon Jay Catling reported it thus: "they’re a boy band right? Sure, they’ve got a couple of guys in the back messing about with laptops and samplers; but the vocalists at the front might as well be X-Factor’s John & Edward. Maybe they are. I spot Cath Aubergine again (Catling's review of the weekend included several references to the fact that we were at a lot of the same shows, and mostly the good ones), she looks as shocked as me. This cheesy 80s pop repellent is awful; flat vocals and a complete lack of hooks. They’ll be huge in no time."
Meanwhile, this was my concurrently written and astonishingly similar assessment for MM: "Ou Est Le Swimming Pool would have been probably best off left as a comedy name on the schedule: the reality is rather disappointing. Unless you're a fan of rubbish 80s disco pop. The first track sounds like The Scissor Sisters without any of the charm: instead of flamboyant androgynous New York City club queens we get a bunch of Shoreditch scenesters-by-numbers. The backing tracks - provided by a serious-looking type in a suit and a slightly less serious looking one with a multicoloured scarf wrapped round his head - are decent enough, but the frontmen let the side down: the bleach-haired singer attempts the old high-pitched disco thing but is lacking in any sort of soul, and I can't work out what the other one's even there for. I just can't lose the overriding feeling that I've landed in a suburban Nite Klub circa 1986, possibly called Cinderellas or something. Maybe I'm being a party pooper but no, this is grade one Emperor's New Clothes. They will probably be massive in about three weeks."
So far, they're not. Let's keep it that way. So where do we go from here?
GIGS OF THE YEAR
How about some of the more enjoyable live performances of 2009? Of which I was privileged to see a great many. In total, 654 sets by 445 different bands/artists at 250 gigs. Fewer on all counts than the last three years, but still an almighty task to choose the best... especially when undoubtedly the greatest gig I went to this year was one I co-promoted and tour managed....
AIR CAV + DANIEL LAND AND THE MODERN PAINTERS, Groningen Vera, 18th April
The first night had gone well. Better than any of us had dared hope. A few minutes before Air Cav's opening bars at Leiden's SUB071, the only people milling around the wonderful squat venue were members of the touring party and the hippies (meant here in the nicest sense) who lived there. Suddenly it was filling, then full; both bands played excellent sets and the party continued well into Saturday morning. Perhaps as well then that despite Groningen being technically at the other end of the country, it's not exactly a massive conuntry. Vera is one of the world's most renowned venues, its upstairs hospitality quarters wallpapered with posters and flyers of thsoe who have graced its stages. I could list them but why not just find a History Of Alternative Music 1980s To Present Day. Holly Golightly was headlining the main room on this particular night, but there was no elitism; she and her band chilled and hung out and ate Chinese takeaway with two up and coming bands from Manchester whose minds were already most of the way to blown. And the great thing about Vera is that the smaller room doesn't even start until the big one's pretty much finished. I'm going to hand over to my Incendiary colleagues for the next bit...
Bathed in the kind of red light normally reserved for cheap horror movies and certain seedy local districts with large windows, both bands were welcomed with warm applause and boy did they deliver their side of the bargain. Daniel and his painters delivered a blistering set. Beautiful, haunting and completely overwhelming. The vaulted roof could barely contain the noise, the floor began to tremble and, in the toilets, the mirrors began to shake, which caused one Incendiary reporter to almost have a complete heart attack when his face started to vibrate in front of him. The crowd were simply beaten into submission. There was no escape from this onslaught of noise and scores of people found themselves wandering downstairs, in search of a nicotine fix, and hanging around instead, shocked at the sheer force of what they were confronted with. Then, in the spirit of not giving a fuck, the band finished their set with the kind of white noise-infused wig out that My Bloody Valentine would have creamed themselves over. It was monumental. As their epic closing number faded into the distance Vera realized that it had witnessed something truly powerful. Holy fuck this had been worth the trip and we still had Air Cav to come.
Air Cav; bloody hell. On this showing, they were something else. If they were good the night before, they were amazing in Vera. To say they stood up to the plate would be an understatement. They took to the stage as if it really fucking meant something. This was important to them and by Christ it felt important to us too. This was one of those gigs that you were simply glad to witness. No fuck ups here, no dodgy wiring, no misplaced footsteps, just a full on assault, every member playing at full power. They were so much more impassioned, so much more alive and so much more up for it than they had been the night before. You could tell that Chris was getting into it. The sweat was pouring out of him and, on more than one occasion, he started beating the ceiling with his fist, just to release the adrenalin flowing through him. The crowd, which was a fucking ridiculous size by now, fucking loved them. Girls started pushing to the front, just to get a better look, blokes stared longingly at Sophie. There was even a bit of bizarre floor tom worshipping going on too, by a spirited local, which drew a classic Mancunian snarling retort from Mr. Nield: “If you’re gonna hit it, hit it! But don’t fanny about with it!” (Words by Damian Leslie).
It's been eight months since that weekend and both bands have gone on to play some outstanding gigs: Daniel Land And The Modern Painters' album launch at the Roadhouse in November and Air Cav's Christmas show at the Unitarian Chapel are both worthy of note - both promoted by the bands themselves, too - as is the November night both bands played at Birmingham's excellent Sound Of Confusion session. But some nights transcend the mere description as a gig. And this was one of those.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS (in chronological order only)...
Magazine, Manchester Academy 1 (14th and 17th February)
It's not often you see a large number of large middle aged men in tears, at least not outside of sporting events, but for two nights in February that was Manchester Academy. Here's what I wrote for MM at the time.
There's a long introduction, the graceful instrumental "The Thin Air" (of which you'd have thought they could have found a CD that didn't jump) seguing into the arch, disembodied voice of Howard Devoto, introducing the comeback along the boundary of fact and fiction whilst Barry Adamson, Noko (Devoto's one-time partmer in Luxuria, in place of John McGeoch who passed away a few years ago), John Doyle and Dave Formula - their very names part of the fabric of this city's musical heritage - slip onstage shadow like, beneath the wall-sized looming grimaces of the "Real Life" sleeve art; but if you're going to return after 28 years, I guess you earn the right to milk it a bit. The anticipation is tangible. And then on he bounds, your slightly sinister uncle in a carnation-pink suit jacket; already likened to Austin Powers' Dr.Evil by those who've been at the preceding London gigs and not without reason. Formula's Hammond sweeps into "The Light Pours Out Of Me" and the first words, after a generation away, are "Time flies... time crawls..." - it's been 28 years in which knowingly pompous, rather melodramatic black-humoured alternative pop has had several days in the sun and many more in the shade, and you realise how ahead of their time this band were. The Killers may or may not even know it but these songs were their ancestors and it's a remarkably contemporary sounding flavour of nostalgia.
Nostalgia it is, though. The front pit is enthusiastic if rather tame due to the age of the participants, and it's possible the date caused all manner of domestics - in front of us a bored looking woman tuts when hubby allows himself a little on-the-spot pogo and many more old fans have probably been forced to go for a "nice dinner". And it's exquisitely presented nostalgia - attendees of the London gigs tell us everything including Devoto's skewed between-song proclamations is being effectively played to a script. Yet this seems to work - Magazine always had a sort of theatrical quality that stood out from their sweaty punk contemporaries. That backdrop; Barry Adamson's shiny shirt and fob-chained waistcoat; the way the Mary Quant-a-like singer from support band Ipso Facto - also providing backing vocals for the headliners - sits on a chair leafing through a newspaper in between her lines. It's there when Devoto narrates oddball spoken-word B-side "The Book", lit by a single blue spotlight, and in the way his eyes narrow as he sings the "I am an insect" line from "A Song From Under The Floorboards". One of Manchester's greatest ever singles, tonight it sees hard looking 40something men's eyes moisten. And, yes, that's why this works.
These are still, three decades on, absolutely incredible songs."You Never Knew Me" reminds us the band were quite capable of writing brilliant mainstream pop; "Permafrost" - Dave Formula's synth is breathtaking here - reminds us they did disturbing bleakness better than the copious number of contemporaries and followers doing so; main set closer "Shot By Both Sides" reminds us they did punk better than most punk bands too. The applause goes on and on and on; we know there'll be an encore because it's in the script but nobody could doubt it was earned - it's a crowd-pleasing package of "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)", "Motorcade" and "I Love You You Big Dummy". And then the five elder statesmen - and all looking pretty well for it, I might add - take a bow and depart. Noko almost manages a smile - he, after all, had the toughest job as the non-original stepping into McGeoch's not inconsiderably sized shoes, but the general consensus is that he very much did the job. They all did. We're going again on Tuesday, even though we know the script now...
Exit Calm, Barnsley Polish Club (1st May)
Barnsley. BARNSLEY. What are you thinking? The miners' strike? That run of amusing Cup upsets a couple of years back? Grim northern stereotypes? Yeah, yeah, well you mark my words, if things carry on at the rate they have in 2009 then by the end of 2010 the town will be synonymous with one thing: one of the biggest live bands in the country. After building a fanbase over a couple of years, on the 1st May we came from far and wide for that ever-important event for any up and coming band from outside of the big cities: the hometown headliner. From my own blog:
Exit Calm are soon to set off on a national tour supporting The Sunshine Underground, and with many dates sold out before they confirmed a few fans suggested the band did a little warm-up date. Being affable chaps, they agreed; a hometown show was mooted, and with Barnsley not exactly being overburdened with decent venues since the closure of Carters No.7 (Air Cav were one of the last bands to play there but it's not our fault, I checked) someone came up with the exceptional idea of having it in the local Polish club. It's already shaping up to be quite an event before a note has been struck. People have travelled up from London and further south, Jam and Pedro have flown in from Spain; pretty much everyone who's been a part of the band's story so far is there. There's nothing like a proper away crew party; old friends greeting each other with hugs and beer (the frighteningly fizzy Lech bringing back memories of last year's visit to Poland) and others meeting for the first time. I briefly think back to British Sea Power's legendary gig at Cargo, five years ago this very week, and in a way this feels like that. There are a couple of support bands, but I'm too busy catching up with people I don't see half often enough.
Fittingly, the band pull out one of their greatest ever performances. Opening track "Hearts And Minds" seems to be regarded by many of the regulars (myself included) as their finest musical moment to date, and tonight's rendition is nothing short of spectacular - which might have left people wondering where they could go from there, had anyone touched down for long enough to wonder. We don't get the chance. They're straight off into the epic "We're On Our Own" - AKA one of those "Greatest Spiritualized Songs Spiritualized Never Wrote" moments. I'm standing right in front of bassist Simon Lindley, whose rolling rhythms are the band's secret weapon and foundation stone, and I've rarely seen anyone so completely absorbed in the music they're creating. The euphoria doesn't let up for the whole set; it's one of those classic feedback loop things with the band playing harder and harder as the delighted crowd shout back every word to them in between outbreaks of air-drumming and shoulder-hoisting; I find myself on the floor at one point due to a combination of said very reasonably priced Polish beverages and the sheer enthusiasm of those around me but I'm soon pulled to my feet and back into it. And later, as a handful of us sit in a takewaway trying to work out where we are and how far it is back to our various accommodation, we already know we've been at one of those gigs that people wil talk about in years to come.
Doves, Leeds Academy (8th May)
I've already written about what a delight it was to see the longst serving of my favourite bands come up with the goods on album number four. Live, they were on brilliant form all six times I saw them in 2009, from one of their first gigs back on the road at Coventry Kasbah (which is where this picture came from, as I forgot to take a camera to Leeds) to the heroic GMex in December via a wonderful summer evening in Delamere Forest. This one, though, was a cut above even those. I had not even originaly intended to go; I was busy elsewhere on the night they should have played a sold-out Leeds Academy, but when the date was postponed due to a band member's illness there were a few ticket returns and I bagged a couple.
Leeds O2 Academy, to give it its full title, is what used to be Leeds Town And Country. It reopened in late 2007 under the Academy brand (Carling, as was) and after visiting the chain's pretty nondescript venues in Sheffield, Birmingham and Liverpool we're pleasantly surprised as soon as we walk into the place. According to Wikipedia the building was originally opened in 1885 by Prince Albert and is a grade I listed gothic building; known originally as the Coliseum it hosted many different events during the early 20th century such as political meetings and circus shows, and then between the 1930s and 1990s the building accommodated a cinema, television studio and bingo hall. According to me it looks like a church, with lovely exposed brickwork around the high balcony. And it's got an excellent sound system. Which is completely wasted on the stodgy efforts of tour support Malakai - even a concerted effort to miss them by getting a later train than we normally would for a gig in Leeds has failed, and we end up seeing three songs, which is three more than anyone should have to. It's worth it though to get a decent front spot for Doves; I hadn't expected this, so didn't have a camera on me - but you know what they look like anyway...
It starts with a jetplane flying over; on the projection screen and from the speakers; the audio-visual aspect of Doves gigs is often overlooked but this is right up there with the now legendary "popping next door to the pub" film from Apollo gigs past, and the band walk on to massive cheers and launch into "Jetstream" as the noise dies down; simple but sublime. "Snowden" sounds massive and I have to admit these days to finding many things to love about the "Some Cities" album which I did not at the time of release; the band look happy, the crowd are enthusiastic without being stupid about it... and then four or five tracks in an exceptional version of "Pounding" sends the whole thing up another level or two, from which it never comes down. Even songs that never did much for me before are hitting the spot - "Ambition" is gorgeous, fragile and moving. And the encore is something else. Down in the front ranks we've found ourselves in a lively bit of Friday night three-beers-merry jumping about and the song - still probably the greatest, most assertive second-album-trailer single there ever was - is immense. We don't want it to end. They don't want to stop. Come on... yes, traditionally "Space Face" is just for Manchester and special occasions, but what's this if it's not special? And so the tour is seen out with a bang; by the time the train home's passed Dewsbury I'm thanking whoever or whatever it was made a band member ill two weeks ago and making the sort of rash-sounding statement that here, four days later, I'm prepared to stand by: that was the best Doves gig I have seen in over six years, and for a band that's been going for twice that long (or three times that if you count Sub Sub days) I can't tell you how astonishing and delightful it is to be able to write that.
Daniel Land And The Modern Painters, The Lucid Dream, Yucatan, Chorlton Abode (6th June)
I know I don't usually allow bands a second slot in my end-of-year reviews, but this was no ordinary night. The Canteen ran for most of 2008 giving Chorlton free live music every Saturday night and for this alone deserves recognition, but at the height of summer they pulled out something quite remarkable with a line-up any of the "premium" shoegaze/space nights would have been immensely proud of. As a free entry gig I am under no obligation to review for MM, but it would have seemed rather ungrateful not to. The picture is (I think) of Yucatan, but seems to sum up the whole evening quite well...
The sound of violins slips across the noisy bar like birds taking flight; guitars follow; gradually drinks are put down on tables, conversations stop. Yucatan have that effect. Somewhere between early Spiritualized and Sigur Ros, they have a strange otherworldliness about them, an icy expansive beauty that makes it almost impossible to describe without tumbling into post-rock cliche. They come from a place where the sky goes on for ever, both musically and indeed physically - as their Myspace claims, "Cwm Llwm, Antarctica". It's actually rather closer to home, in the middle of Denbighshire, but you sort of know what they mean. Leader Dilwyn Llwyd, an almost elfin character in a bobble hat which isn't removed all night, could easily pass for Icelandic; his hushed Welsh vocals like some secret language half heard on the breeze. And then it all builds, drums gather pace across washes of keyboard and those sweeping violins, like Hope Of The States at their most majestic and anthemic. Each track has a soul of its own, and the last is nothing short of magnificent. Everyone from the bar staff to my mate's 68-year-old mum is under their incredible spell, and you wonder how the hell such an outstanding band have not been more widely heard.
By this point there are people sitting on the floor, oil wheel projections cutting across the smoke machine - have we somehow transported back to a Spacemen 3 gig in the late 80s? It's been a year since we first caught The Lucid Dream's tentative early steps at Night & Day; hailing from Carlisle and barely six gigs old there was already something about them that said this band is special - and how far they have come since then. Supports with Spectrum must have had Sonic Boom wondering if he was on a particularly intense out-of-body flashback, because close your eyes and this could indeed be that early Spacemen gig. Not to say there's any plagiarism as such; more a feeling that they have come from the same headspace, growing up in a forgotten town with a pile of 13th Floor Elevators and Velvet Underground records and discovering the euphoria that comes from playing one chord for longer than conventional wisdom would recommend. We suspect it would actually not be phyiscally possible to have more reverb on the vocal; it's like listening to lost 1969 garage classics through a flotation tank.
We've had the orchestral majesty and the spaced out rock'n'roll; time for the third point on the dreamsonic triangle - the Supermassive Effects Pile-Up. A couple of miles down the road from here, in an old cottage with fortuitously thick walls, Daniel Land And The Modern Painters are crafting what looks like being one of Manchester's albums of the year; tonight they'll be showcasing it in full. Sonic Cathedral single - in more ways than one - "Within The Boundaries" is their opening missive, like Slowdive powered by a jet engine its magic ingredient is the glorious bridge between the instrumental track and the few lines of vocal towards the end; if this is how it starts then it sets the standards pretty high. Personal circumstances have seen the band trimmed to a five piece at many recent gigs; this however is the full-blooded six-strong line-up, with powerhouse Marcus Mayes and craftsman Jason Magee alternating on the drums, the other adding percussion, and I'm thinking what if one day this band could afford two drum kits - they'd be hard pushed to fit them in here though. What Abode might lack in space however is more than made up for in its sound quality; every track sounds shimmeringly beautiful tonight, and the cluster of people sitting on the floor are soaked in it.
God only knows what someone walking in off the street, perhaps after a few pints and a kebab, just looking for a bar with a late licence, would think right now. "This is a shoegaze song" says Daniel at one point - um, as opposed to what?? As one track bleeds beautifully into the next - punctuated only by guitarist Graeme Meikle - who has possibly been drinking - throwing in the odd 80s cheese-metal riff between songs (who said shoegazers were humourless?) it slips way past midnight, the bar rings for last orders, and still the crowd is entranced; then as the last track descends into a single euphoric wave that lasts - I don't know, three, five, ten minutes? people are on their feet, arms aloft and around each other. This is likely to be the last Manchester gig for the band until November, by which time that album should be in your hands - and on the strength of tonight's preview, it looks like it's going to be something pretty special. And let's just say this again - this gig was free to get in. You almost feel like you stole something.
Kraftwerk, Manchester Velodrome (2nd July)
Several million years into their career Kraftwerk - now reduced to just one original member - hit upon the great idea of playing venues that reflected their album themes. A power station, a factory, and on the opening night of Manchester International Festival, in homage to their "Tour De France" era and a lifelong love of cycling, they came to the Velodrome with some very special guests. This is from my blog.
It doesn't, we all agree quite early on, matter that much that when the four uniformed members of the veteran ensemble take to the stage to their familiar backdrop and signature tune "Man-Machine" there's only Ralf Hutter left of the foursome who made the album. Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur are many years adrift - the latter leaving us with one of the greatest and funniest rock autobiographies I've ever read (this will be the first of two book recommendations in this blog; I'm going all multimedia!) - whilst long-serving founder Florian Schneider finally called it quits a year or so back to be replaced in the live line-up by the band's lighting technician. There's some cliche about German efficiency there.
There's not exactly been a great deal of new music coming out of Kling Klang Studios in the past decade or two either, and those classic albums are so well known it feels basically like a Greatest Hits set which is absolutely fine. This is the band who influenced the music of our city at least as much as any other; most of the golden-age line-up of Factory Records and our early adoption of techno, right up to present day bands such as The Whip and Delphic who play live electronic music of substance. And they've got a trick or two up their meticulously-pressed sleeves as well... bloody hell, it's only the medal-winning British Olympic cycling team! They do a few laps during "Tour De France", causing me to text my cycling-obsessed sister who's actually ridden here herself - probably the first time since we were giggling over Duran Duran ages ten and six that our passions have collided. At the end Hutter introduces the team "and their German coach" - deadpan as hell. Elsewhere "Autobahn" sounds like a vocoder barbershop quartet, "Neon Lights"is as evocatve of a late night city as anything you'll hear, and "The Model" an exercise in icy beauty. Someone comments it's much the same set he saw at the Free Trade Hall in 1981, but the music is timeless.
The 3D glasses come with instructions that they should be used at 9.30pm, but things got off to a late start and it's actually 9.51pm when the band return for either a second set or extended encore. And... fucking hell! Radiation symbols and waves flicker in the ether to the beatiful "Radioactivity", whilst "Vitamin" sees tablets effervesce in glasses of water somewhere in mid-air whilst two-colour capsules float down from the sky and disappear just above the heads of the people about three rows in front of us. It doesn't feel like a gig, but then it doesn't really feel like anything familiar. And if the aim of the Manchester International Festival is to push boundaries, then this is a pretty good start.
British Sea Power: Port Eliot Festival, Cornwall; Tunbridge Wells High Rocks Inn and London Regents Park (25th July and 2nd & 16th August)
Still probably the best consistently astounding live band in the country, British Sea Power didn't tour in the regular sense in 2009, appearing instead at a variety of offbeat festivals and special events, some of their own creation. I saw them on about 10 consecutive weekends in the summer, and wouldn't really want to be pushed to choose between three such remarkable and unique nights out. This, in case you were wondering, is why we do this.
PORT ELIOT
This is no ordinary festival. This, my friends, is Port Eliot Festival, a literary affair where poetry and readings are more the order of the day than amplified popular music; the majority of the audience look like teachers and their families, and the security presence is unobtrusive as it is largely unnecessary. Following great afternoon sets from Neil Halstead and Edwyn Collins, we are not sure what the expect from British Sea Power - they were billed as playing a soundtrack to "Winged Migration" but there doesn't appear to be a screen in the tent they're playing in; earlier in the evening we'd run into Scott who told us "I think we're going to do some... songs." This would probably be a good idea.
And what songs! Scott starts by picking up a bass, which in itself is a sign of something a bit different - few BSP gigs start fronted by Neil, and it's rare live outings for "The Smallest Church in Sussex" and "The Land Beyond" which are first on the list, followed by their cover of "Come Wander with Me", the only sung track on the recent "Man of Aran" album. A glorious gift to the ten of us regulars who have made the trip and a relatively gentle start for the majority of the crowd who are probably not as familiar with the band's work anyway and wouldn't know a B-side from a single. But then it's all guns blazing into "Remember Me" and - you can't start a moshpit at a literary festival... can you? We have a go. It's not hugely successful, although a few people near us who are indeed seeing the band for the first time look like they're enjoying the set. After that it's pretty much business as usual, although the ever developing nature of some of the older songs is very apparent tonight - the odd Krautrock middle section that "Spirit Of St Louis" has acquired over the past couple of years actually ends up in dub bass territory tonight, whilst the euphoric coda of "Carrion" has pretty much mutated into "Another Girl Another Planet" to the point where you can actually sing the last verse of the latter along to it and it ends at the right time. "Waving Flags" is an odd choice as the band are lacking keyboard and cornet man Phil, off on his honeymoon, but Noble asks the crowd to sing the absent sampled choir part - "just follow Geordie Mark". Mark has been drinking all day, and nobody could follow him if they tried, but it was worth a shot I suppose. And "Lately", the much-maligned opus with which even the most devoted fans got rather bored a few years back when it ended every single gig, sounds fragile and beautiful tonight as its ending does deranged. How Mark manages to get covered in duct tape is completely beyond me, but I'm not surprised to hear that Noble was involved. It's my favourite BSP set for at least a year, possibly more - and well worth the ridiculous effort involved to get here.
HIGH ROCKS
Just outside Tunbridge Wells is a beautiful English country lane of the sort we urbanites sometimes forget even exists any more, with every shade of green picked out in the warm afternoon sun. The authentically preserved steam train that runs from the town down to the Inn rattles past, and on it is Geordie Mark, one of our regulars. I'll let him take up the story for a minute: "As the greenery flashed past the window I was taken right back in time on the short journey, and as we slowed down approaching High Rocks I could hear people chattering and I saw fingers pointing at a small gathering on a trianglibout (editor's note: presumably a creative Geordie word for a traffic island in the middle of a T-junction). "Ooh they must be filming something" one person said. "They've got some birds there as well! Can't be Harry Potter can it?". At this point I recognised a few smiling faces looking toward the train, small sherry glass in one hand, samosa in the other..."
Let me explain. Hardcore BSP regulars Mark (another one) and Yaz - well over 300 gigs between them - are celebrating their 22nd wedding anniversary. On a traffic island. Two plastic decoy birds are perched on the roadsign; there are trestle tables with a selection of fine sherries, a cheeseboard, plates of Yaz's home-made samosas (which are better than any I've eaten in any restaurant or takeaway) and an I-pod docked into a speaker blasting out old-school classics such as The Skids' "Into The Valley" and SLF's "Alternative Ulster". There, that makes a lot more sense, doesn't it? It does to us.
British Sea Power have sound problems, technical problems, you name it - but still manage to put in a top level performance. There's one new song in the set, with a working title of "7/4" which is the time signature for bits of it - erk, they really have gone prog/post-rock haven't they!? Well no, it's more of a post-punk-ish kind of thing. The other bit everyone is talking about for days afterwards is one of those things that, well, this is how online mag http://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk reported it and I think I'll let them tell the tale from the outside, so to speak... "There are many reasons that British Sea Power have raised the bar in providing novel and vivifying experiences for their fans, but halfway through a set in a barn deep in Kent countryside, my admiration for them reached its latest zenith. An interlude like this has never taken place anywhere, I'm sure of it. Whilst sticksman Woody tends to mending his ailing snaredrum, his bandmates are keen to invite an audibly drunk, ruddy, stout Geordie fan familiar to them to clamber up on stage. After grabbing the mic to loudly tell everyone off for not jumping up and down, he launches into an oompah-style chant of 'Joom oop and down everybody! Jump oop and down!', whilst the band back him with some jaunty improvised guitar. The Geordie guy calls the shots about when to end the song. 'He used to be in Cypress Hill,' announces Noble. This must be seen for the full beauty to take effect - the band's faces were a picture of dropped jaws and wide laughing yet overwhelmed eyes. Personally, I had to wipe away tears of pure laughter."
You're not the only one, mate. Well done Mark. You will never be allowed to forget this... The band recover to finish their set, and a lively moshpit develops whose average age is considerably older than me. The ending is suitably chaotic, and Scott defies all common sense and health and safety concerns by taking a liking to one of the beams. It has the feel of one of those raucously insane gigs from the early days, only with a set drawing the best from across their career - what more could you ask for for your Sherry And Samosas Wedding Anniversary? Or indeed for any Sunday afternoon.
REGENTS PARK
This evening we will be entertained in the extremely bizarre surroundings of Regents Park Open Air Theatre. Bizarre, because it does exactly what it says on the tin: it's a permanent stage with semicircular stalls seating and a foyer bar, but it's in the open air. It does not usually play host to rock bands and their fans. We, however, are of course a very civilised bunch and thus start the festivities with a picnic. Yep - for the second time in three weekends. Only this time the soundtrack is provided not by a boom-box but by British Sea Power themselves soundchecking, we've got sherry and cheese and olives, both BSP drummer Woody and one of the regular fans have brought their babies along, and it really is like some sort of family gathering. A good few of us make it inside for the second support, though, because after their astonishing set at last October's Roundhouse gig we're looking forward to seeing them again and they don't exactly get outside of the capital much...
It's the London Bulgarian Choir! Once again they are amazing, their haunting and eerie tones rather at odds with the sometimes rather bawdy subject matter - no, I haven't suddenly learnt Bulgarian; their leader explains each song, in the course of which we learn the wonderful new euphemism "planting the pepper", which means exactly what you think it does.
The stage is set - well, not exactly short of foliage round here. And as with pretty much every gig in this astonishing summer season, British Sea Power are on fire. As befits the more sedate atmosphere, they go with the "Polite Version" opening salvo - as tried and tested at Port Eliot - of Hamilton's haunting "Smallest Church In Sussex" and the viola-led "Land Beyond", after which it feels a bit strange to be seated for "Lights Out" - and it's just not going to last. It's not so much a question of whether it's going to go off as when, and the opening chords to "Remember Me" are the not especially surprising catalyst. Legendary regular fan Scottish Bill, a man made entirely of white hair and red wine, is up and dancing. Two or three of us follow. Then some more. The security look nervous, but figure there's not much they can do so long as nobody's actually causing trouble. Alfie and I look at each other, and at the handy little set of steps up to the side of the stage, and nothing needs to be said.
The band dish out a perfect set, with the back stairs of the stage often filled by the choir adding their voices ; this means a rare outing for the debut album opener "Men Together Today" as well as a brilliantly augmented "No Lucifer" during which the idea of a score of Bulgarians chanting an old wrestling refrain ("Easy! Easy!") doesn't sound half as bizarre as it does writing it down. They depart after a beautiful version of the shoegazey instrumental "Great Skua", but it's early and nobody's clearing anything away, and anyway, they usually pull out something pretty special for the encore at their showcase gigs. Yep - welcome back to seven foot bear Ursine Ultra, with bog roll. The choir are back for "All In It", and then Woody pounds that bass drum four to the floor and we know it's going to go crazy. Alfie and I have edged out to the side, we smile at twelve year old Archie, a veteran of pretty much every all-ages gig the band have played since the age of five; his dad nods back at us as if to say "You go first, we'll be right behind you". Band and bear are throwing branches into the crowd as fast as the bouncers can snatch them back, and when the fabled beast (containing, on this occasion, TV actor Matthew Horne) provides a distraction by almost lurching right off the centre of the stage...The speed with which we are literally thrown from the stage and wrestled to the floor rather puts Archie and his dad off following suit, but unlike Bill we manage to avoid ejection from the venue and rejoing the happy branch-waving hordes down the front. The bouncers just look really pissed off. I'm guessing they don't get that kind of thing at their Shakespeare plays. We all walk out of there grinning from ear to ear knowing the greatest live guitar band in the world have pulled it off again.
Wooden Shjips + GNOD, Salford Islington Mill (20th August)
With pretty much all my regular favourites on blistering form this year, is there actually any room for anyone else in this list? Of course there is. Just a few days after Regents Park we're at what could possibly be the socio-geographical opposite - an old mill in the near no-mans-land end of central Salford. I'm on MM duty for this one which means staying relatively sober, but by the end of it feel like I've had a truckload of something or other...
Just two bands on? That's not like Wotgodforgot... ah, yeah, but thing is both of them are quite capable of playing for, oh, anything up to about three days. If our last visit to our longtime favourite live club night was all about abstract sound sculpture ("Whalesong Through a Pitchshifter", Live Reviews, 23rd July) then this one's all about psychedelia. And obviously, being Wotgodforgot we're not talking pretty boys in paisley shirts with a Syd Barrett record kind of psychedelia, no, this is your full-on whoah-I-think-the-walls-are-liquifying wig-out sort of psychedelia.
GNOD are, of course, Wotgodforgot veterans. We first saw them at one of WGF's earliest forays back in the Star & Garter where they basically made us feel like we'd done loads and loads of drugs. We hadn't. And they've done much the same many times since, rarely repeating themselves. Tonight's trip into GNODworld is one of their best yet. It starts as a sort of amorphous mass of sounds, wibbling analogue keyboards, rattles of drums and handbells, chant-like mantras, until gradually things start emerging like early life-forms from the primordial soup - a rumble of deep dub bass, a heavy beat, and we're off. And instantly transported into some underground Krautrock "happening", where we will be staying for the rest of the evening. One of them wanders around the space in front of the growing crowd, not so much singing as preaching echoey vocal vibes a la Damo Suzuki and occasionally blowing into a melodica as the trip gathers pace; fifteen minutes or so in there's a brief stop for air before we're plunged back into a throbbing Spacemen 3 dream. They're off after half an hour. What? Ah well, the day GNOD get predictable is the day they're not GNOD any more...
This is probably Wotgodforgot's biggest crowd to date, and the reason is a very rare visit to these shores by Wooden Shjips. Hailing from San Francisco they exist on the outer edge of the American spacehead scene, releasing albums with just five or six tracks of bubbling psych-drone; live, however, they're a whole lot... louder. The ingredients are simple: the most basic drum kit ever (bass, snare, cymbals, no frills) hammers out hypnotic primitive rhythms; the guitar and bass change chords only when absolutely necessary (and rarely more than a couple of times in any given track). The organ (wrapped, for some reason - in tinfoil) sounds like the wind through a selection of interesting rock formations, and the vocals sort of drift over the top of it all from behind a badger-stripe beard. Actually it's something of a surprise that two of them don't have beards.
On paper it doesn't sound like much, but at blisteringly loud volume it permeates every pore. It's like they've found some secret recipe for intoxication by sound alone and then doubled all the quantities. You'd swear the room was full of hash smoke and incense clouds. My eyes have gone out of focus. My brain's gone out of focus. My ears are going to tell me off in the morning. People are dancing at the front, standing on the furniture at the back. I look around and see the same expression reflected from everywhere; entranced euphoria. And as they reach a climax with a "We Ask You To Ride" that makes the recorded version sound like a quiet Sunday stroll in the park they can feel it too; this band who are sometimes accused of being a little apathetic live are anything but. The crowd demand them back and they're clearly delighted to comply; by the sound when they finally finish they could have kept them there for a good while longer.
I Like Trains, Leeds Cockpit (16th October)
Dropped by their label and back in day jobs, I Like Trains are not a band to give up that easily. If last year's Christmas Tree Ship EP hinted at an expanding sound, then October's tour showed them at the top of their game. Liverpool on the Wednesday was pretty good; Manchester on the Thursday excellent (again, the picture's from that gig rather than the one I'm writing about, as Mancunians wil instantly recognise from Deaf Institute's ridiculous wallpaper), and with In The City just a day or two away it seemed almost wrong to bugger off to Leeds but I needed one more...
Friday night sees the band return home to Leeds Cockpit. I didn't actually buy a ticket as I really didn't know if I was going to be able to go - or indeed if I was going to want to do three in a row. I've always liked the band but they've never been one of those where I feel the urge to go all over watching them; this isn't all over, really, though, it's a quick train ride away and after the last two nights I very much do and am so glad it was still possible to get one on the door... turns out to be the right decision, as if Liverpool was good and Manchester great then this turns out to be the best ILT gig I've seen in a very long time and continues the most exciting run of form I've seen them on since maybe 2006. It's been much the same over the three nights, the odd change of order, but tonight I don't know if it's the hometown vibe or just that they are really getting into their stride, but everythig sounds perfect. "Sea of Regrets" is astonishingly good, but it would be a tough call between that and "Father's Son" as my pick of the "new" (as in post-album) stuff; to be honest though it's all pretty immense and I really don't want it to end.
Bo Ningen + Asakusa Jinta, Manchester TV21 (20th October)
Best show of In The City? Um, some local heroes maybe? Some hotly tipped young firebrands? Truth be told ITC09 wasn't a vintage year, but on the final night, at the ridiculously early hour of 6.30pm in a basement at the far end of the Northern Quarter near the bus depot, I'm about to have my brain re-wired...
Right, so there's no official Japanese showcase this year, but I seem to have found the unofficial one. Brilliant! It's brought to us by all-ages promoters XOX (leave your drinks at the door) down at TV21 and, well, there's two Japanese bands in a row so I suppose it sort of counts.
We first encountered Bo Ningen at this September at the ultra-hip Offset festival - I'd like to say "saw them" but in reality I could barely poke my head inside the overstuffed tent. This excuses me having thought hyperactive, helium-yelping singer/bassist Taigen was a girl - which here in his skinny bare-chested glory he clearly isn't, although he does have a girl's haircut. Two, in fact, simultaneously - a pretty 60s fringe and bob at the front and luxuriantly long and straight tresses at the back. Guitarists Kohhei and Yuki and drummer Mon-chan have equally long, straight hair and some of them appear to be wearing 1970s pyjamas; they're like four baby Damo Suzukis and the noise they make is every bit as insane. Blisteringly loud guitars do prog, post-rock and metal often within the space of one song, whilst Mon-chan just about steals this year's Animal From The Muppets Award For Drummer Insanity (beating yesterday's Heels Catch Fire into a distant second place) as he appears to be drumming with his head as much as any sticks or accessories. The other three bounce off the amps and pillars and each other as Taigen alternates between Damo-esque rambles and frenzied punk attacks; each track is like a brilliant swirling full-on psychedelic wig-out compressed into a few minutes and with everything turned up to 11. As is often the case with international showcases there's a decent ex-pat contingent down watching them and they're going crazy too, whilst the bloke standing next to me just appears to have his eyes out on stalks for the entire thing. It later transpires he is Ezra Bang whose band's on later and is possibly wondering how the hell they're going to follow this. By the end of the set Taigen is crouching with his legs splayed simulating sex with his bass and Kohhei and Yuki are throwing themselves and their guitars into the drumkit while Mon-chan continues battering it and them, until they all fall over and lie there grinning. Set of the weekend, no contest.
I've long had a theory that there's something about the highly ordered and reguated nature of Japanese society which makes all bands from over there do whatever it is they do about 30 times more intensely than tneir Western counterparts. Japanese punks have the tallest, most colourful Mohicans; indie bands the tightest blackest jeans and most perfect fringes; rappers the biggest gold chains and baggiest sportswear; metallers the most piercings and wildest tattoos... and what happens next makes Bo Ningen look relatively sane.
They're called Asakusa Jinta and there's a raspberry-haired girl blowing a tenor sax whilst pogoing, an older lad with a moustache and a double-neck guitar; others have a trumpet, electric double bass and large curly horn thing respectively (as regular MM readers will know, I've never been any good at identifying brass instruments). In the tiny space in front of the stage there are two tiny Japanese girls trying to start a ska knees-up moshpit. Oh yeah, the music? Just your average everyday mixture of Glenn Miller big band, Bad Manners lunatic ska, a military parade, cartoon punk and soul revue. Proportions of the above vary from one track to the next, although it's hard to keep up as the whole lot is administered at roughly 300 miles an hour. They do something that sounds like "In The Mood" but not quite, and raspberry haired girl is leading the crowd in a sort of one-potato-two-potato hand dance. They do something that vaguely resembles a rocket-powered Can-Can and several of the end up in the audience. And the last of my brain, the bit Bo Ningen didn't melt, holds up a little white flag.
Later I look them up online and discover that "Their base is Asakusa, Tokyo's old downtown, an area reminiscent of traditional Japan. They love this town and people who live there love the band as they are known as a marching band playing on the shopping streets or for weeklong parades." I don't think there's a lot more to be said about this, really. Just try and hold that image.
Worriedaboutsatan, (with Daniel Land And The Modern Painters, Exit Calm, 93millionmilesfromthesun and more), Nottingham Bunkers Hill (25th October).
Not content with hosting Dot To Dot in May, October sees Nottingham's sort of edgier all-day venue-hop, the Hockley Hustle. Hockley being the road most of the venues are on. Not Hockley Road or anything, just Hockley. The bargain-tastic £10 ticket (£7.50 if you bought it far enough ahead) allows access to 20 different venues, where the discerning music fan could experience such delights as Spam Chop, Pee Wee's Funk Salad, You're Smiling Now But We'll All Turn Into Demons, Ocean Bottom Nightmare, the Yeah I'll Play It Later DJs and - our favourite - Arse Full Of Chips. The variety of genres on offer is far greater than these all-dayers usually afford: indie, drum'n'bass, dubstep, samba, hip-hop, rock/metal and whatever the hell Arse Full Of Chips do (we guess at grotty pub punk) and you have to hand it to them for co-ordinating such a mammoth task - but I had quite enough venue-hopping during In The City. At the top end of Hockley, DrownedInSound have colonised a nice pub called Bunker's Hill, the sort of place that offers a 15p discount on its real ales to CAMRA members, and stuffed it full of shoegaze and space-rock of various sub-genres.
(Other bands played well, sure, but it was the Yorkshire duo who really stepped up a gear or two here...)
...next, Worriedaboutsatan. With the clocks having gone back last night, even their relatively early slot sees darkness outside - and inside, too, as the rather sweetly unassuming looking pair are lit by just their regular backdrop of Géla Babluani's "13 Tzameti" plus a single swinging bare lightbulb which seems oddly fitting. Now I always knew they were good, but sometimes they are so much more and tonight seems like one of those nights. You think Fuck Buttons' introsuction of techno to their post-prog recipes was a good idea? These guys did it first. Only they threw in a third dimension, too; the creepy, Burial-esque dark end of dubstep. During their continuous piece guitars are bowed and fed through boxes until they don't sound like guitars any more, waves of synth rise and fall, and a thousand little clicks and pops fill the spaces. They finish, and at first there's silence. Then applause. "More!" shouts someone. They've had their 30 minutes, but it's not like they've a drumkit to strip before the next band... the shouts are growing now. This may be their first ever encore. It's a piece of deep fluid techno, like Ulrich Schnauss in dancefloor mode. It's brilliant.
Maps, Manchester Warehouse Project / Southampton Joiners / Brighton Digital (2rd, 25th, 30th October)
In 2009 I saw Maps live more than any other band except Air Cav - 19 times each - and frankly there weren't many I didn't thoroughly enjoy. After a handful of promising dates in May with Serafina Steer on keyboards, Maps 2009 pared down to the crackshot duo of mainman James Chapman and wild-eyed Danish techno DJ August Jakobsen, cranked eveything up to 11 and proved once and for all that you don't need guitars, bass or drums to play a blistering live set. October saw three brilliant examples of such.
MANCHESTER
Once inside we're pleasantly surprised that the drinks prices aren't as colossal as they could probably have got away with, and the unadorned arches do give the place a very Hacienda-like feel. By the time we've had chance to check out the other rooms - and the festival-like Portaloo compound (in which much later on I will open the door of an unlocked cubicle and interrupt two rather pilled-up looking girls mid sexual act; my male companions are all keen to know exactly which cubicle, for some reason...) - it's time for Maps.
This is how Maps should be seen and heard. Not in the indie clubs and pub upstairs rooms that comprise most of the rest of the tour, not in the overly well-lit Deaf Institute, but in a proper rave atmosphere where people are actually dancing and strobes are bouncing off brick walls. Smoke billowing behind them, I swear "It Will Find You" has never sounded so perfect - and the thing about this crowd, too, is unlike the regular "indie" gig crowds we've seen elsewhere and doubtless will again as the week goes on, they don't give a shit that there are no guitars or bass or drums; they don't care that there's not a lot off the first album here; because a fair few of them probably have no idea who they're watching or less still care. They just know a fucking great thundering electro tune when they hear one, and when the end bit of "Papercuts" breaks into something Balearic there's a sea of hands in the air. More people pile in (the place is open til 5 but last entry's half eleven so a lot are coming in to beat the post-pub scramble) and feels like a full-on party now with James and August gleefully at the helm. August says something incomprehensible. "Um, he's Danish" explains James. I get the feeling this might become a tour in-joke. By the time they finish on a truly brickwork-trembling version of "Love Will Come" they basically own the place. Yeah, they should have been on later, shoul have had a longer set, but this was a half hour of euphoria of the very highest order. This band should be out there on the LCD / Soulwax circuit. This band was made to play in railway arches and warehouses and air raid shelters. This is one of the many reasons why I love them.
SOUTHAMPTON
OK, look, I do love Maps and I do love awaydaying but there was no way I was going to go all the way to Southampton. That would be silly. As such, a couple of weeks ago I checked TheTrainline in order that the extravagant prices charged by rail companies these days would be the final nail in that idea. (Un)fortunately, the cheapest available ticket was 15 quid and I'd bought it before the common sense bit of my brain had chance to intervene... Southampton is weird. I'm not sure I ever found the city centre. None of the roads on my Multimap print appear to exist in reality, Gadgetphone's SatNav has gone mental and refuses to believe I am not at Bristol Parkway railway station (the last place, I guess, I used it) and the locals polite but astonishingly useless at giving directions around their own city. I give up and get a taxi, and having located the venue settle in a nearby gay bar, on the grounds that it's the only pub in the close vicinity of Joiners that doesn't look like a stabbing waiting to happen.
It may not be a strobe-addled rave in an undergound car park but it's kind of space-age in a different way: by the time Maps walk onstage there is so much dry-ice billowing round the room all we see is two silhouettes working their banks of machines, in whatever lurid shade the spotlights decide. It slowly disperses to reveal our deliriously happy looking protagonists, still buzzing (and in one case possibly still actually up) from last night. This is the full-length set and it flows beautifully, travelling through space towards the euphoric climax and once again the slight worries of the summer, that audiences might not connect with the guitar-free format, are roundly dispelled. The inclusion of "You Don't Know Her Name" is a good idea - probably the closest thing to a hit from the first album's haul of great singles - but what strikes me is the fact that this beautiful sun-blazed song, my official Festival Anthem Of The Summer 2007 which I don't think I went a day without listening to from about May to September that year, is actually one of the lesser moments here. By the end people are dancing again and Southampton on a Saturday night doesn't seem too bad a place to be.
A couple of days later I'll visit a friend in Nottingham who used to live in Southampton a few years back. She confirms that I was correct in identifying at least one of the nearby pubs as scary. Working in the betting shop over the road, sometimes went in the pub after befriending some of the locals, including one nice polite chap... whom she eventually discovered had served 20 years for killing someone with a machete...
BRIGHTON
I didn't actually bother writing anything about Brighton, but suffice to say it was well worth a second trip to the south coast in under a week.
Fuck Buttons, Heaven (27th October)
So if you are following the chronology here, I left home early on the Saturday morning after the Warehouse Project; went to Southampton for Maps, back up to Nottingham Sunday for the Hockley thing, and back to London Monday for Maps again. It wasn't one of their best gigs and more frustratingly for me my trusty phone breathed its last. I am exhausted and wish I could go home, but I have another gig ticket in my pocket I don't want to waste, and I'm glad I didn't...
I dunno, you wait all your life for a pair of blokes with a load of cables and then three come along at once - tonight's is Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, collectively Fuck Buttons, and from the volume of the Andy Weatherall DJ set I can heard from said foyer while the staff faff about being really not very good at finding anyone's name on the door pick-up tickets list, they are going to be seriously bloody loud. Inside we're impressed with the quality of the sound system; loud it may be but clean as anything. The venue itself is beautiful, too.
When they eventually start (we're thinking they're actually getting too big now to be doing all their own cable-plugging-in in full view of the audience: if you can't trust roadies to do it maybe get a curtain?) the sound is spot on, "Surf Solar" alone feels like a joyride in a spaceship, and for the second time in two nights I witness people at a gig in London dancing! Lasers fire, strobes flicker and the duo do their trademark bouncing their heads up and down while facing each other across their control panel thing. Only occasionally do I have to do a double-take and wonder how the hell this peculiar band, two geeky looking boys seemingly weaned on the less melodic end of Krautrock, have got to be this successful? That they have can only be a good thing. I did a lot of my growing up in techno clubs and indeed to Andy Weatherall's beats; I think Fuck Buttons have made a great success of blending these sounds into their existing musical vocabulary and "Tarot Sport" is a great album (probably top five, even in this quite astonishing year for albums). But when they come back for an encore and that eerie bleakly repetitive drone cuts across the brickwork arch, accompanied at first by just a single green laser beam, this is when they are truly sublime. It is, of course, "Sweet Love For Planet Earth", one of the greatest tracks released this decade, and it still sounds like little else before or since. I shouldn't hold it against them that they've not quite equalled it yet.
OTHER GIGS WORTHY OF SOME RECOLLECTION...
The Tamborines, Notting Hill Arts Club (Jan)
Daniel Land And The Modern Painters, Caernarfon Morgan Lloyd (April)
My Bloody Valentine, Primavera Festival, Barcelona (May)
Pet Shop Boys, Manchester Apollo (June)
The Durutti Column, Manchester International Festival (July)
Orbital + Delphic, Manchester Academy 1 (September)
The Longcut, Manchester Academy 3 (October)
Maps + The Longcut (+ Remember Remember, Bronnt Industries Kapital, Talons, Bilge Pump and more), Oxford Jericho Tavern (October)
The Twilight Sad, Manchester Ruby Lounge (October)
Daniel Land And The Modern Painters, Manchester Roadhouse (November)
Brakes, Leeds The Well, November
Half Man Half Biscuit, Sheffield Boardwalk, December
Air Cav, Manchester Unitarian Chapel, December
All of which has thrown up a pretty large shortlist of contenders for the Band Of The Year. Previous incumbents made a good showing: Daniel Land And The Modern Painters (2008) came good with that album and their first headline tour; Maps (2007) should probably win on points whilst I Like Trains (2006) returned with new typesetting and their best material yet, although little of it's actually been recorded and released yet: album of the year 2010? We'll see. Meanwhile my hardiest of perennials British Sea Power continued to push boundaries in every direction. And Fuck Buttons and Worriedaboutsatan can have a tie for the Breakthrough Band title with both proving there was more to them than slightly silly names and interesting tables of stuff - but this year I'm going to break with tradition and award my personal honours not to a new band who exploded onto the scene, but to a much older one whose return to form was no less exciting....
BAND OF THE YEAR 2009: DOVES
My life as a band: teenage love for Manchester's 80s indie greats; young adulthood Madchester-raved out, the long twentysomething hangover nineties, then as the millennium approaches a last mad surge of youth. And we're still here. After a handful of beautiful ten-inch singles at the tail end of the last century, Doves welcomed in 2000 with "Lost Souls", setting the bar high for all the rest of the decade's releases. I had no idea at this point that the 2000s would see such a revival in great music and my love of it; less still that the band who kicked it off would still be there at the end, one of the last bands I saw live in the closing stages of 2009.
The six times I have seen them this year have been among the best, whilst "Kingdom Of Rust" and its title track single made most younger cooler bands - and indeed their more critically acclaimed contemporaries Elbow - look pale in comparison. Mild disappointment at their Mercury list omission was soon replaced by relief that I didn't have to give a shit about it this year. Jimi, Jez and Andy: if it were up to me, it'd have been all yours.
Nearly done now, but before I go I just want to pay tribute to some people who are as crazy about music as I am, and for three years tried their best to introduce the rest of the world to it...
RIP CHANNEL M MUSIC
In May, Manchester and the alternative music loving world (at least those with the right satellite or cable boxes) lost somethig special. This is what I wrote at the time; occasionally we flick past the channel late at night and catch sight of a re-run of one of these shows, and wish they'd found a way to carry on...
When I say I don't do telly it's not strictly true, but breakfast news, two or three primetime series a year and whichever Formula 1 races I can be bothered to get out of bed for barely justifies the licence fee, never mind the extra people pay for satellite or cable. Mates of ours round the corner have got one or the other and going round for drinks often involves a flick through the 20 or 30 music channels available to them - and to coin a well-worn phrase, it says nothing to me about my life. "Come On Eileen" or "Take On Me" will usually be airing somewhere, as the golden age of 80s pop videos is celebrated by replaying them until any glimmer of nostalgic enjoyment has shrivelled and died. There will be some heavy rock, usually of the modern-day Kerrang variety impenetrable to anyone over the age of 18; twenty infinitesimally different r'n'b blingfests; and if you're really lucky some "modern" "indie" of the lowest common denominator about-as-indie-as-Tesco variety. You're certainly not likely to see live studio performances from the likes of Puressence, Maps, Holy Fuck, even under-the-radar acts like The Tides; interviews with bands yet to sign a record deal (or indeed local pretend music writers); local cult legend Frank Sidebottom interviewing fellow local cult legend Johnny Bramwell from I Am Kloot, or a full half hour of live gig footage from a band such as Air Cav. Or at least you wouldn't expect to - and yet all these things have indeed been broadcast in the past three years and for people in some areas of Manchester you didn't even need cable or satellite to see them; they came courtesy of Channel M Music, and if for the local music fan that seemed just too good to be true, then sadly it seems it was.
Last week Channel M announced large scale redundancies, following news that the channel - largely run out of Urbis on a budget considerably less than any one of those nonsense r'n'b blingfest videos - was losing a couple of hundred thousand pounds a month. Camera operators, technicians and admin staff are waiting to see which third of them survive to continue the channel's output of local news and sport programming, but for some of us it's the end of an era. Channel M Music is being wound up.
As well as knowing a few people who work(ed) there both in front of and behind the scenes I've been present at a good few live recordings and the almost maverick operation of the whole thing was nothing short of heartwarming. As a "talking head" guest once on City Centre Social I've seen first-hand how a one-hour music and chat show was recorded in its entirety - including live studio performances from three quite different bands - in under three hours. Which included the time needed to convert the one-room studio from newsroom to talk show set and back. They had to. The news was broadcast live at six and ten o'clock and City Centre Social got the time in between; the footage edited into an hour-long programme and broadcast within a couple of days. You watch episodes now though and they're no less professional than the magazine shows on far richer channels.
As a punter, I've seen some classic moments too. The experience of gliding up on the escalators through three floors of casino for those live sessions at Manchester235 never stopped being faintly surreal; the influx of a hundred typically scruffy Puressence fans into the well-dressed establishment almost felt like class war, even if the drinks prices did remind us of the old casino rule that the house always wins in the end - even if you're not actually playing the games. And Channel M music staff still remember Jimmy's standard requests for the lights to be turned down, until eventually someone reminded him it was for TV and they couldn't be. Later sessions within the Urbis HQ itself were no less bizarre, whether it was Frank Sidebottom's mini-gameshow The Squid Is Correct! or guest presenter Clint Boon getting Holy Fuck to record mini-electrosquelches to blank out the "fuck"s in his links for pre-watershed transmissions.
All good things must come to an end though, and yes, in the real world market forces are everything. I'm not about to write long tracts of semi-informed opinion about what could and should have been done to make the channel as a whole more commercially viable as I don't know all the facts. But from the point of view of a Manchester based music fan who knows first, second and third hand just how difficult it can be for a whole lot of amazing bands to get any form of media exposure at all, it'll be a gaping hole I hope someone has the guts and the budget to fill.
And that was 2009.
2010
Don't ask me. I'm never right about these things. Make a new year resolution to see at least one band a week or month (depending on your financial and logsitical ability) that you haven't seen before. Refuse to go to nights (and festivals) where "promoters" force bands to sell tickets upfront before they can play. Go and see a band you love in a strange town you've never visited before. Your new favourite band is out there somewhere and they might not be mine, but you won't know if you don't keep your eyes and ears open.
Love as ever to anyone who has been a part of this...
Cath Aubergine, 03/01/10
