A Good Hard Rogeting

Two points of interest about this review:

1) I don't know of whom I was thinking at the time, but having since heard a decent amount of The Sensational Alex harvey Band, I reckon they're pretty ace.
2) My ex-editor at BBC Oxford disliked this review so much he parodied it in an online review of Foxes! a few weeks later: "There was no chicanery here, it was just three bonhomie types all coeval physically and mentally. They peeled back the patina of the night and enticed the salmagundi of striplings to take their caution and defenestrate it. The lead singer may have been a hobbledehoy - there was something of that about the whole band - but I still found it daedal and not in the slightest rebarbative. Sorry if I've been a little fustian but they deserve the effort". Absolutely wonderful stuff, I was proper chuffed (although "bonhomie" isn't an adjective, and you can't really peel back a patina, if you're reading, Tim).

EMMY THE GREAT/FOXES!, My Analogue, Port Mahon, 6/06


It was once said of Clinic that they make the music that might spring up if The Beatles were wiped from the musical annals, reference points leaping from scratchy blues and lush Phil Spectorisms to Velvet Underground chug and new wave irascibility. A similar thing could be said of newish local act, Foxes! Their set is a rough mix of lindyhopping naivete, ebullient garage bash and no wave loft experiment as performed by local oddballs at some fleabitten village fete. In other words, hugely entertaining, if a tiny bit messy round the edges, with a surprising ear for a tune in evidence, too. John, Paul, George and who?

If ever there was a frustrating genre moniker, it’s “anti-folk”. Coined in earnest, we dare say, but generally read by gig-goers nowadays as “acoustic performer with minimal vocal ability and possible funny trousers”. Despite a couple of breathy quirks in the vocals we’re pleased to announce that London’s Emmy The Great is a long way from this deadening bunch, and is really a straightforward and enormously talented poetic singer-songwriter, who manages to keep a tired and parboiled Port audience in rapt attention. There are a few oddities in the subject matter, but the structure and delivery is as traditionally intimate as any old folkie’s. Imagine a cubist Michelle Shocked.

Admittedly, lines like “a million shadows will all become pregnant or diseased” are more intriguing than they are, err, good, but the majority of Emmy’s compositions are lucid and lovable, and she pulls off the golden songwriter’s trick of sounding completely original and universally relevant at the same time. It’s often patronising to call a performer “charming”, especially if they’re female, but Emmy’s charming set was less like a performance and more like a friendly musical chat in which one participant just happened to stand at the front of the room. Unlike The Sensational Alex Harvey Band or The Legendary Pete Fryer, Emmy The Great has picked up an adjective that we’re not arguing with at all.