Running Out Of Relevant Pun(t)s

More old Punt tales. 50ft Panda, who are sadly no more, were generally known as Soft Panda round these parts. Oh, how we laughed...

THE PUNT 2008, various venues


You can imagine Face0meter falling somewhat flat performing his twitchy caffeinated anti-folk to a crowd of weekend drinkers, but when he gets to rant and sing unamplified in a bookshop he instantly wins over all-comers. Abetted by the excellently named Dapper Swindler, Face0meter produces what sounds like frenzied Polish dance tunes with lyrics by Bob Dylan via Edward Lear, and shows an odd mixture of New York cool and slightly frightening effervescence: imagine Lawrence Ferlinghetti as an assistant scoutmaster. Faceometer’s vocals may not be very supple, but his way with language is dexterity itself.

Desmond Chancer (AKA Tomohawk from The Big Speakers, amongst other acts) leads his band The Long Memories in a smoky trawl through gutter life jazz ballads that instantly recall “Blue Valentine” era Tom Waits. The music is louche and endearing, with some excellent jazz sax solos, but sadly the vocals let everything down, tumbling into the songs with all the subtlety of a drunken Wellington boot. Perhaps this sort of thing just doesn’t work until we reach the wee hours.

Having hilariously heard a man at a bar ask for two pints of Confidence, and invented the genre Nu-Gazing (hard trance remixes of Chapterhouse), we find ourselves at the Purple Turtle for International Jetsetters who certainly aren’t short of “jaunty” and are far from lacking in “cheery”. Very occasionally the strong female vocal reminds us of Patti Smith in its declamations, but some of the rather average music has the consistency of damp pastry, which spoils the effect.

Cat Matador are far more successful at creating high octane indie rock, with plenty of chiming guitar and intriguing violin. Occasionally the mood got lost somewhere between “epic” and “introspective”, but the music definitely had force and character enough to keep the healthy crowd interested.

Over at the surprisingly pleasant Thirst Lodge Black Skies Burn have unlocked the Pandora’s Box labelled “Racket”. This is proper metal with huge white noise guitars and vocals that sound like an emasculated pig being sucked into a black hole. The whole shebang is polished and well-crafted, but we do wish that the drummer were working as hard the room-prowling vocalist, the rhythms never seemed to blast along as we’d hoped.

Non-Stop Tango sound like Talking Heads and King Crimson and Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart and The Doors and Hawkwind and Bjork and The Fall and The Art Of Noise and lots of others. Not necessarily our opinion, but this is just a selection of comments we overheard in The Wheatsheaf as the set progressed, which goes some way to explaining how varied their sound is. Composed of Oxford’s free improv luminaries, Non-Stop Tango is really an experiment in taking groove-based music and destroying it from the inside, bombarding funky basslines with electronic drums, tinny keyboards and incomprehensible vocals. Not many people last the distance, but if they left confused we’ll call it a victory. The Punt needs bands like this. No scratch that, the world needs bands like this, there aren’t enough surprises left.

Sadly Alphabet Backwards isn’t just someone rewinding an episode of Sesame Street, but happily they are a pretty feisty pop concoction with some excellent fizzing keyboards and bouncy backbeats. Sadly the vocals let the side down with some clumsy pub rock intonations, but apparently the normal vocalist is off tonight, so we’ll give them a bye. Worth a second listen, we feel.

50ft Panda are Oxford music’s equivalent of a Belgian truffle: creamy and delicious, but too rich to want too much of. Imagine all your favourite heavy rock records distilled down to their essence, and that’s what this duo produce: nothing but firy drumming, the riff, and the volume (my God, the volume!) again and again and again. They really do it incredibly well, but, like another local duo that had two people making the noise of ten, Winnebago Deal, you wouldn’t want to listen to it for more than thirty minutes.

At this point the sight of the Cellar bouncer eating raw eggs made our beer filled stomach somewhat queasy so we stumbled for the bus. Clanky Robo Gob Jobs will have to wait for another time. We can only hope that any inquisitive local music virgins who got a Punt pass found something they loved to treasure in their memories…and we hope they found something they abhorred too, that’s what music should be all about.