PUNT, Cellar, PT, Wheatsheaf, White Rabbit, Turl Street
Kitchen, 13/5/15
The stage at the Purple Turtle is dedicated to the late
sound engineer, blues fan, musician, husky owner and huskier singer, Tony
Jezzard. If his spirit dropped by
tonight, it would certainly appreciate the volume levels on display, but more
likely his spectre would smile wryly at the tales of a locked venue, a PA
shoved together at break-neck speed, and an electrocuted soundman. After such a start to the proceedings, it seems
churlish to moan about the stage running late when James Serjeant has had the
national grid pumped through his skinny frame, so we start our night at the
Cellar, with only the most cursory grumble...just for the sake of form, you
understand.
There, Balkan
Wanderers are kick-starting the night with more crackling energy than James
Serjeant’s first piddle of the night (yes, yes, we’ll stop now), buoying the
crowd with spicy East European pop, and inspiring some surprisingly early
hedonistic dancing, considering it’s Oxford on a Wednesday and most of us are
still digesting our burritos.
Superficially they resemble gypsy punk rabble rousers Gogol Bordello,
but listen carefully beyond the thumping drums and shoutalong choruses, and
you’ll find that Balkan Wanderers have replaced the wild aggression with
chirpy, quirky mid-80s indie pop, in the vein of Grab, Grab The Haddock, or
even Stump. This allows the band’s
secret weapon, the conversational intimacy of Claire Heaviside’s clarinet, to
slowly steal the show. In what will
become a leitmotif throughout the evening, we overhear someone saying the band
should have finished the Punt.
Back at the PT, The
Shapes have now taken the stage, offering a breezy cocktail of Radio 2
melodies and light rock styles. They have
a track that resembles The Beautiful South, they have a tune that sounds like
Tom Petty, they even have a song called “Tom Petty” that sounds a wee bit like
10cc and a wee-er bit like Darts. In
many hands this would all be pretty generic fluff, but there’s a mercurial,
alchemical sensibility at work that keeps the music interesting; take “Mr
Sandman”, a mash-up of The Beatles’ “Something” and Pink Floyd’s “Brain
Damage”, with keyboard player Colin Henney throwing properly loopy jazz-dance
poses as he doles out elegant fruity chords.
You’ve heard of Dad rock, but this is more like Eccentric Uncle rock –
enjoy it, but don’t sit on their knee.
Entering The Wheatsheaf’s upstairs room, you can really
tell that this is the only Punt venue that exists solely for listening to live rock,
such is the room’s dinginess, the cosy crush of the crowd, and the full-fat
glory of the sound. It’s a sound that
suits Ghosts In The Photographs, who
open the dam to wave upon wave of Explosions In The Sky styled guitar noise. Perhaps we’ve come across this tumescent
post-rock business before, and Ghosts do nothing new, but who ever complained
that a sunset was unoriginal, eh?
Imposing, impressive stuff.
“Money is the devil’s pie”. Did Rhymeskeemz
really just say that? Let’s assume
we misheard. Ah, now, he certainly did just slip “I’m sick of my dad’s
impressions” into a litany of politico-social criticisms, which we like a
lot. Yes, there’s a lot to enjoy about
this rapper, who has a vibrant wit that keeps his bars the right side of
cliché, and a nice rhythmic variation.
But the vocals just don’t seem to bear any relation to the music, as if
the backing tracks were composed in isolation, and DJ Bungle has just unleashed them for the first time. An enticing new discovery, but a
frustratingly unconvincing set.
Outside The White Rabbit, a morris side is giving it the
full hanky. Considering it’s as close as
we can get to a native Cotswold music style, there really should be some morris
on the Punt bill one day. Get your
applications in for 2016, chaps! Inside,
things are less old-fashioned, but sadly, rather more dated. White
Beam, featuring local band veteran Jeremy Leggett, are certainly not too
bad, but hark back to 1991 or so, when indie dance has dissolved into lightly
funky, floppy rhythms and thin, fuzzy guitar provided a sickly European cousin
to grunge. Probably, lots of older
Punters feel a warm glow of the post-Ride Oxford sound displayed here, but it simply
reminds us exactly why Britpop happened.
Over at the Turl Street Kitchen, 18 year old Katy Jackson is pulling the carpet from
those over twice her age with some delicately tuneful acoustic ditties. The first impression is of Joni Mitchell
without the paranoia and patchouli, but it soon becomes clear that there’s a
sardonic side to Katy, as if she’s looking askance at her melodies and raising
her eyebrows at her own undoubted ability.
Our next reference point is the smooth cynicism of Evan Dando, and
before we know it we’ve spotted a Lou Reed influence in the vocal
delivery. We’ll definitely be revisiting
this songwriter at a less hectic date.
But for now there’s a pint to be tossed back, and a
wobbly jog back to The PT on the cards, to check out another very young act,
fraternal duo Cassels, who take the
flea-bitten sneer of early Sebadoh and weld it messily onto the fuzzy tuneful
surge of The Pixies. They’ve got the ‘flu
today, apparently, and if so, we’re quite excited to see them at peak fitness. Apparently, we hear, if they were feeling
better, They Could Have Closed The Punt (mark 2).
At every Punt there’s one act that ends up with a crowd
that’s just a little too large.
Sometimes it’s a band that just proves too big a draw, as anyone who
stood craning at the doorway to see The Young Knives or Little Fish in earlier
years will attest, but often it’s a quieter act who can’t battle past the
increasingly, ahem, relaxed crowd.
Whilst Water Pageant might
not have been quite as up against it in the volume stakes as The August List a
few years ago, we can’t really hear anything from the back of the White Rabbit
but some pleasant vocal fragments and what sounds like a mellotron. A couple of tasty ingredients, doubtless, but
we can’t really judge the dish.
Sometimes we worry that the Turl Street Kitchen is a little
too refined for the maelstrom of spilt pints and tinnitus that is The
Punt. In about three minutes flat Despicable Zee has destroyed that
notion by calling the audience grumpy, and starting a good natured
argument. Then again, Zahra Tehrani, of
Baby Gravy/BG Records fame, probably starts an argument at every
rehearsal. And she’s the only band
member. Beyond acting like a surly
drumming Jack Dee, her music stretches from drunken clockwork electro in the
style of Plone, through MIA flavoured attitude pop and a kind of Capitol K
home-made doodling, to a beery hip hop barn dance featuring various local MC
luminaries...some of whom may have even known how the track goes. This is messy, abusive, unfinished music, of
the sort that dodges every traditional indicator of quality. It’s almost certainly the best set we see all
night.
Zaia and Maiians on at the same time? Don’t the organisors realise how confused we
are by this point? How about some other
vowels to help us get our bearings? The
former are a phenomenally slick reggae band, with plenty of juicy bass and stabbing
brass, who sound wonderful in the Cellar’s resonant gig space. Strictly, this is the sort of band you want
to listen to at a festival, in a set long enough to allow you to take all the substances,
read a book, fall in love, start a political party with a stranger and still
have time to nip to the cake stall a few times, but our brief exposure tonight leave
us impressed. Maiians are equally bouncy
and dancefloor-focused, but a little more ornate, with their excellent
cross-rhythms and organic kraut-electronica keyboard lines. Those who discover the band tonight will go
home very happy, we suspect. These are two
acts that exemplify the observation that crowd-pleasing isn’t always the same
as stupid.
And, incidentally, we hear they both Could Have Closed
The Punt.
Like Cassels, Esther
Joy Lane has apparently climbed from her sick bed to play for us. Seriously, we’d never have known. The trick of unfurling rich reverbed vocal
melodies over freeze-dried beats suggests a strong Grimes influence (as does
the T-shirt Esther wears on her Soundcloud page), but there’s a sultry
steeliness to the delivery that contrasts with Grimes’ pastel comedown
haze. If this set might have been suited
to a PA bigger than what could be squeezed into the corner of a city pub, in
quality it cuts easily through sonic paucity.
Sadly, we don’t make it back to Turl Street to catch Adam
Barnes, having got confused, lost a notebook and accidentally drank some beers,
but we’re present and correct for Rainbow
Reservoir back at The White Rabbit.
The trio play a punky pepped-up pop racket, with a devil take the
hindmost insouciance, but without any vestige of aggression. In this sense the band reflects the singer’s
American roots, harking back to US college keg parties rather than British
commuter town basements, red cups hoisted rather than glasses in the face, and
if the wordy songs sound a bit like Kim Deal reading out her PhD, the best of
the tunes are packed with fire, fun and energy. So much so, we think the band
Could Have Closed The Punt.
Oh, wait a minute.
They did. Right, is the bar still
open?
