Sleeping Partner

I'm hungry.  Might eat something.

DREAM WIFE/ VIENNA DITTO/ SUZI WU, Heavy Pop & Dork, Bully, 16/10/17

We’re a little confused.  We’re sure Suzi Wu says onstage that it’s her debut gig, but there’s already stuff on the merch table, the promoters felt unable to announce her presence beyond special guest, and she enters to a sprightly little bass and drums riff like a conquering hero.  Perhaps the last of these is just stagecraft, as Suzi certainly squeezes the maximum live impact from her bouncy dub pop.  At her best, such as an intriguingly asymmetrical Tom Waits cover, she sounds like Tricky channelling Gwen Stefani’s sassy nous, but at other times we’re kicked queasily back to 1994, and a well-meaning but ill-conceived crusty knees-up featuring Nicolette and Back To The Planet.

Good advice to a new band is to play every gig like you’re headlining Glastonbury, no matter how small.  Even better advice to a band that has won its spurs is to play every gig like you’re performing direct to your mates, to avoid the pratfalls of pomposity and choreographed bombast.  Vienna Ditto are so relaxed and unhurried during this set, they only actually manage to play 4 songs, spending more time laughing with the crowd, vainly poking at a drum machine trying to get it to make the right noise, and looking like a Dickensian urchin and Chicago blues singer had met each other in a time warp and decided to get stoned instead of trying to work out how.  All very unprofessional, maybe, but the second of these 4 tracks is a glorious 10 minute reading of old favourite “Long Way Down”, which is half enticing torch song and half sonic abrasion, complete with rando-speed breakbeats and a guitar rubbed against the stage barrier.  The best possible advice for an aspiring band?  Be Vienna Ditto.

If Vienna Ditto look mismatched onstage, two of Dream Wife seem positively polar, the guitarist sporting an austere white bowl cut, like Joan of Arc meets Mr C from The Shamen, and the vocalist stalking round the stage in a tied off shirt looking like a 50s cheerleader gone horribly wrong.  Or, we should say, horribly right, as Dream Wife is a band that marries feminist ire to well-honed tuneful garage, and any soda fountain pin-up would be the better for sneering their way through new wave anthems and hand-picking a coterie of moshing “bad bad bitches”.  If there’s one criticism to make of this pleasing set, it’s the they never quite lived up to the promise of their opener, where the vocals were all taut, Talking Heads supercilious intonation, and the band pummelled poppily, like a whipped cream Ramones.  There’s a new strategy, get the patriarchy to dance themselves into submission.