And Mick Navigate?

Let's be honest, there are so many childhood TV references in here, the review might as well have been written by Peter Kay, but I still like it.  There are some amazing photos of the night, by Fyrefly Pothography, which I'm sure you could locate online if were less lazy than I.

PADDY STEER/ MANDRAKE HANDSHAKE, Upcycled Sounds, Tap Social Movement 8/11/19

Whilst good bands can survive with awful names – Fuck Buttons?  Prefab Sprout?  The bloody Beatles? – it’s always nice when saying the name out loud doesn’t make you want to immediately apologise, or change your entire social circle out of shame.  For this reason, we are glad that one of the most interesting Oxford bands to arise in the last year are no longer called (shudder) Knobblehead.  Fortunately, the newly christened Mandrake Handshake are still an expansive ramshackle collective with a fine line in hypnotic slowburns and they still have a man who looks like James Acaster in a Grant Wood painting on tambourine and unsettling falsetto.  Some of their early furry freak bothering has been judiciously pruned, and they now ride gloriously sleek, machine-oiled psych grooves into the sunset, like Stereolab with the Marxism and Cluster replaced by mescaline and granola. 

By contrast, Paddy Steer couldn’t be messier, looking like a half-mad shaman mage who is kept in the basement of Flourish & Blotts and only let out after closing to catch scampering pamphlets, sitting amongst vast electronic devices that couldn’t look more home-made if he’d glued macaroni to the edges.  Musically it’s also a slapdash bricolage, fat Egyptian Lover basslines snaking through Jean Jacques Perrey bloop-showers whilst floppy, funky drums try vainly to hold things together. Sometimes it sounds like three “Rockit” era Herbie Hancocks obliviously occupying the same point in space time, and sometimes it sounds like a half drunk Daft Punk jamming with Old Gregg, but it is never less than spell-binding.  If some pieces resemble a confused man in a Gallifreyan collar trying to invoke the early 80s with barely recalled themes to Sorry, Roobarb and Kick Start played on broken machinery, well, perhaps that’s exactly what they are, but whether the drastic envelopes applied to sequenced riffs and sudden spasms of spring reverb are uncontrolled or artfully assembled it’s a trip.  Join us in the crowd when he next comes to town – we’ll be the ones in the home-sculpted papier mache Metal Mickey head-dress.