Lavitate

Hmm, I fear I may have over sold the Cowley Lavatory Story, so please bear in mind that after you've read this, there's a really dumb pun I thought of at the end. No peeking ahead, now.

Recently I had one of those experiences that everybody has, no matter how urbane and sophisticated they feel they are. My bowels rebelled, and half way through a thirty minute walk, I realised strange things were afoot. It's a terrible feeling, packing a turtle's head when you know you have another ten minutes of walking until you reach your destination, all you can do is hope you've got the stamina. Sadly, my destination was a bus stop, at which I'd catch a bus for a 15 minute or so journey. So, I reached my port, and had there been a bus arriving I would have got on. I would probably have survived. But there was no bus, and the little electronic screen that looks like the one that provided the football scores on Saturday afternoons in the 80s claimed it would be eight minutes befoere the next one came. Eight minutes! Normally I wait about two. Oh my God, God, God, what to do. Right, I can't wait.

So, I hobbled a little further down the road and used a public toilet, adjacent to Manzil Way, in Oxford. I can't tell you how many hundreds, nay thousands of times I've walked past this little building without really paying it any mind, but stepping into it was an eye opener. Here was a building that clearly missed a meeting, a few square feet that must have mislaid the memo about the whole Dreaming Spires thing.

The urinal was aromatic, but I had no time to pay it any mind. I bundled into a cubicle and slammed the huge institution green reinforced door and slid home the cast iron bolt behind it. Hang on a mo, what? Am I in prison? Honestly, this huge bolt was like something from a nineteenth century remand house, not a convenience in a celebrated town in 2o1o. The cubicle walls didn't reach the ceiling, there was about a foot left for ventiliation, which was filled with serious looking bars.

The toilet itself was something I've never seen the like of. There was nothing so elegant as a separate cistern, and no sniff of anything as decadent as porcelain. What I got was a huge, aluminium block of a thing with no seat; a big old indominable, undamagable hunk of metal with a hole in it, in other words. There was, of course, no paper, but luckily I had some random packet of tissues in my bag. There was, however, more unpainted metal in the form of a box in which to put your used needles or, apparently, safety pins. How do you inject heroin with a safety pin, anyway? Do you just prick a vein and sort of drop the brown stuff over the tiny hole, like someone crumbling an Oxo cube into a pipette?

After the unpleasant business was done (and I don't recall ever having hovered above a toilet bowl like a prim dowager in a 50s theatre, but I did this time), I pressed the flush. "Flush" is right, the small unmarked metal button was set into the top of the giant metal lav-chunk, and I didn't see it for a few seconds. Presumably people would steal an actual flush and sell it for safety pin money. It was then that I realised that the toilet felt like something from an interstellar shuttle. Some sort of space jail for rogue asteroid miners, perhaps.

But, once the pressing issues of the afternoon had been dispensed with, I had a look at the grafitti. It was mostly pencil sketches of dark skinned lads getting intimate with one another, along with some times and dates one might meet the artist (not the day on which I was there, I'm happy to report). I suddenly realised how very long it had been since I had seen pictures like this; I think I came across some in public loos in my youth, but there was something improbably reassuring about them; yeah, of course there are any number of big willies and "call to suck me off" messages scrawled on pub bogs in Oxford, but nothing like this. There was almost a sort of melancholy about the whole thing. It was like coming across a traditional wheelwright, or one of those sweet shops with racks of old fashioned confectionary to be weighed into quarters for boys in school caps. It fucking stank, though, so I didn't linger to admire .

Guess whether there was any soap.

And that's the Cowley Lavatory Story; now here's a pun.

I just went to the bookshop for a beginner's guide to Japanese culture. It's called What Part Of Noh Don't You Understand?

BEAR IN THE AIR – BIPOLAR EP (demo)


Well, this is a pleasant surprise.

We’ve seen Bear In The Air live twice over the past few years, and been left resolutely uninspired both times, but this recording is a pretty enjoyable experience. “Put On Your Travelling Shoes” opens with tastefully reverby keyboard tinkles that aren’t a million miles away from something on the American Beauty soundtrack. A few seconds later the band comes in with a hazy fuzzy version of 60s rock recreated in the guise of 90s indie, and a frantically catchy, breathy vocal line about “drinking wine straight from the bottle” hooks its claws deep into that odd nodule of the brain that exists solely to hang onto fragments of pop melody and random lines from ancient adverts (“Clifford is quite the bon viveur”). Whilst the medulla hauntologica is being entranced, the conscious part of our mind is coming to a conclusion: that Stefan Archer’s keyboards get flattened and distorted through small PAs, and that Kane Chamberlain’s vocals can be charmingly tuneful, even though they’re clearly too weak to cut it on a noisy stage. There are definitely some very strong elements to this band that we’d entirely missed in concert.

“Unnatural” reinforces the feeling that this is a studio band – no shame in that – by washing us down with a tinny High Street shoegaze sound that might not excite the purists, but again tickles the ears of anyone with an interest in well made pop music. In fact, it reminds us an awful lot of “Dreams” by The Cranberries, and it might come as a shock to anyone who’s only come across the ugly punchdrunk politicising of “Zombie” that they were a decent band on their first album. Cloyingly sugary perhaps, but these two tracks are worth a listen.

“Have A Happy Life” is slightly less successful, but it’s still built around a jaunty little melody that takes us by the hand for a quick dance down a petal-strewn path; trouble is Archer keeps trying to trip us up into a fetid pool of schmaltzy mid-80s sax along the hourney. Get back on the keyboards, man! Something about the clean rock ‘n’ roll rhythms remind us of Aztec Camera just after they’d ceased to matter. It’s a decent enough song, but doesn’t really hit the heights.

There are some lovely icy little drum machine interjections on “Skywriting”, but for the most part it’s smothered beneath a thick blanket of pseudo-strings. The lyrics talk about being “underneath a landslide/ Swimming in the riptide”, but the music is so safe it’s more the sonic equivalent of sitting quietly on the little train at Blenheim Palace, with members of Keane riding the throttle making sure the journey doesn’t get too exciting.

We look forward to hearing the Bears’ next recording, as this one has honestly blown away our expectations. We hope that they can capitalise on the airy melodicism of the best music here, and leave the nods towards landfill indie behind. We’d like them to leave the sensibly cosy ground behind and start to sound a lot more bi-polar, but for now this is a CD we can fully support.

The Dusk Brothers

Oh dear, I'm in a hurry again. Here's an Oxfordbands review from a couple of years ago. It was all Dunkirk spirit that night as ace local fest Truck had been cancelled due to Biblical weather. I was happy, as it meant I could go after I'd been away when it was postponed. I flew to Europe the morning after this gig. I was hungover.

THE EVENINGS/ KING FURNACE/ BEAR IN THE AIR – GRINNING SPIDER, THE X, 20/7/07


Following monstrous downpours, and just hours after the news that Truck has been postponed, it’s pleasing to see so many of Oxford’s music fans prepared to make the trip to The X, to share a beer and commiserate over the sudden death of a long anticipated weekend.

Plenty of opportunity for commiseration during Bear In The Air’s set, because it does very little to impinge on your consciousness, despite the volume. With tinkly high keys and emotive vocals always fluttering at the edge of falsetto, Bear In The Air are essentially a pub rock version of Muse. Some of their songs could perhaps be twisted into an entertaining Bond theme bombast, if only their performance wasn’t so sludgy, and Bear In The Air are resolutely earthbound. Sorry, that’s an obvious gag – but not nearly so obvious as their arrangements.

Thank heaven for King Furnace, then, who bring some sense of occasion back to the stage, along with entertaining rock pomp. With a vocalist who looks like BBC man Tim Bearder’s cooler brother (actually, doesn’t Tim already have one of those?) prancing around the stage howling out some foot tapping cock rock, a nice sprightly drummer and a guitarist with a full-fat sound, King Furnace are guaranteed to keep you amused, even if they’re unlikely to change any lives along the way. The whole pantomime affair brings back rather fond memories of Marconi’s Voodoo. Good stuff.

We’ve said it many a time, but The Evenings are one of our favourite local acts, always up for a bit of reinvention. Until recently they’d taken rather a lengthy hiatus and now they’ve returned as a trio, with a clutch of new material. When not acting the giddy goat, Seb’s keyboards are still a winning mixture of cheap rave and Vangelis, whilst Jo is currently playing bass with far more authority than the old days, and it seems that stripping down the lineup has worked well. The newer songs have a surprisingly lyrical bent, all slowly evolving vocal melodies and lovelorn melancholy, and they fit rather well with the electro rock backing we know so well.

But, perhaps this new found delicacy needs a better voice to carry it through. Nothing wrong with Mark’s voice, really, but it doesn’t really have the malleability to truly coax the beauty from the melodies, nor the character to capture the emotion of the lyrics. Plus, we don’t want anything to detract Mark from playing drums, as he does this so bloody well, displaying fluidity and power simultaneously. A couple of criticisms, then, but The Evenings are still up there with the best.