Scotty's Fantasy

I do love an indoor festival.  And an indoor festival where you wander between venues, best of all worlds.

BEAM ME UP, Academy & Bully, 10/2/24 

After our seventh full-body pat-down at the doors of The Academy, we rechristen this all-dayer Feel Me Up. But, although we never tried to smuggle anything illicit past the (consistently polite and respectful) security, we often brazenly walked out with a sense of pride at the local talent on display, mostly in the tiny Academy 3, a  corner of the downstairs room hastily screened off as if there had been a horrific incident (well, there had been a Stereophonics tribute the week before). My Crooked Teeth play a lovely set alternating between Don McLean lyricism and straight-up country lamenting, even though an intense light just under Jack’s chin makes it look like he’s going to launch into a ghost story at a scout camp. Eva Gadd looks less demonic, but her versatile jazzy voice sounds just as sweet, and The Bobo takes sees this bet and raises it, unleashing her inner Julee Cruise with a wispy, sultry set accompanied by James Maund from Flights of Helios on guitar; we’d say her voice was smoky, but smoking is bad for you, and this music is balm for any ailment. Johnny Payne unveils a new unnamed trio in the larger upstairs venue, sounding like Joy Division if they enjoyed wholesome roadtrips across the midwest instead of nights drying Manchester drizzle by a two-bar fire. Conversely, Tiger Mendoza plays the small room as if it’s the biggest imaginable, with striking projections and some of their block-rockingest beats. Plus, university band Girl Like That do a sterling job of opening the day at the Bully, playing 90s altrock that’s somewhere between Stone Temple Pilots and The Breeders as if they’d been together twenty years. 

But other acts have travelled from further afield, such as Chroma, who are almost distracted from performing by a certain rugby match because they are “very Welsh” (pity, we hoped they were pun-lovers from the Norfolk coast). Thankfully they manage to focus enough to deliver corking glam-punk fun with greasy riffs, chunky drums, and infectiously cheeky vocals. They pair well with Shelf Lives, whose mix of sassy, insouciant rapping/singing, gnarly guitar and distorted electronics isn’t quite Beyoncé Teenage Riot but comes close to being Gwen Stefani possessed by Peaches. 

Some bands just work despite all the signs being initially bad. Make Friends sound as though they’re shooting for Foals, but hitting Curiosity Killed The Cat, yet their rubbery bass, soft chorus guitar and urbane vocals manage to remind us of Climie Fisher and entertain us enormously, which is surely a victory. Conversely, Blue Bayou look like the full prescription, with soul revue vibes, folky fiddle, crazy Scooby-Doo villain vocals, and brass, but they stall at every hurdle and never manage to lift off, ending up as Dexy’s Tired School-Runners.  

The de-facto headliners today at the Academy are The Rills, who make a perfectly passable fist of being a new rock revolution band from 2001, and more excitingly Deadletter, whose broadly drawn psych rock is something like Spiritualized if the only drug they’d taken was speed, or The Brian Jonestown Massacre, if they’d not taken any drugs at all and had just put more effort in. But the real stars are both at The Bully. Snayx look like Max and Paddy, and sound like a monstrous melange of Soft Play, Idles, and Silver Bullet. They’re delivery is Black Flag brutal, but they charmingly take time out to ensure everyone in the pit is doing OK between numbers. Whilst their drummer is honed and stripped back, like John Bonham playing Run DMC patterns, the bass descends into the filthiest bit-crushed noise we’ve heard in a while. Even better are Home Counties, whose council-estate take on Talking Heads disco and Chicago house we christen GLC Soundsystem, although at one point they groove around a classic rock riff like The Streets doing Thin Lizzy. There’s even a touch of The Blockheads about their most ornery, awkwardly bouncy tracks, but as with Ian Dury, beneath all the winks and sneers there is an undercurrent of melancholy. Turns out, despite all the fun, we go home having felt something...a bit like the Academy bouncers. 

Common People

I bought an early Simple Minds album today in the charity shop.  We will find out whether they were not shit before I'd heard of them, as some people claim - NB, it turned out not to be true for Genesis.

OH! COMMUNITY, DIVINE SCHISM, Common Ground, 7/5/23

Divine Schism’s Oh! Community all-dayers have been a regular highlight of Oxford’s post-lockdown music palette. By holding them in community-run spaces like the Common Ground coffee shop and art space they seem to attract people who might not explore classic dingy beer-dungeon venues, and today we see intrigued passers-by decide to step in, as well as some under-18s who can’t access most gigs. But, crucially, the bills have not been tempered or diluted to comfort the casual listener, and today’s line-up spans the delicate and the discordant, above a valley of the absurd.

Sensibly, the day starts with the approachable. Young singer Beth Pirrie has a lovely, unshowy voice and gives an excellent reading of a song by Corinne Bailey Rae (even though she can’t pronounce Corinne Bailey Rae). Green Hands are a pleasingly relaxed threepiece, recalling Wilco or Silver Jews at their least threatening, but The Bobo – with regular collaborator Kid Kin – are more memorable, their ethereal synthpop icily austere whilst being attractively melodic – imagine if the 3 ghosts who visited Scrooge had been the members of A-Ha.  

Suep deliver the sort of scrappy organ-led pep that has been played loud and tipsy in garages since 1963, and often remind us of old-school Truck favourites Fonda 500. They have a synth line that nicks to tune from ‘Love Will Tear us Apart’ which they put above a countryish lope, and some Bow Wow Wow buoyancy with a keyboard that sounds like a disappointed kitten. They merge into Garden Centre, sharing members, but with Max “King of Cats” Levy at the helm, giving them a more foscussed Monkees flavour (plus the best parasite shanty you’ll ever hear). Sinews, although having a hardcore underpinning and a taste for Bleach-era Nirvana, are fitting bedfellows with a surprising ear for a tune despite vocals delivered with the angry belch of a killer whale with a hangover.

The day really belongs to a pair of bands who are part high-concept performance art, part farcical prank...which is what all great pop is, ultimately. Dream Phone toss nasally pitch-shifted Auto-Tune vocals above infectious electro-punk à la Blectum From Blechdom, at times sounding like nightmare pier-end entertainers, Daniel Bedingfield & Orville. Shake Chain are more intense, and as the band begins Kate Mahoney is crawling agonisingly from the middle of the street outside, before delivering the second number from under a rug. When The Fall’s final line-up morphed into Imperial Wax, they had a vocalist conundrum: an MES impersonator would have been crass, but a standard rock singer leached some of the magic. Shake Chain sound like an alternate reality version of the group, where lean wiry post-punk is paired with a Diamanda Goulash of visceral howls and startling sobs.

The only way to follow that is with good tight bands. Ex-Void play sweet-minded college rock with a nod to Throwing Muses, or even Juliana Hatfield. They do a nice sprightly Arthur Russell cover, though they aren’t experts at mid-song gear changes. Holiday Ghosts splice in some classic rock ‘n’ roll chug driven forward by Gedgey hyperstrums, and are frankly excellent. Oh, and those kids we mentioned earlier? They got into the day, and went bananas for Shake Chain; there may be a future for mankind after all.

Crack, Class A

This was a wonderful event.  Divine Schism have been right at the top of their promoting game for about 18 months now, got to as many of their gigs as you can...they;re normally reasonably priced, too.

HYPERDAWN/ KID KIN/ THE BOBO, Divine Schism, The Library, 12/2/20

By 2030, middle-aged hipsters will complain about two things: the disappointing appearance of tattoos on sagging street food and craft brew bloated flesh, and why their beloved tapes now sound rubbish, the permanence of both having been ill-considered, in different ways.  Still, there’s an aesthetic in the sounds of tape degradation that one can appreciate, even as it spoils once cherished recordings.  For example, new Oxford artist The Bobo utilises layers of fuzzy, twisted samples of their own voice as virtual accompanists, in a fashion that recalls that odd pre-emptive ghost track that occurs on some worn cassettes.  These enticing vocal pile-ups are joined by effected synth stabs, strewn brightly like scrunched sweet wrappers.  Tonight’s performance is a little hesitant, and could do with a touch more variation, but is often excellent in obscuring epic pop behind a glitchy sonic miasma, much in the way that Jenny Hval might: one track sounds like the pale spectre of a Kosheen banger wandering lost in a barrage of field artillery, which is something we’re eager to revisit.

Kid Kin is back to solo performance after a brief hiatus, and, in swapping guitar for keyboards, they have made their music cleaner and crisper than ever, a spick-and-span contemporary version of the sort of tuneful clinical lushness you’d find as instrumental beds for non-trailer cinema ads and corporate videos circa 1992.  As such, this is glossy music for shiny CDs, not scuzzy tapes, from the tricksy Detroit drum programming to the grown-up, ironed-shirt keyboard curlicues (one selection of near-cheesy piano flourishes is high-end easy listening made ruggedly cool – Richard Clayderman, you da man!).  One track reminds us of Boards Of Canada, so perhaps the set would sound even better recorded to VHS and left in the attic for a decade or so.

Salford duo Hyperdawn smash the outmoded into the modern, their tables laden with tiny sleek keyboards and digital triggers, alongside two huge reel-to-reel tape players.  This wonderful set can be thunderously huge or timid and tiny, but from vast sad looped choirs that sound like 10CC’s “I’m Not In Love” sung by bone-tired analogue banshees, to creamy lopsided R’n’B croons, it never moves far from melancholic melody lines that are a delicate as the long tape loops wound around a handy mike stand.  “Plastic” introduces a home-made string instrument, and comes off like Tom Waits’ backing band having a crack at Cocteau Twins, and “The End Of The World” features frenetic mike rubbing that could be an attempt to isolate and capture a single strand of feedback for a sonic lepidopterist’s specimen drawer.  The response from the spellbound crowd is simply, wow!  Not to mention, flutter.