Improv/Comedy

This was about the most fun a review has been to write since some of the old Truck shakedowns.  I'm amused that it requires specific knowledge of two quite different, but equally obscure, cultural byways - it's a bit like a sketch I wrote the other day which hinged on the listener knowing about both Borges's influential literary techniques and Lennie Bennet's Lucky Ladders.  Never to be performed, I fear.

THE BOHMAN BROTHERS, Oxford Improvisers, Old Fire Station,15/1/19

There’s a doctorate to be written about the crossover between leftfield comedy and improvised music.  There are high profile fans, of course – Stewart Lee got air time for an improv duo through his Comedy Vehicle series, as well as facing the Celebrity Mastermind third degree on avant-guitar trailblazer Derek Bailey, whilst Vic Reeves snuck an Evan Parker solo onto a top 20 album (“Pack it in, Parker!”) – but there is also a partly shared outlook.  Perhaps it’s because both stand-ups and improvisers are often relegated to the sort of pub corners and dysfunctional function rooms that the lowliest of toilet venue rockers would sneer at, perhaps it’s that both art forms always make the most sense in an intimate live environment, or perhaps it’s just that in both cases the unexpected is rarely regretted or ignored, but embraced and incorporated into the show. 

The Bohman Brothers combine the absurdity of the oddest comedy with the most dadafiedimprov.  They have the classic comic double act dynamic, one uptight and starchy in his collar and tie, the other relaxed and wayward in a potting shed sweater.  It’s Morecambe and Wise, Bert and Ernie, ego and id.  An introduction in which welcoming platitudes are haltingly and exhaustingly mumbled over a recording of car crashes has the surreal mundanity of vintage Ted Chippington, a feeling bolstered by the fact that the duo make their close-miked scrapes and percussive skitters, not from catgut and drumskin, but from rubber bands, classroom geometry sets and a couple of fetching old-school toast racks. 

We’ve sat through self-conscious art music trying not to laugh before now, so it’s wonderful tonight to see guffaws invited with such deadpan hilarity, and cut-up texts - think Burroughs meets Mark E Smith meets spam emails - are delivered impeccably: after all, timing is a key concept in both music and comedy, and The Bohman Brothers’ strange, yet strangely ordinary, performance embodies both.  Coincidence, perhaps, but we are overjoyed that the final word enunciated, in a hilarious exchange of contrasting extracts from an old guide to tree frogs and a medical Mills & Boon novel is “mother-in-law”.  Fluxus?  They’ve only just met us!

A Hayward Gallery

Here's a Nightshift review from last year, picked at random from the pile. It's about someone famous (ish) doing unfamous things, which is far more interesting than people who are post-famous doing half dead things, which is what we often get here in the provinces (don't ever get me started about the true awfulness of gigs by Womack & Womack, or The Nashville Teens). It was a good night.

NB The Wheatsheaf is a central rock toilet venue in Oxford; West oxford is where all the tofu and cycling co-op hippies in oxford live (all the mescaline, cider and dubplate hippies live in East Oxford); Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes was an early 90s Saturday morning cartoon; Oliver Postgate was a much missed children's TV genius; Dom Lash pops up on this month's Wire cover CD; Shellac are a North American alternative rock band; "noirish" refers to the Film Noir cinematic movement; Oxford is a small university town in the south west corner of the midlands of the United Kingdom; do let me know if these explicatory notes become annoying...

OXFORD IMPROVISORS FEAT CHARLES HAYWARD, Oxford Improvisors, Port Mahon, 8/10/08

You never know it all. We recently witnessed The Wheatsheaf’s engineer and landlord – who’ve presumably seen a thing or two – reduced to silent incredulity by a recording of free vocalist Phil Minton. Whilst volume and rebellion have been co-opted and flimsily assimilated by an ever more voracious mainstream, free improv remains capable of causing incomprehension, smothered giggles, and irate walkouts that metal, punk or techno can rarely inspire…which is not to say many of its adherents are bent upon creating a counter-cultural broadside; in fact, tonight’s chatty coterie of relaxed, primarily middle aged listeners looks tellingly like the AGM of some West Oxford allotment. All of which is a way of observing that Oxford Improvisers is something all too rare: a group unassumingly playing music for themselves, but with no hint of exclusivity or insularity. You’re all welcome, so long as you listen. Tonight’s show features This Heat member Charles Hayward, but we shan’t mention his past again, as this gig bears the same resemblance to a rock legend headline showcase that a side salad bears to Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes.

Atmosphere aside, the music is also impressive. The opening duo loses John Grieve’s noirish sax under Chris Brown’s guitar, which sounds like an ill-thought out parade of pedal effects, but Brown redeems himself with some later longwavy treble tones that wouldn’t sound out of place on a lost Oliver Postgate project, with inventive double bass accompaniment from Dom Lash (who improbably also plays with charmless cock rockers, The Treat). Pete McPhail is superb throughout, whether clicking his unblown flute or enlivening the final blowing session with some keening emotive flights, clean shafts of sound amid the skronking morass.

Hayward himself veers gloriously from near-silent stone rubbing to skittering hi-hat tapping, via sententious (if vague) pronouncements on atomic physics and heavyweight thumping a la Shellac’s Todd Trainer. He even stops mid-solo to tell a little muso anecdote. Conversation of a musical sort when he plays with the other performers, somehow allowing everybody space without ever falling into the background.

There’s a danger that descriptions of improv can become mere lists of tricks and techniques, making it all sound aridly academic; however, this is music making in its most intimate, unpretentious, social guise, which is something we thought was unheard of in Oxford. You never know it all.