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. 

Forty Sense

This might not have been the greatest day of music I've ever seen, but it's the sort of thing that should always be celebrated.

FORTY YEARS OF PROMOTION, PRODUCTION & PERFORMANCE, ITS ALL ABOUT THE MUSIC, Port Mahon, 2/9/23 

This event is part of a month-long celebration of local promoter Osprey’s career spanning 40 years onstage, at the mixing desk, or at the helm of multiple gigs. There’s palpable love for the man himself on display from today’s punters and performers, and this reflects Osprey’s greatest trait as a promoter: passion. There are legions of successful musicians who got their first break at one of Osprey’s nights, as he took a chance on some nascent promise, and there are other acts to whom Os has stayed loyal for years, even if they’ve never picked up a following. Every healthy music scene needs this sort of supportive underpinning, just as much as it needs hip young gunslingers and breakout successes, and with that in mind this review will highlight acts who may not have had much previous coverage in this magazine (and if you need to know that he didnt, Beaver Fuel, The Foam Heads, and Matt “Charms Against The Evil Eye” Sewell are worth your time we prescribe Nightshifts passim, stet).  

The garden hosts a surprisingly varied roster, and starts strong with uke-slinger Bill Frizzell. His runaway -jalopy run through the top 10 singles from 40 years ago is unpretentious fun, but his musical setting of diary extracts from his time building Australian railroads in the 70s is brilliantly funny and dramatic: a one-man Edinburgh show surely beckons. Nash also has a playful approach to covers, mashing up contemporary pop culture tunes with a bit of hip-hop and a bourbon-blessed blues growl, but Paul Lodge makes him look predictable by comparison: the garden might have the vibe of an open mic night, but how often do you see people setting words by Nietzsche, Wordsworth, and a 12-century visionary abbess to delicate Dylanish music at your local? 

Tiger Mendoza is a name well known to Nightshift readers, of course, but how many times have we seen Ian de Quadros barrel through his tunes with only a trusty acoustic? Even shorn of their electro-hip-hop settings his songs stand up and his voice proves to be strong enough to take the spotlight...also, weirdly, he does the second cover of the day of ‘No Diggity’ - the Blackstreet revival starts here, we guess. Ben Jacobs deserves praise for turning in two sets of fluent, assured songs, but our favourite new find is The Station, a Newbury trio whose high-energy romp-pop falls somewhere between The Jam’s socially conscious concision and the fringe-flicking sensibilities of early Gene. Finding yourself in a small room, tapping a foot to a band who look like they’re having the time of their lives might not make the headlines, but captures the spirit of an Osprey event. We're looking forward to the fiftieth anniversary already. 

Aired Broadcast

Two posts coming at you like Cleopatru (pardon my accent), today.  Here's the first, of local acts nobody's heard of, but they're wroth bending an ear towards.

IN-FLIGHT MOVIE/ JUNIPER NIGHTS/ TIGER MENDOZA, Oxfordshire Music Scene, Port Mahon, 3/6/23 

Ian De Quadros has his finger in so many pies Environmental Health probably keep a dossier on him. He’s worked with such a roster of people, as collaborator or remixer, that no two Tiger Mendoza gigs are the same, in terms of either line-up or style. Tonight, Ian is joined in person by Dan Clear on guitar - chunky chords, delicate picking, or righteous shredding, as required - and virtually by the fantastic vocals of Emma Hunter and Mike from The Deadbeat Apostles (whose chunk-hop soul-revue guest spot ‘Easy Tiger’ is equal parts Propellerheads, Gomez, and Blues Brothers). ‘Green Machine’ gets a more organic reading than usual with hints of Mike Oldfield, as well as reminding this old Oxford electronica head of The Evenings’ version of the Channel 4 News theme. You truly never know what you’ll get from a Tiger Mendoza gig...unless you count quality. 

Juniper Nights also raise eyebrows slightly, their latest incarnation having ditched most of the Radiohead moves for a blurry psych-indie sound that threatens to go stratospheric but never quite does, which we christen faux-gaze. This is not a criticism, though, and their way with a fuzzy groove is pleasing. ‘Stop Motion’ is the set highlight, a bonsai Foals tune anchored by bass which is somehow elastic and staccato at the same time. 

Pairing synths with live drums works so well, it’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more often. In-Flight Movie are an object lesson, melding the propulsive neon sheen of 80s Tangerine Deam to the long-fuse explosions of 65 Days Of Static. They have a track about the flight patterns of red kites, which is about the most perfect concept for Oxfordshire post-rock anyone could ever dream up. Immersive yet often slyly funky, this set is excellent. Perhaps the slow and overly reverbed vocals could be improved, their dour goth tempo often pulling against the John Carpenter purity of the sparse passages and the hyperactive percussive climaxes, but this is a minor quibble. In-Flight Movie are such a strong addition to Oxford’s scene that it’s surely only a matter of time before someone suggests they work with Tiger Mendoza. Oh, we just did. 

Strange Party?

Warm, isn't it?

ODDBALL, Isis Farmhouse, 8/6/19

This week the leader of the free world told us that the moon is a part of Mars.  We laughed at the time, but, spending a day in the colourful whirlwind that is the Oddball festival, suddenly such maverick cosmologies start to seem feasible – after all, we’re gearing up for Iffley lock to become a distant banlieue of Saturn with the Sun Ra Arkestra’s first ever trip to Oxford, and by six pm, a glance into their eyes reveals that a fair percentage of the crowd seem to have taken a psychic trip to Proxima Centauri, even if their physical husks still walk among.

And whilst we’re considering something as topsy-turvy as Commander Trump piloting Spaceship Earth through the inky galaxy, how about having the comedown before the trip?   We’re used to Moogieman making quirky, scientifically accurate new wave, like Robin Ince fronting Devo, but today he and drum machine prodder Stefano Maio turn in a set so bleak and unpsychedelic it’s actually otherworldly.  Imagine a John Carpenter soundtrack playing on a slowly decelerating Victrola whilst razor-honed guitar chords accompany the deadpan pronouncement “Don’t get lost”, and you have a set highlight.  New song “Journey To The East” is pretty much just a squelchy synth ostinato with some sententious metaphysical pronouncements intoned over the top, and is basically the opening to Sapphire & Steel rewritten by a paranoid Gurdjieff.  It’s brilliant, but (ironically) disorienting, and we’re glad we had the beautifully cascading kora notes of Jali Fily Cissokho to ease us into the festival.

There’s an outstanding representation of Oxford acts, from The Elephant Trip’s smoking-is-cool, shades-indoors-at-night Black Angels grooves, to Tiger Mendoza’s suet-fried melding of lysergic hip-hop beats with leather-clad rock guitar riffs, courtesy of Chris Monger from Shotgun Six (surely a shoe-in for Oddball 2020), to grief-pop heroes Flights Of Helios, who tonight get the balance between the band’s Pink Floyd vistas and Chris Beard’s stricken angel vocal spot on.  In fact, the festival’s only poor decision – apart from a few people’s final pint – is the installation of an onsite barber, whom we saw doing no business all day.  Who wants their aerials cut, man?

Whilst the day offers plenty to perplex sonically, perhaps the oddest experience is finding that the pub itself has been inexplicably rechristened the Android Garden, and that behind the bar instead of pint-pourers we find Chief Mixalot DJing some late 90s drum and bass classics - anyone witnessing the rare sight of Nightshift dancing is advised to repair immediately to the Psy-Care healing tent for a lie down.

We come across some new names during the day, Ia(i)n Ross clearly being such a new name that the event’s programme can’t decide how to spell it.  His amniotic synth washes are pleasing, but not as exciting as the old-fashioned hardware techno of ex-Vienna Ditto scamp Nigel Firth debuting as Oxford Audio Archive.  Plenty of acts on today’s bill, especially the spoken word artists, are gnomic, but Nigel’s the only one who’s gnomelike, sitting cross-legged behind a coffee table of teetering gadgets, and giggling quietly like he’s just got the jokes in Alice In Wonderland. His messy, but euphoric electronica has the glowing warmth of Pete Namlook, the ludic lo-fi chutzpah of Aqua Regia, and the sleek insistence of Hardfloor.  It’s enjoyably unpretentious, but when a Bollywood spectre starts to haunt a scrapbook jungle collage, it’s actually rather lovely too.

Perhaps the cream of the local crop, though, are expansive indie psych rockers and tambourine fetishists Knobblehead, who turn in an outstanding set of huge chugging tunes, mixing wild vibing with good honest melodic catchiness, part Brian Jonestown Massacre, part Jefferson Airplane.  At some points the blaring trumpet and tuneful chants even recall James circa Seven.  This is comfortably the best set we’ve seen them play, possibly because it’s the first time they’ve all managed to fit onstage simultaneously.

After all this, The Sun Ra Arkestra is an unusual headliner, but if this isn’t the sort of festival where expectations can be ravaged, nobody here has even tried to power a Moog by plugging into a leyline, and if bandleader Marshall Allen, at 95, hasn’t earned the right to do what the fuck he wants, then we’re from Betelgeuse (NB by this point, we aren’t entirely sure we’re not from Betelgeuse).  Tonight, they mostly eschew the frenzied freedom and synthesised abstraction of much of the back Ra-talogue for a smooth but slightly abstract lounge swing, including a surprisingly straight take on croon classic “Stranger In Paradise”.  Gavin Bryars once tried to capture the music of the Titanic’s band as they sank underwater, but the Arkestra make the sound of a Reno casino band melting into their daquiris, and if they seem to be treading water occasionally – space is the placeholder – and it isn’t the stellar voyage we expected, they sure can Pleaides tunes.

And then, it’s out onto the towpath for a moonlit stumble back to the mundane world.  Should the planets align, and Oddball return next year, we’ll certainly be there at the outset, ready for take-off.  Start the countdown, commander Trump...and smoke me a covfefe, I’ll be back for breakfast.

You Let One Off?

Quick review of an all-dayer a little while ago, featuring a previously unseen paragraph, cut from Nightshift because there wasn't room/ it was about a band from outside Oxon/ it was undbearably knowing.

ROYAL PARDON, MD, Bully, 19/9/15

It’s quite refreshing to find an all-dayer with no trappings.  The mysteriously named Royal Pardon (“Run that past one again, footman”) from newcomer MD Promotions is not tied to charity, advertising, label promotion or the dressing up box, it’s a just a 7 hour selection of local music in a big beer-fuelled room, which is more than enough justification for a day out.  Opener Kid Kin’s laptop is broken, so we get a truncated, on the hoof mini-set of his texturally savvy library music melodies.  As ever, the tenor of his De Wolfe electro is a delight, but this swiftly salvaged set is perhaps indicative of a bill of often great music and great ideas that don’t necessarily always make for great sets. 

31hours are a band for whom stylistic cohesion is probably not a major concern, though that’s not to say their eclectic prog pop isn’t immensely pleasing.  If there is a thematic anchor to their music it’s that high fret-twiddling jam block-thwacking Afroals sound, which is probably the least interesting element, outweighed by freeze-dried Glass Animals balladry and lush Pompeii era Floyd soundscapes.

Pipeline’s funky contemporary indie is a far simpler proposition, along the lines of The Wedding Present without the poetry and Senseless Things without the tequila.  The vocals are winningly effortless, and if the set of snappy tunes runs out of steam slightly before the finish line, this is a band that is maturing steadily.

We Have A Dutch Friend, by contrast, have a long way to go.  Their blueprint of sweet Sundays lilts punctuated by strident Chumabawamba folk harangues is viable enough, but the playing is messily fragmented and joylessly stilted, probably because they appear petrified almost to the point of collapsing; perhaps that lowlands connection could suggest something to settle the nerves. 

We’re used to Tiger Mendoza’s hip-hop airs and post-EDM power pop, but tonight perhaps the best moments are when angle-ground guitar thrashes are laid over asbestos beats in a manner recalling light industrial acts like Ministry and Nitzer Ebb.  Some of the transitions between tracks are not as fluid as they might be, and sometimes different compositional elements seems to jostle each other to get to the front of the mix, but overall this set shows that ian De Quadros is an inventive and varied producer.

A small break is presumably there to let the engineer grab some dinner and go and find more Cliff Richard records to play us, but we return after 40 minutes to find the atmosphere changed for the better.  Not only is the room thankfully a little busier, but the later sets have a more coherent flavour, none more so than Cosmosis whose affable acoustic roots rock (think Stone Temple Pilots busking Cure songs) is presented with such unforced bonhomie even those of us who have an anaphylactic reaction to wackiness get swept up in the japes.  The lead vocalist keeps looking shiftily from side to side, as if to check that they’re getting away with it, but the set proves that music doesn’t have to be serious to be worthwhile.

Duchess announce that this is their last gig, which is a pity as their playing is tighter than ever.  It’s low-key as valedictory sets go, but not short on energy, especially a bouncy “South Parade”.  As well as inheriting Paul Simon’s trick of slipping filched global drum patterns underneath eloquent pop (Rhythm Of The Saints is in evidence as much as the obvious Gracelands), we catch snatches of motif and melody that remind us of “Walk On The Wild Side”, “Down Under” and “I Started A Joke” - but mostly we pick up pure character and musical fluency.  They will be missed.

Word count limited.  Bel Esprit: Longpigs.  Gene.  Gomez.  Las.  Mansun.  Stone Roses.  Sum of parts?  Nope.  “Creep” cover?  Best not, eh.

The Scholars were an epic alt stadium act who may as well have been called The Copy Editors, and whom we didn’t care for.  Strangely, Zurich, the trio that evolved from them are rather excellent despite ostensibly dealing in the same sound.  A lot of the bombast and bluster has been excised  leaving elemental, muscular glory pop with flightpath vocal lines and dark disco rhythms, along the lines of a Cinemascope Half Rabbits.  Their music might not be complex or mysterious, but it snags the spirit and skewers the emotions, an unexpectedly direct and affecting conclusion to a highly enjoyable but not always entirely convincing event.

The War On Pteradactyl

Do you know what I'm not doing tonight? Going to The Wheatsheaf. Great place, of course, but if I did it three nights in a row it wouldn't do me the world of good, I suspect. You can't live on a diet of Oxford Gold and tinitus, can you?


V/A – WE DO NOT HAVE A DINOSAUR (download)


People doing things for charity, we like that. People doing bleepy things, we like that. So, let’s be honest, we’re well disposed towards this Japan tsunami fundraising LP from promoters The Psychotechnic League and The Modernist Disco, featuring various flavours of Oxfordshire electronica. As is the way with this sort of thing, the record feels more like a grab bag than a carefully cohered entity, but anybody with a passing interest in digital dance music should find something to make the fiver tag acceptable, not least the efforts from the curators of the project: We Are Ugly (But We Have The Music) offers a simple little chugger that sounds like it could have been made by a schoolchild on their Amga (not necessarily a bad thing), and Space Heroes Of The People’s “Kosmoceratops”, an insistent spiral of buzzing synths that’s like being harangued by Jean-Michel Jarre at a political rally.

There’s a fair variety of styles on offer, from Left Outer Join’s crusty trance that brings back king Rizla memories of Astralasia, to icy Biosphere tones from The Keyboard Choir, and Sikorski’s chest-thumping synth rock (which we don’t really like, because it sounds like Big Country doing Eurovision, but it makes a change). “Winter Sounds 4” by King Of Beggars isn’t the arctic techno we were expecting, but rather a portentous grid of synthesised harp with a bleak vocal direct from early OMD, and it’s rather great. Meanwhile, The Manacles Of Acid live up to their name by producing straightforward acid house with samples about, err, acid house; it’s almost criminally unoriginal, but if like us, you find any vestige of critical opinion evaporating in the face of a 303, you’ll agree it’s bloody brilliant. Tiger Mendoza and Cez can also hold their heads high.

But we end with the best. Coloureds have made a track called “Tennis”, which is logical, because listening to its relentless chopped vocal fragments feels like spending four minutes as the ball in a game of Pong. It also sounds like it’s going to break into Orbital’s “Chime”, which is obviously fantastic. Perhaps not a perfect LP, but one well worth getting hold of...unless you’re one of those people who thinks that electronic isn’t real music, in which case just go stick your head in a bucket of elephant dung. I bet even the bucket is plastic. Can’t even get a proper tin bucket nowadays. Poor you. Yes, yes, we know: hell in a handcart.