Issue 48 / September 2014
September 2014 issue of Bido Lito! Featuring CORRUPT MORAL ALTAR, BY THE SEA, DJ DANNY FITZGERALD, GOOD GRIEF, GRUMBLING FUR and much more.
September 2014 issue of Bido Lito! Featuring CORRUPT MORAL ALTAR, BY THE SEA, DJ DANNY FITZGERALD, GOOD GRIEF, GRUMBLING FUR and much more.
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<strong>Issue</strong> <strong>48</strong><br />
<strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Corrupt Moral Altar by Robin Clewley<br />
Corrupt Moral<br />
Altar<br />
By The Sea<br />
Good Grief<br />
Grumbling Fur
fri 29 aug 7pm 14+ £10 adv<br />
get cape.<br />
<br />
<br />
sat 30 aug 10pm 18+ £7 adv<br />
club mtv<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £3.60 adv<br />
BET music<br />
matters<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £15 adv<br />
the magic<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £6 adv<br />
23 fake street<br />
7pm 14+ £5 adv<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £6 adv<br />
<br />
sat 20 sept 7pm 14+ £6 adv<br />
spare room<br />
sat 20 sept 10pm 18+<br />
chibuku<br />
ft. bicep, skream,<br />
<br />
plus more tba<br />
tues 23 sept 7pm 14+ £8 adv<br />
<br />
thurs 25 sept 7pm 14+ £15 adv<br />
<br />
fri 26 sept 7pm 14+ £8 adv<br />
jaws<br />
<br />
sat 27 sept 7pm 14+ £6 adv<br />
<br />
<br />
sat 27 sept 10pm 18+<br />
chibuku<br />
<br />
<br />
plus more tba<br />
thurs 02 oct 7pm 14+ £5 adv<br />
etches<br />
fri 03 oct 7pm 14+ £5 adv<br />
weightstock lll<br />
sat 04 oct 7pm 14+ £8 adv<br />
<br />
the bear<br />
sat 04 oct 10pm 18+<br />
chibuku<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £8 adv<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £14 adv<br />
<br />
thurs 09 oct 9pm 18+ £13.50 adv<br />
(live av show)<br />
6.30pm 14+ £7adv<br />
<br />
<br />
metcalfe<br />
10pm 18+<br />
chibuku<br />
<br />
plus more tba<br />
7pm 14+ £10 adv<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £12 adv<br />
wheatus<br />
7pm 14+ £9 adv<br />
<br />
10pm 18+<br />
chibuku<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £9 adv<br />
<br />
fri 24 oct 6.30pm 14+ £22.50 adv<br />
the tour of<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
fri 24 oct 7pm 14+ £6 adv<br />
the struts<br />
sat 25 oct 7pm 14+ £10 adv<br />
<br />
sat 25 oct 10pm 18+ £10 adv<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £8 adv<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £8 adv<br />
marika<br />
<br />
6.30pm 14+ £10 adv<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £8 adv<br />
the heartbreaks<br />
7pm 14+ £6 adv<br />
richie campbell<br />
7pm 14+ £10 adv<br />
<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £12.50 adv<br />
<br />
<br />
the savages<br />
7pm 14+ £12 adv / £10 nus<br />
the smiths<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £8 adv<br />
<br />
7.30pm 14+ £10 adv<br />
<br />
7pm 14+ £18 adv /<br />
£55 meet & greet<br />
<br />
12pm 14+ £15 adv<br />
lashout fest<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
follow us @artsclubhq and at<br />
facebook.com/mamaco.evartsclub<br />
90 seel street, liverpool l1 4bh<br />
tickets available from ticketmaster.co.uk or 0844 847 2472 (24hr)<br />
mamacolive.com/<br />
eastvillageartsclub
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong> 3<br />
Editorial<br />
One of the real plus points of being with Bido Lito! since issue number one is the ability to be able to<br />
see people develop, be they the artists or events that we cover, or our own contributing team. Everyone<br />
learns at different speeds, of course, and it’s fascinating to see what paths these little twists and turns<br />
in the developmental process take people on.<br />
Take By The Sea, for example, a band who are featured in this month’s issue, making this their fourth<br />
feature in forty-eight issues. Their change in style and substance over this period has been massive,<br />
and it’s been fascinating to document these subtle shifts over the past four years. We can say the<br />
same about Bird, who we’ve featured three times, and We Came Out Like Tigers, All We Are, GhostChant,<br />
Stealing Sheep, Sunstack Jones, The Tea Street Band and Outfit (all featured twice). Each feature we do<br />
is like a snapshot of an artist at a particular<br />
time, and we’d like to think that our body<br />
of work as an independent monthly<br />
cigars with us, and coerce us into writing pretty words about them – ha ha, imagine! The reality is far less<br />
glamourous, of course: we just go to gigs, listen to music, and write about what we – as a team – think<br />
is worthy of the ears of our readers (though we are partial to the odd drop of pink gin too). You don’t<br />
have to agree with us: in fact, it’d be pretty boring if everyone did. Our ears are always open to criticism,<br />
so please let us know what you think.<br />
I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your attention that a lot has been going on at Prenton Park of late (and no,<br />
I’m not talking about the Main Stand getting painted); and I hope that you are as excited as I am by the<br />
arrival of Mark and Nicola Palios as new owners of Tranmere. No? Are you mad? This is the man who,<br />
while playing for the mighty whites, man-marked Alan Ball out of an FA Cup tie in October 1973! He’s<br />
the bloke who turned the FA’s finances around and got Wembley back on track, and Price Waterhouse<br />
Cooper’s go-to man for turning around struggling businesses! He’s the Superman figure we need right<br />
now, striding out of the boardroom, rippling biceps straining at the Lycra, and leading us into a bright,<br />
sustainable, potential leveraging and financially prudent future. The term “audit risk” has never sounded<br />
so sexy. And, henceforth, Faria Alam’s name shall not be mentioned in these pages.<br />
At the time of going to press, the implosion of ATP’s Jabberwocky event is burning the airwaves, as<br />
social media timelines turn blue at the cancellation of one of the biggest gigs of the year, just three<br />
days before the event. I genuinely feel for the thousands of punters who’ve lost out by this fairly<br />
catastrophic fuck up, especially those from overseas who’ve forked out for travel and accommodation<br />
expenses that they won’t get back. Above all, it’s a bloody shame, as this disaster may well spell the end<br />
of ATP after over a decade of brilliant festival curation. All good things must come to end, however.<br />
Now go and stick some Corrupt Moral Altar on. They’re our latest “Bido Lito! band” you know.<br />
Christopher Torpey / @BidoLito<br />
Editor<br />
publication has charted the progression of<br />
these, and countless other, artists over the<br />
past four and a bit years.<br />
One of the amusing gripes we hear from<br />
time to time about our coverage is due to<br />
the artists we cover: “Oh, they’re a Bido Lito!<br />
band”. This always makes me chuckle, not<br />
least because I’m not really sure what is<br />
meant by it. I wonder if people think we<br />
run some kind of exclusive club where<br />
Man Of Fiscal Steel<br />
bands come and drink pink gin and smoke<br />
Features<br />
6<br />
8<br />
CORRUPT MORAL ALTAR<br />
10<br />
THE MUSICAL POETRY<br />
OF CALYPSO<br />
12<br />
GOOD GRIEF<br />
14 GRUMBLING FUR<br />
16<br />
BY THE SEA<br />
ECTOPLASMIC<br />
AUDIO GUIDE<br />
Regulars<br />
4 NEWS<br />
18<br />
PREVIEWS/SHORTS<br />
20<br />
REVIEWS<br />
Bido Lito!<br />
<strong>Issue</strong> Forty Eight / <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
bidolito.co.uk<br />
4th Floor, Mello Mello, 40-42 Slater St,<br />
Liverpool, L1 4BX<br />
Editor<br />
Christopher Torpey - chris@bidolito.co.uk<br />
Editor-In-Chief / Publisher<br />
Craig G Pennington - info@bidolito.co.uk<br />
Reviews Editor<br />
Sam Turner - live@bidolito.co.uk<br />
Designer<br />
Luke Avery - info@luke-avery.com<br />
Proofreading<br />
Debra Williams - debra@wordsanddeeds.co.uk<br />
Words<br />
Christopher Torpey, Craig G Pennington, Naters<br />
Philip, Mark Greenwood, Will Fitzpatrick, Maurice<br />
Stewart, Patrick Clarke, Damon Fairclough,<br />
Richard Lewis, Alastair Dunn, Hannah McEvoy,<br />
Alex Holbourn, Tilly Sharp, Mike Townsend,<br />
Christopher Carr, Can Brannan, Dirk Hebel.<br />
Photography, Illustration and Layout<br />
Luke Avery, Robin Clewley, John Johnson, Oliver<br />
Catherall, Hannah Cassidy, Adam Edwards, Keith<br />
Ainsworth, Gaz Jones.<br />
Adverts<br />
To advertise please contact ads@bidolito.co.uk<br />
Distributed By Middle Distance<br />
Print Distribution and Events Support across<br />
Merseyside and the North West.<br />
middledistance.org<br />
The T<br />
views expressed in Bido Lito! are those of the<br />
respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect<br />
the opinions of the magazine, its staff or the publishers.<br />
All rights reserved.
News<br />
Merseyside Arts Foundation Deadline<br />
This year’s Merseyside Arts Foundation MUSIC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME application deadline is fast approaching. Set up<br />
to help upcoming local acts, the programme selects 12 artists from the list of applicants, who will benefit from expert support<br />
in mentoring sessions and workshops alongside three-day recording sessions at Parr Street Studios and the chance to perform<br />
live at a showcase event. Sounds good, doesn’t it? If you’re interested then you’d better hurry, the application deadline date is<br />
Friday 26th <strong>September</strong>. To apply for the programme or for more information, go to merseysideartsfoundation.org.uk<br />
Release The Music<br />
Having notched up some serious live dates over the past few months, VYNCE are now set to release their debut EP Waves (pictured).<br />
Recorded at Catalyst Studios in St. Helens with Sugar House Music, it will be available as a digital release on 20th <strong>September</strong>. Prime<br />
your ears for deep-rolling bass, staccato guitar riffs and broody minimalism akin to The xx. Local delights BEACH SKULLS are back with<br />
some more lo-fi garage surf, courtesy of Eighties Vinyl Records. Their new single Dreamin’ Blue echoes the sentiment of their dreamy EP<br />
A Different Kind Of Smooth and you can fall in love with it on 7” vinyl on 22nd <strong>September</strong>. Bring on the Californian vibes, baby.<br />
Girl, Put Your Cassettes On<br />
For those of you who have a penchant for analogue, INTERNATIONAL CASSETTE STORE DAY (27th <strong>September</strong>) is going to be your Eden.<br />
Bands and musos from all over the world are taking part in their droves this year and Liverpool is no exception. Blak Hand Records are<br />
issuing 100 numbered tapes of the new single by Manchester’s PURPLE HEART PARADE (pictured), to coincide with their stint at this year’s<br />
Liverpool Psych Fest. Rest Relax Records are also releasing new material, from MITTERNACHT and RONGORONGO, including a creepy<br />
cover of I Can Sing A Rainbow by our Cilla. For more information on the events for Cassette Store Day, head to cassettestoreday.com<br />
Everything’s Alright When You’re Be-Cider<br />
The folks at Heebie Jeebies are determined to make the taste of summer last courtesy of their all-day HEEBIE JEEBIES CIDER<br />
FESTIVAL. As they revel in some fine cider with a range of deliciously obscure bottled and cask offerings, 22 of Liverpool’s most<br />
dynamic independent businesses (including East Avenue Bakehouse and 13 Ink) are joining them for a fête-like celebration of all<br />
things indie. Soundtracking your day out are a host of local live acts, including a stage curated by Bido Lito! The apples are being<br />
fermented and readied for Friday 7th <strong>September</strong>, so for more information get your eyes to facebook.com/OfficialHebbieJeebies<br />
GetIntoThis Relaunch Party<br />
With a brand new look, GETINTOTHIS are preparing to celebrate their swanky, newly independent website with a relaunch party.<br />
The 3rd <strong>September</strong> event will be a testament to GetIntoThis’ eight years of independent music reporting, kicking things off with a free<br />
show in The Kazimier Garden, next door to where the annual GIT Award was held in fine style this year (pictured). Helping to ring in the<br />
festivities will be performances from face-melters STRANGE COLLECTIVE, alt-rockers QUEEN MAUD, and the ever-evolving, downbeat<br />
lamentists DROHNE, with more to be confirmed. For more event information, check out the new website getintothis.co.uk<br />
Bido Lito! Dansette<br />
Our pick of this month's fresh<br />
#PZYK cuts...<br />
Allah-Las<br />
Worship The Sun<br />
INNOVATIVE LEISURE<br />
If listening to ALLAH-LAS doesn’t make you<br />
want to spend the rest of your life catching<br />
waves in California then I’m afraid you’re<br />
musically dead. Percussive Latin lilts mesh<br />
neatly with gently rolling garage grooves<br />
throughout Worship The Sun, which trips<br />
along like a blissful evening stroll on the<br />
sands of Catalina Island. Why can’t all<br />
music sound like this?<br />
Camera<br />
Remember I Was Carbon<br />
Dioxide<br />
BUREAU B RECORDS<br />
As cyclical as the Berlin U-bahn, CAMERA’s<br />
gloriously fizzing electrokraut missives<br />
will make your mind do somersaults.<br />
REPEAT. As cyclical as the Berlin U-bahn,<br />
Camera’s gloriously fizzing electrokraut<br />
missives will make your mind do<br />
somersaults. REPEAT. As cyclical as<br />
the Berlin U-bahn, Camera’s gloriously<br />
fizzing electrokraut missives will make<br />
your mind do somersaults. REPEAT…<br />
Cheval Sombre<br />
Madder Love<br />
SONIC CATHEDRAL<br />
Oxjam Takeover DJ Riff<br />
COMPETITION!<br />
This year’s Oxjam Takeover Liverpool crew are teaming up with a host of local promoters and venues to hold a selection of fundraising<br />
events throughout <strong>September</strong> and October. Having started the ball rolling in August, their latest outing is with Sessions Faction at<br />
Django’s Riff on 5th <strong>September</strong> and will feature a line-up of Liverpool’s rising hip hop/grime talent: JAMIE BROAD, ROSH and 2K among<br />
others. Stick around for DJ sets from DALEMA and CITIZEN SCHNIPPZ too. Watch out also for Oxjam Takeover’s 12-hour DJ event – The<br />
Evolution of Dance Music – coming later in the month. For more information on these events cast your eyes on oxjamliverpool.org<br />
Truly a festival unlike any other, FESTIVAL NO. 6 is an intimate weekend of music, arts and culture, set in and around the<br />
most stunning festival site you will ever see. From 4th to 6th <strong>September</strong>, the pseudo-Mediterranean village of Portmeirion<br />
in north Wales will play host to a bespoke and stunning assortment of artists, headlined this year by London Grammar,<br />
Beck and Temples among others.<br />
Sponsors THE KRAKEN RUM are bringing their own late-night bar to Festival No. 6 this year, featuring a stellar DJ line-up<br />
of Don Letts, Norman Jay MBE, Dave Beer and Bez. We’ve teamed up with Kraken to offer a pair of tickets to the festival –<br />
worth £340 – plus a years’ supply of The Kraken Rum, to one lucky winner in this month’s competition.<br />
To win this amazing prize, all you have to do is answer the following question:<br />
Which band did Bez provide "freaky dancin'" for? a) Happy Mondays<br />
b) Crappy Sundays c) Family Fundays<br />
To enter, just email your answer to competition@bidolito.co.uk by 3rd <strong>September</strong>. All the correct answers will be placed in Beck’s Stetson, the winner<br />
drawn at random and notified by email. Entrants must be over 18 and the winner must be able to prove their age to claim the prize. Good luck!<br />
New York mood poet Christopher Porpora<br />
captured the magic of the narcotic raver’s<br />
comedown on his 2012 record Mad Love,<br />
and some of the record’s fans have<br />
contributed re-workings of drone folk<br />
lullaby Couldn’t Do to this brand new<br />
12” EP. Justin Robertson and The Horrors’<br />
Tom Furse are among those tripping the<br />
navel-gazing light fandango, making for<br />
a hyper cosmic buzz.<br />
Anthroprophh<br />
Outside The Circle<br />
ROCKET RECORDINGS<br />
You can travel to the ends of the earth in<br />
search of a totally unique way of making<br />
otherworldly noise, but sometimes all<br />
you need is a guitar. A guitar, some FX<br />
pedals, and a desire to frazzle the air<br />
about you with terrifying energy. This<br />
is Paul ‘Prof’ Allen’s speciality, and on<br />
Outside The Circle he nails it in dizzying<br />
fashion.<br />
bidolito.co.uk
facebook.com/o2academyliverpool<br />
twitter.com/o2academylpool<br />
instagram.com/o2academyliverpool<br />
youtube.com/o2academytv<br />
Thurs 28th Aug • £16.50 adv<br />
St. Vincent + Arc Iris<br />
Sat 30th Aug • £12.50 adv<br />
Mordred + Twelve Gauge<br />
Thurs 11th Sept • £17 adv<br />
Jesus Jones Doubt Tour<br />
Fri 12th Sept • £10 adv<br />
Definitely Mightbe<br />
(Oasis Tribute) 20 Year Celebration,<br />
performing Definitely Maybe in full<br />
followed by greatest hits<br />
Fri 19th Sept • £18 adv<br />
The Wall Of Floyd<br />
Recreating the iconic Pink Floyd<br />
Weds 24th Sept• £7.50 adv<br />
Kobra And The Lotus<br />
Fri 26th Sept • £13 adv<br />
The Urban Voodoo Machine<br />
Sat 27th Sept • £16 adv<br />
The Pierces<br />
Weds 1st Oct • £15 adv<br />
Wayne Hussey (The Mission)<br />
Fri 3rd Oct • £9 adv<br />
The Big Cheese Tour<br />
ft. Lonely The Brave<br />
+ Marmozets + Allusondrugs<br />
Sat 4th Oct • £18 adv<br />
Goodgreef Xtra Hard<br />
- 10 Year Celebration<br />
ft. Darren Styles + Re-Style + Alex Kidd<br />
+ Andy Whitby + Mark EG<br />
Sun 5th Oct • £15 adv<br />
Supersuckers<br />
Fri 10th Oct • £14 adv<br />
Kids In Glass Houses<br />
Sat 11th Oct • £10 adv<br />
Knotslip<br />
Sat 11th Oct • £15 adv<br />
ICW<br />
(Insane Championship Wrestling):<br />
I Am The Walrus<br />
Mon 13th Oct • £14 adv<br />
The Lawrence Arms<br />
+ Sam Russo + Bangers<br />
Tues 14th Oct • £13 adv<br />
Alestorm<br />
Thurs 16th Oct • £15 adv<br />
Clean Bandit<br />
+ Years & Years<br />
Fri 17th Oct • £16 adv<br />
Maverick Sabre<br />
Fri 17th Oct • £16 adv<br />
Hawklords<br />
Sat 18th Oct • £15 adv<br />
The Carpet Crawlers<br />
Performing ‘Genesis - The Lamb Lies<br />
Down On Broadway’ - 40th Anniversary<br />
Thurs 23rd Oct • £25 adv<br />
Boomtown Rats<br />
Ratlife UK Tour<br />
Fri 24th Oct • £9.50 adv<br />
Lucius<br />
Sat 25th Oct • £15 adv<br />
9pm - 3am • over 21s only<br />
Drome ft. Dream<br />
Frequency Live PA<br />
+ Trix vs X-Ray<br />
+ MC Cyanide + DJ Rob<br />
+ MC Cutter + DJ Nibbs<br />
Tues 28th Oct • £11 adv<br />
Little Comets<br />
Thurs 30th Oct • £16 adv<br />
Haken<br />
+ Leprous + Maschine<br />
Thurs 30th Oct • £16.50 adv<br />
Wild Beasts<br />
Fri 31st Oct • £28.50 adv<br />
UB40<br />
Sat 1st Nov • £18.50 adv<br />
Gong<br />
Mon 3rd Nov • £14 adv<br />
SikTh<br />
+ Heart Of A Coward + Idiom<br />
Tues 4th Nov • £16.50 adv<br />
The War On Drugs<br />
+ Steve Gunn<br />
Weds 5th Nov • £17.50 adv<br />
Band Of Skulls<br />
+ Bo Ningen<br />
Thurs 6th Nov • £11 adv<br />
The Shires & Ward Thomas<br />
Fri 7th Nov • £15 adv<br />
The Crazy World<br />
Of Arthur Brown<br />
Sat 8th Nov • £10 adv<br />
UK Foo Fighters<br />
Fri 14th Nov • £10 adv<br />
Antarctic Monkeys<br />
Sat 15th Nov • £12 adv<br />
8pm - 1am • over 18s only<br />
Quadrophenia Night<br />
+ Danny Mahon<br />
Sun 16th Nov • £20 adv<br />
Alabama 3<br />
Mon 17th Nov • £17.50 adv<br />
Lit<br />
Weds 19th Nov • £18 adv<br />
T’Pau<br />
Thurs 20th Nov • £18.50 adv<br />
6pm<br />
Pop Punks Not Dead<br />
ft. New Found Glory<br />
+ The Story So Far<br />
+ Candy Hearts + Only Rivals<br />
Fri 21st Nov • £14 adv<br />
Absolute Bowie<br />
Sat 22nd Nov • £11 adv<br />
The Smyths<br />
30th Anniversary of Hatful Of Hollow<br />
- the seminal album in its entirety<br />
Fri 28th Nov • £11.50 adv<br />
The Doors Alive<br />
Sat 29th Nov • £10 adv<br />
The Hummingbirds<br />
Sat 29th Nov • £12 adv<br />
Legend (Bob Marley Tribute)<br />
Mon 1st Dec • £18.50 adv<br />
Rescheduled show • original tickets valid<br />
Professor Green<br />
Weds 3rd Dec • £15 adv<br />
Graham Bonnet<br />
Catch The Rainbow Tour<br />
Thurs 4th Dec • £12 adv<br />
Electric Six + The Usual Crowd<br />
Fri 5th Dec • £12 adv<br />
The Lancashire Hotpots<br />
+ The Bar-Steward Sons Of Val Doonican<br />
Sat 6th Dec • £15 adv<br />
Dreadzone<br />
Sun 7th Dec • £8 adv<br />
Raging Speedhorn<br />
Sat 13th Dec • £10 adv<br />
Catfish And<br />
The Bottlemen<br />
Fri 19th Dec • £22.50 adv<br />
Rescheduled show • original tickets valid<br />
Fish A Moveable Feast Tour <strong>2014</strong><br />
Sat 20th Dec • £18 adv<br />
Cast<br />
Sat 14th Mar 2015 • £14 adv<br />
Whole Lotta Led<br />
Thurs 28th Aug • £16.50 adv<br />
St. Vincent + Arc Iris<br />
Sat 27th Sept • £16 adv<br />
The Pierces<br />
Thurs 30th Oct • £16.50 adv<br />
Wild Beasts<br />
o2academyliverpool.co.uk<br />
11-13 Hotham Street, Liverpool L3 5UF • Doors 7pm unless stated<br />
Venue box office opening hours: Mon - Sat 11.30am - 5.30pm • No booking fee on cash transactions<br />
ticketweb.co.uk • seetickets.com • gigantic.com • ticketmaster.co.uk
6<br />
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Corrupt<br />
Moral<br />
Altar<br />
Words: Mark Greenwood / @markgreenwood23<br />
Photography: Robin Clewley / robinclewley.co.uk<br />
A beer garden in Preston on a sunny Sunday afternoon is<br />
perhaps an unlikely entry point into the bleak and visceral world<br />
of CORRUPT MORAL ALTAR, but you’ve got to start somewhere,<br />
right? The Southport-based quartet – John Cooke (Guitar), Chris<br />
Reese (Vocals), Tom Dring (Drums) and Adam Clarkson (Bass) –<br />
have accumulated many tags of late (grindcore, doom, sludge),<br />
ones that are usually attributed to metal and heavy music. Their<br />
debut album, Mechanical Tides, escorts you through the ruins<br />
of a broken, post-industrial city, promising a new land of eternal<br />
pain and atrophy. It was released through cult metal label<br />
bidolito.co.uk<br />
Season Of Mist in July, and features special guest appearances<br />
from Carcass and Menace, grindcore heavyweights whose<br />
presence feels like an endorsement from the highest levels<br />
of the occult. Yet there’s also a hardcore punk element in this<br />
most interesting of maelstroms, which comes through in the<br />
pessimism of their lyrics and performance.<br />
The back room of Preston’s Adelphi is the setting for my<br />
first experience of Corrupt Moral Altar’s live onslaught and<br />
it’s a strange experience – a short sharp shock delivered with<br />
sincerity and honesty. Their music stinks of burning sweat and<br />
fear. As a band, they’re tight as hell, despite a deliberately dirty<br />
sound, and they intersperse metal structures with punk anger,<br />
pounding tempos and slick time changes. Anger is the overall<br />
attitude, torturous and unrelenting in its battery. Sections of<br />
intensity resemble bouts of bare-knuckle boxing where invisible<br />
opponents are pummelled, leaving witnesses who come to<br />
the altar battered but hungry for more. As a bystander, I am left<br />
exhausted by waves of brutality, treading water in a whirlpool<br />
of mayhem.<br />
A few weeks later and safely back on dry land, I re-encounter
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong> 7<br />
the band over a few IPAs and I’m surprised at how open<br />
and approachable they are; we quickly bond over a mutual<br />
appreciation of Breaking Bad, and a mutual disgust for David<br />
Cameron and George Osborne. A wasp enters through the<br />
window and irritates us, and I ask the band about their writing<br />
process and why they are so angry.<br />
“We write from personal experience, from what we see<br />
going on around us. We are particularly pissed off with blind<br />
consumerism and the malpractice of governments and<br />
authorities. For us anger at authority is always there and will<br />
never go away, giving us plenty as a band to write about. We<br />
see stabbings and blood and loads of urban decay all around us,<br />
and this inspires us to be continuously sick, in a psychological<br />
sense, and we hope this comes through in the music.”<br />
In a material sense, Corrupt Moral Altar’s music and<br />
performances correspond to their name, suggesting an offering<br />
or sacrifice – a contribution of corrupt flesh and blood in a<br />
futile attempt to cleanse impure souls. There are themes of<br />
redemption, purging and catharsis present in their conceptual<br />
armour. Metallic and monstrous, the Corrupt Moral Altar set<br />
shifts through a series of violent scenarios, screams and heavy<br />
drones. Primitive mantras and dirges are occasionally whipped<br />
into down-tuned frenzies as the band enact razor-blade rituals.<br />
“We don’t really write about mythical stuff. For us the writing<br />
has to be real and extreme, both musically and lyrically. We<br />
work together, fusing little poems into patterns that begin<br />
to fit sequentially. We can’t really say what comes first and<br />
sometimes we discover things accidentally, such as the dual<br />
vocal stuff on the album. Each track remains a work in progress<br />
right up to its recording.”<br />
Within the album there are a number of surprises, always<br />
taking the listener off guard. The artwork is of particular interest,<br />
depicting a matrix of entwined souls, exposed and vulnerable<br />
to the violence and aggression of a corporate spectacle. I’m<br />
reminded of paintings and engravings illustrating The Divine<br />
Comedy and Dante’s depictions of Hell: the perceived sins of<br />
Christianity – greed, indulgence and malice – processed by the<br />
band and subsequently ravaged.<br />
“We loved the artwork of bands such as Entombed and<br />
Morbid Angel. When we were younger we always appreciated<br />
great covers, sometimes at our peril. But naturally we wanted<br />
to spend a lot of time on the artwork. We were staring into<br />
the Mersey, watching tides and waves, like chains or synapses<br />
in the brain, and imagining bodies in there, churned up and<br />
unable to escape. Immediately we were reminded of the<br />
crushing immorality of modern life… we wanted to reflect this<br />
in the title as well. We commissioned an artist, Lucas Ruggieri,<br />
to do the cover because we loved his work and we wanted it to<br />
have that material depth. It took him five months to finish it but<br />
we wanted that specific depiction of futility and resistance.”<br />
Corrupt Moral Altar urge themselves to push against the<br />
prescribed agendas of capitalism; to organise and redefine<br />
a subculture that refuses to budge. The opening track of the<br />
album, Father Tongue, blasts structures of patriarchy, depicting<br />
domestic disdain in an abandoned, tinned-up ruin. Slabs of<br />
dark metal grind and tangle with intense blasts of beats, the<br />
doomier aspects revealing dark deeds as spirals of black blood<br />
spread over floorboards. Heavy riffs ooze an intense atrophy<br />
of pleasure mixed with disgust and bewilderment. Echoes<br />
add haunting textures and malevolence to a range of bloody<br />
harmonies and distorted frequencies. And they’re not through<br />
with us yet.<br />
“We hate the idea of categorisation, and it plays into the<br />
politics of control and classification. We want to develop our<br />
own personality as a band. We aren’t afraid of revisiting genres<br />
that have inspired us. We even appreciate prog-rock and<br />
psychedelic music for its textures and use of structures that<br />
resist the typical construction of music. We try to constantly<br />
think outside the box.”<br />
Rather than batter away at the fantastic or satanic, the<br />
band are eager to explore more esoteric myths such as Die<br />
Glocke – a secret scientific weapon associated with Nazi<br />
Occultism and anti-gravity research. The band utilise this object<br />
symbolically, describing in an abstract sense the weapons<br />
utilised in oppressing modern societies, such as surveillance<br />
and technology. Arteries of fury throb throughout Mechanical<br />
Tides. However, there is no pretence or illusion as the listener<br />
is invited to envisage the monotony of a northern city and its<br />
outskirts, pushed away from the spectacle of corporations that<br />
pander to aggressive consumerism and macho culture, while<br />
ignoring the dirt, grime and puke stains that accumulate within<br />
dreams of cosmopolitanism, celebrity culture and hip bakeries.<br />
Banal tropes of homogenous culture are spat back with<br />
vitriol in the face of bland consumerism, negating economies of<br />
reproduction and distribution. I first encountered hardcore/death<br />
metal and thrash back in the early 1980s, quickly becoming<br />
obsessed with bands such as Napalm Death, Celtic Frost, Energetic<br />
Crusher and Hellbastard, their recordings disseminated via C90<br />
tapes and carrier pigeons. These days, the internet allows free<br />
and instant sharing of underground metal and the days of tape<br />
trading are gone: however, touring and consistency are things<br />
that emphasise the importance of bands like Corrupt Moral Altar,<br />
who appear unwilling to take their foot off the gas. Though<br />
not afraid to experiment, they stick to their guns, maintaining<br />
a sense of integrity that embraces immediacy and exchange.<br />
Collaboration and networks are key to these bands and, despite<br />
an aggressive individualism, there is, paradoxically, a great deal<br />
of generosity and support for other bands.<br />
“We met in Southport by accident really. We were hanging out<br />
together and regularly getting smashed and we just decided to<br />
start making music. We started two years ago and we’ve been<br />
gaining momentum ever since. We do see ourselves as isolated<br />
from the Liverpool scene, but at the same time we’ve had loads<br />
of collaborations with bands such as Iron Witch, We Came Out<br />
Like Tigers and Coltsblood. We always try to help each other out<br />
with recording and touring.”<br />
It’s refreshing that this generation is following a template<br />
set by early punk bands. There can be many comparisons made<br />
between contemporary metal/hardcore bands and their 20th<br />
Century predecessors, lads and lasses still keen to abandon<br />
mundane factory work or careers in the service industry in favour<br />
of their own creative practices. Loyalty and pride are visibly<br />
recognisable at metal gigs across the North West, evidenced<br />
in the audiences that support such events. Bodies are inscribed<br />
with tattoos and strange symbols, hair is overgrown, and battle<br />
vests are emblazoned with an array of bands spanning decades,<br />
so that VoiVod and Possessed now share the same denim space<br />
as EyeHateGod and Nails.<br />
The prestige of signing for a label like Season Of Mist means<br />
that Corrupt Moral Altar can focus more on the music and less<br />
on the complicated labours of arranging gigs and putting out<br />
material. In a short time they have come a long way, and are<br />
enjoying the acclaim they deserve. Like so many metal/doom/<br />
hardcore bands in the North West, they’re savouring success<br />
which is not necessarily measured in financial accumulation.<br />
Instead, they are able to sustain their activities of making<br />
records and touring without losing their souls to the more<br />
corporate tendencies of the music industry.<br />
After wrapping up the conversation, I continue back to the<br />
Liverpool suburbs. Mechanical Tides is my music of choice,<br />
blasting out of my diminutive car speakers, which can barely<br />
handle the intensities of sound that the band evoke. My<br />
knuckles are white as I drive and I resist the temptation to put<br />
my foot down and crash into any innocent bystanders who get<br />
in my way. In many ways, this is the litmus test for the bands<br />
I encounter and Corrupt Moral Altar have passed with flying<br />
colours. Long may they continue to prosper.<br />
Mechanical Tides is out now on Season Of Mist.<br />
corruptmoralaltar.com<br />
bidolito.co.uk
8<br />
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
BY<br />
THE<br />
SEA<br />
Words: Christopher Torpey / @CATorp<br />
Photography: John Johnson / pooloflife.co.uk<br />
Four years ago Bido Lito! spoke to BY THE SEA for the first time,<br />
and encountered a band with not only oodles of tunes but oodles<br />
of promise too, yet they were afraid of their own shadows. It<br />
seems pretty fucking obvious to say that a lot can happen in four<br />
years, but By The Sea may well be the living embodiment of this<br />
old cliché. The By The Sea that pulses and twinkles through new<br />
album Endless Days, Crystal Sky (their follow-up to 2012’s self-titled<br />
debut record) is virtually unrecognisable to that band who we<br />
described as “the grandchildren of The Byrds playing Townes Van<br />
Zandt songs” back in our second issue. The summery shimmers<br />
have been replaced by brooding melodramas, all Depeche Mode<br />
synths and Johnny Marr Chorus pedal guitar noodling. Endless<br />
Days, Crystal Sky is a record that brims with conviction, and this<br />
newfound swagger suits them well. So what changed?<br />
Where we were curious four years ago about where they came<br />
from, now we want to know where By The Sea are going with this<br />
new album, and what it took to get there. So we sat down with<br />
them and tried to pick apart the building blocks of Endless Days,<br />
Crystal Sky, and find out how they pieced it all together. Halfway<br />
through the interview vocalist and guitarist Liam Power stops to<br />
reflect on the direction the conversation has taken. “This is like<br />
bidolito.co.uk<br />
some kind of a monster therapy session! We all needed to get<br />
this out, I think – we’ll be here for hours!”<br />
By The Sea on… the gestation period of Endless Days, Crystal Sky<br />
Joe Edwards (Keys, Synths): We recorded it last summer, then<br />
obviously the mixing was done from then. The week that the first<br />
album came out [in November 2012] we had Endless Days already<br />
there, as well as some other demos. And then we had it all done<br />
within about six months – written and demoed.<br />
Liam Power (Guitars, Vocals): It wasn’t the fact that we wanted<br />
to rush and do a second album, it was more due to how long we’d<br />
sat on the tunes for the first album for. We had Endless Days, and<br />
then we thought ‘Can we do this, is it that much of a jump?’ And<br />
by the time we were five tunes into the second album we thought<br />
that it wasn’t that much of a jump. It still sounds like us. It all just<br />
got a bit synthy.<br />
By The Sea on… a more synthetic approach<br />
JE: That’s probably mainly me! (laughs) That wasn’t really<br />
intentional though.<br />
LP: I was kind of conscious to get more synths in… We lost our<br />
other guitarist [Steven Campbell] and so that meant there was<br />
loads more room in the arrangement for the synths, and we’d<br />
kind of always wanted that.<br />
Daniel O’Connell (Bass): It was more of a practical thing though<br />
because we were demoing it [this album]. We never demoed the<br />
first album at all. I think the first album’s songs are like sketches.<br />
For this one we sat down and wrote it as we were demoing it, and<br />
we did most of it in Joe’s garage.
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong> 9<br />
LP: It’s more like a necessity because it lays the base down<br />
for the tune. You can get such a stronger foundation of a tune if<br />
you do the keys first: you haven’t got that thing where you have<br />
a straight bassline that follows the chords. There’s more room<br />
to manoeuvre. The whole sound was basically built around Joe’s<br />
Selma drum machine.<br />
JE: Yeh, drum machines and synths, and then layers on top of<br />
that. It was Endless Days where we first started it, went in and<br />
were like ‘ah let’s just try this New Order beat’, and then we had<br />
a mini-Korg lying about. Without really thinking ‘let’s go synth’ it<br />
kind of came from that and we heard how good it was and that<br />
we could actually do it. It’s like a different way of writing really,<br />
compared to the first record – and it’ll probably be different again<br />
for the next one. When you write in the practice room you only<br />
ever hear it while you’re playing it. And then you record it, and<br />
that’s how it is. Whereas with this way [of recording] you change<br />
it as you’re going along… There’s a lot more space in this record.<br />
LP: I think that, because the synths are there, we didn’t have to<br />
fill the space with wanky guitar lines over and over. The guitars<br />
are a bit more sparse now.<br />
DO’C: What were we to begin with? First we were a folky sea<br />
shanty band. Then we were shoegaze. And we were jangly Byrds<br />
for a while. And now we’re 80s synth lords, apparently!<br />
By The Sea on… the studio<br />
Andy Royden (Drums): All the pre-production [for Endless Days,<br />
Crystal Sky] was already there because we’d demoed it.<br />
DO’C: Yeh, it wasn’t like we started again from scratch in the<br />
studio. We took it in and the framework was already there.<br />
JE: We pretty much used a lot of the keyboard sounds off the<br />
demos for the record, and some bass as well. It was kind of<br />
already there, and then we just made it a bit better when we went<br />
in the studio, with guitar parts and vocals. Obviously Bill [Ryder-<br />
Jones, producer] sprinkled a bit of magic on there.<br />
LP: Bill helped with the arrangements of some tunes. We had<br />
too many layers though still: Bill helped by suggesting us to leave<br />
parts out and stuff. There was a little bit of pressure with being in<br />
Parr Street. We couldn’t go in and dilly-dally around – Bill totally<br />
managed that. He’d tell us to ‘go in and get this done today’. I<br />
don’t think we could have figured that out ourselves. We’d<br />
probably have spent so much more time on tunes.<br />
JE: It’s just good to have outside ears, and someone whose<br />
opinion is different from ours, us who’ve lived with the tunes for<br />
so long. Equally, you can disagree with him and he will listen to<br />
you. It’s not like he’s always right! Even though he often is. But<br />
yeh, we work well together, I think: it’s a two-way thing.<br />
LP: We’re speaking about this like it’s Pet Sounds, when it’s<br />
more like Chumbawumba’s first album! (laughs) I think we’ll<br />
always be a better studio band than we are a live band though.<br />
We’ve played some good gigs and stuff, but I think the studio is<br />
where we all wanna be. It’s not as intense.<br />
DO’C: Yeh, I’d go with that, deffo.<br />
JE: I do love the studio – but then I do love the spotlight too, ha!<br />
(laughs) We just wanna make good records, mainly.<br />
By The Sea on… self-releasing<br />
LP: I think we could have put it out on a label, but there would<br />
have been a lot of waiting round and it wouldn’t be coming out<br />
when we want it to. It’s half the problem with some bands, they’re<br />
too precious. And then they end up missing the boat.<br />
JE: It was kind of the plan originally to use our label – War Room<br />
Records – for other stuff, but then it kind of made sense to release<br />
this album ourselves as well. It was more important for it to be<br />
out, and this seemed the quickest way of doing it – even though<br />
it has taken ages. And there will be other stuff to come on the<br />
label too. Tear Talk’s EP is done, that’ll come out next. And then<br />
hopefully Minnietonka [who has provided backing vocals on At<br />
Your Window and Another Way] as well, but Bill’s kind of looking<br />
after that. And then we’ll see. Loads of disco white labels, I hope!<br />
DO’C: We set up the label originally to work with Tear Talk; it<br />
was never the plan to be doing the By The Sea album. Because<br />
we have got a publishing deal with Domino, initially we thought<br />
we’d be going with an indie label for the second record. But<br />
we just kind of got passed around a little bit and we thought<br />
‘mmm…’. In the end we struck a deal where we own the master<br />
rights to the album. So we were like ‘Why would we give this<br />
to another label where someone else can potentially profit off<br />
it when we can just put it out ourselves?’ And we’ve had enough<br />
money from it all to get good press and radio plugging out of it.<br />
So, even though we’re bringing it out on our own label, it’s not<br />
like we’re going to be dubbing cassettes in Joe’s garage. We go<br />
through Tri-Tone and PIAS for the distribution, so it’s pretty much<br />
like any other label. You can’t be sitting around waiting for a<br />
mythical three-album deal. That’s what a lot of bands will do, and<br />
it’ll just never happen.<br />
And with a final sigh from guitarist Mark Jackson our therapy<br />
session comes to an end. In their transition from folky upstarts<br />
By The Sea have shown a willingness to be elastic with their<br />
approach, ultimately to the benefit of their new wholesome<br />
sound. And they’re already itching to get back in the studio and<br />
work on album number three. If you’re looking for any parallels,<br />
Pet Sounds was the Beach Boys’ eleventh studio album, so By<br />
The Sea may still have a few years of experimenting in the studio<br />
ahead of them before they reach their peak. And you can bet<br />
there’ll be a few more therapy sessions along the way.<br />
Endless Days, Crystal Sky is out now on War Room Records.<br />
bytheseabythesea.bandcamp.com<br />
bidolito.co.uk
10<br />
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Caribbean culture is currently enjoying a resurgence of popularity<br />
in the UK. The island influence is seen in many facets of society<br />
– fashion, food, sport and of course music. As is often the case,<br />
coming into contact with the mainstream has stripped it down<br />
to the most recognisable of totems: Usain Bolt and Bob Marley,<br />
Rihanna and Reggae Reggae sauce. Luckily, a local lad has taken it<br />
upon himself to dig a little deeper, and shine a long-overdue light<br />
on the criminally underrated world of calypso music. Following in<br />
the footsteps of Latin and jazz pioneer<br />
DJ Gilles Peterson, respected dubstep<br />
producer The Bug and punk scholar<br />
Jon Savage, Wavertree's own DANNY<br />
FITZGERALD has worked with seminal re-<br />
many countries outside of the Caribbean such as France, Spain,<br />
Nigeria and Britain. The novelty image – cast in the 30s and 40s<br />
through the success of the likes of Harry Belafonte – is usually<br />
based around the jauntiness of the music and Caribbean patois'<br />
unique rendering of the English language. In reality, there are often<br />
weighty lyrical subjects alongside the bawdy humour. Calypso<br />
laid the foundations of Caribbean music in Britain, in the wake of<br />
the migrations of the 1950s. Lord Kitchener – the ‘Grandmaster Of<br />
the diss tracks, the crime stories, the social awareness – it's all<br />
there.” A quick perusal of the tracklist – Pussy Galore, West Indians<br />
In England, Exchange No Robbery and Lift The Iron Curtain, as<br />
well as the album's title Musical Poetry In The Caribbean – bears<br />
this out emphatically.<br />
Fitzgerald’s reverence for the music seeps in to the warmth of the<br />
compilation: his is a pure enthusiasm, uncluttered by the cynicism<br />
that hinders most who choose to turn their passion into a career.<br />
Every point comes with an involuntary chuckle,<br />
and is illustrated perfectly with another record<br />
from the pile. “My collection was so big I just<br />
felt I had to do something with it,” is his modest<br />
response to enquiries regarding his motivation;<br />
issue imprint Soul Jazz Records to collate<br />
a history of calypso through words and<br />
music, in a way that allows us to re-assess<br />
the genre and celebrate its impact from<br />
both a musical and a cultural standpoint.<br />
As we settle down to chat in my living<br />
room – accompanied by a portable record<br />
player and a big stack of 7”s – Fitzgerald<br />
blows out his cheeks almost in disbelief as<br />
he searches for an answer to the question<br />
of how it all began: “It all started from<br />
an email I sent to Soul Jazz, pretty much<br />
on a whim. I'd been a fan of theirs for a<br />
while.” Over the past 20 years, Soul Jazz<br />
founder Stuart Baker has championed a<br />
mind-boggling number of genres across<br />
almost 300 LP and 7” releases. Wonders<br />
are plucked from all parts of the globe<br />
and distributed from his Soho office-cumrecord-shop,<br />
appropriately named Sounds<br />
Of The Universe. Having brought Latin<br />
jazz and experimental German rock and<br />
electronic “Musik” to the attention of its<br />
expanding base of followers, one of the<br />
few gaps in the Soul Jazz armoury was a<br />
dedicated calypso album – and it was one<br />
that Fitzgerald hoped he could fill: “They'd<br />
touched on calypso with a release called<br />
Mirrors To The Soul, but that was mainly<br />
a pan-Caribbean compilation with a few<br />
calypso tracks on it. I just thought they could<br />
be interested in my collection. They got<br />
The Musical Poetry<br />
back to me inside half an hour.” Fitzgerald’s<br />
level of enthusiasm proved vital not just<br />
to getting the idea off the ground in the<br />
first place, but in sustaining it throughout<br />
Of Calypso<br />
an arduous fourteen-month project. “The<br />
first few months was spent sending them<br />
mix CDs,” Fitzgerald continues, “and they'd<br />
like one or two tracks from each. The initial<br />
proposal was to do two CDs of 20 tracks, so<br />
Words: Maurice Stewart / theviewfromthebooth.tumblr.com<br />
I was a bit worried it would take about five<br />
Illustration: Oliver Catherall / olivercatherall.co.uk<br />
years!” Eventually two discs became one,<br />
as Baker helped him to think more about the everyman than the<br />
Calypso’ – and his peers articulated the struggles to acclimatise<br />
aficionado. “I was making a calypso fan's calypso album, when what<br />
to their new surroundings in a way that was accessible to both<br />
was needed was a sampler for the casual listener to dip into.”<br />
his countrymen and their new hosts. This was social commentary<br />
More help for the uninitiated comes in the form of a<br />
rendered through music before Dylan or Baez.<br />
comprehensive liner essay that expertly traces calypso's timeline<br />
The lyrical content is what first resonated with Fitzgerald,<br />
as its popularity expanded around the world. The genre's history<br />
reminding him of the hip hop records that had dominated his<br />
can be traced back to Trinidad, and represents the cross-pollination<br />
stereo until that point. “Calypso is a massive influence on hip<br />
of European and African influences occurring throughout the<br />
hop,” he insists. “All of its lyrical styles have their roots in what<br />
region. It has also played an important part in the histories of<br />
the calypso artists were doing. The boasting, the sex and drugs,<br />
bidolito.co.uk<br />
however, this impressive record collection<br />
wasn't entirely dormant beforehand. Fitzgerald<br />
has held a weekly DJ residency at both Tabac<br />
and Brooklyn Mixer for a number of years. His<br />
real motivation is a love of the music, not just<br />
for the wilfully obscure – which is a charge that<br />
some would no doubt throw at a white boy<br />
from Wavertree with an obsession for calypso<br />
music. This love is clear from the delight in his<br />
voice while discussing tales of trawling the<br />
internet in search of rare gems. After torturous<br />
deliberation he acclaims Mighty Dougla's<br />
Exchange No Robbery as his favourite track<br />
on the album. “It's probably not actually the<br />
best song on there, but I'm biased as he's my<br />
favourite calypso singer. He's got such a soft,<br />
crooning voice, and his lyrics are quite clever<br />
and really funny.” Within seconds, Dougla's<br />
Dance Me Lover fills the room. “That's one of<br />
the records that really got me going initially,”<br />
effuses Fitzgerald. “It made me think: 'that's it...<br />
this is what I’ll be collecting from now on.' I<br />
went on holiday with a mixtape of some of my<br />
favourites, and just driving around with those<br />
tunes on made up my mind.”<br />
Having spent the afternoon absorbing the<br />
smooth sounds coming from my speakers<br />
it's easy to imagine coming to the same<br />
conclusion. The album's most striking element<br />
is its scope, especially considering the narrow<br />
connotations calypso evokes. Each artist adds<br />
their own set of influences to the mix, be it<br />
the bossa nova of Lord Hummingbird, the jazz<br />
flavours of J.B. Williams or the pop sensibilities<br />
of Azie Lawrence.<br />
In the opening paragraph of the liner<br />
essay, calypso is described as “one of the<br />
most exciting and enduring forms of musical<br />
expression to emerge from the beginning of<br />
the 20th Century.” After being completely taken<br />
in over these 31 pages and 19 tracks this is a<br />
statement with which I can only agree. In fact,<br />
so entertaining and compelling is the argument<br />
made by this compilation, I’d say that only the uninformed could<br />
refute this claim. Go on, give it a try. I dare you to disagree.<br />
Calypso: Musical Poetry in the Caribbean 1955-69 is out now on<br />
Soul Jazz Records.<br />
Head to bidolito.co.uk now to listen to an exclusive guest mix by<br />
Danny Fitzgerald, featuring some of his favourite calypso songs that<br />
didn’t make the final compilation.<br />
souljazzrecords.co.uk
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PRINCIPLE VENUE PARTNERS
12<br />
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Words: Will Fitzpatrick<br />
Photography: Good Grief and Eureka California<br />
bidolito.co.uk<br />
It’s taken six<br />
months of planning, one hastily<br />
arranged stand-in drummer and an awful lot of fuming<br />
at travel agency websites, but finally we are here. GOOD GRIEF<br />
are on American soil. And what’s the first thing that<br />
greets us as we wait for our connecting flight in a bar at<br />
Philadelphia International Airport? Why, it’s a plethora of<br />
TV screens showing the golf at Hoylake while the PA blasts<br />
the familiar strains of The Beatles. OF COURSE. Are you sure<br />
this isn’t home?<br />
A little background: last year, Good Grief embarked on<br />
our first tour as a band, hooking up with ace American<br />
garage pop duo Eureka California in the process. Together<br />
we travelled the UK, taking in sculpture parks and prehistoric<br />
heritage sites in between playing shows and irritating those<br />
good enough to let us crash on their floors (tour in-jokes are<br />
a truly terrible business for collateral victims). Over a year<br />
later, Eureka are driving us around the East Coast of America,<br />
and we’re stupidly excited at the prospect. Bido Lito! were<br />
foolhardy enough to request some of the highlights from our<br />
tour journals: what we could remember of it is written here.<br />
CAST:<br />
EUREKA CALIFORNIA (Athens, GA)<br />
Jake Ward<br />
– guitar/vocals<br />
Marie Uhler<br />
- drums<br />
GOOD GRIEF (Liverpool)<br />
Will Fitzpatrick<br />
– guitar/vocals<br />
Paul Abbott<br />
– bass/vocals<br />
Gabby Dos Santos - drums<br />
21st July – Philadelphia, PA<br />
Tonight we’re playing at Golden Tea House in Philly, a city which<br />
reminds us of home in its clear division between regenerated<br />
tourist traps and working-class areas left to rot. Naturally, the<br />
venue is housed amidst the latter, but we’re bowled over to<br />
discover that this gnarled old punk house actually has a much<br />
better setup than most ‘pro’ venues. Most notably, the stage is set<br />
up on the back wall of the kitchen, facing the fittings, and thereby<br />
ensuring that the fridge<br />
is handily within reach of all present.<br />
Whilst walking to a nearby store to pick up some generic<br />
American lager (PBR, Highlights, Icehouse… take your pick – they’re<br />
all superbly cheap and taste of fucking nothing), we also discover<br />
that in 1965 Martin Luther King addressed 10,000 people<br />
at a road<br />
junction not two minutes’ walk from<br />
the show. Admittedly, we only learn this after tripping over a sign<br />
when Jake from Eureka insists on having his photo taken outside<br />
a hot-dog vendor called ‘Texas Wieners’, but still, pretty aweinspiring.<br />
Our hosts look after us nicely, even<br />
writing “loo” on the bathroom sign just in case we’re confused<br />
about whether to go for a wee or a nice relaxing soak. Tonight’s<br />
openers Humanshapes blow us all away with Hot Snakes riffs<br />
and plenty of sass, before an incredible acoustic performance<br />
from pop-punk legend Joe Jack Talcum of the Dead Milkmen. Our<br />
set goes pretty well, but it’s the phenomenally catchy racket of<br />
our tourmates that wins the night.<br />
Halfway through proceedings,<br />
Humanshapes’ drummer drops a<br />
veritable menagerie of intricate<br />
balloon animals from the balcony.<br />
It’s surreal yet brilliant; exactly<br />
what we were hoping this tour<br />
would be.<br />
23rd July – Brooklyn, NY<br />
We’ve all heard stories of<br />
what New York will be like in<br />
the summer: sweltering heat,<br />
unbearable humidity… but<br />
how hot can it really be? Very,<br />
it turns out. Manhattan’s sky-<br />
scraping tower blocks seem<br />
to trap the heat at street level,<br />
whilst subway vents blast<br />
unfeasibly hot air onto the<br />
pavement. It’s impossible<br />
to walk 20 metres without<br />
dripping with sweat.<br />
One dash under the<br />
Hudson later and, despite<br />
Brooklyn’s relatively airier<br />
streets, the temperature<br />
barely drops. As we<br />
arrive at the venue, Titus<br />
Andronicus frontman<br />
Patrick Stickles gives<br />
the English members<br />
of our party some grade verbal shit for no<br />
apparent reason. No-one cares, though, because we’re too busy<br />
racing towards the room’s giant fan (“This is my new god, “ declares<br />
Paul) – a popular spot in the oven-like warehouse space known as<br />
low-<br />
Shea Stadium. And yeah, we know. A band from Liverpool playing<br />
a venue with that name. What are the odds?
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong> 13<br />
In the end, the show is a triumph for all concerned, with great<br />
sets from local bands Deep Pockets and Crowbait. We should also<br />
mention at this stage that Good Grief’s on-loan drummer Gabby<br />
plays in the mighty Town Bike back home and, with TB singer<br />
Sarah currently studying in Manhattan, it only seems right that<br />
we drag her on stage to sing their brat-punk classic Jerk With<br />
New Shoes. As high points go, it’s only topped by the heavens<br />
suddenly opening halfway through the night, as everyone races<br />
outside to gratefully soak up the rain.<br />
24th July – Salem, VA<br />
There’s not a lot that can be said for an eleven-hour drive from<br />
Queens to Salem, Virginia, but in the event it feels a lot less<br />
punishing than it appears on paper – even Marie from Eureka<br />
seems unaffected by such a Herculean undertaking, despite taking<br />
the wheel for the whole journey. In any case, tonight we’re excited<br />
because we’re playing with arch-lunatic pop experimentalists The<br />
Bastards Of Fate (anyone who saw them lay waste to MelloMello<br />
in 2013 will understand our joy).<br />
Billy’s Barn provides the receptacle for tonight’s show: a huge<br />
wooden shed converted into a saloon straight out of The Blues<br />
Brothers. As we arrive, a group of around forty elderly ladies are<br />
square-dancing to generic Nashville<br />
another bunch of nerds hawking our indie-punk wares to DIY<br />
spaces across the country, but here… why, we could be kings…<br />
25th July – Athens, GA<br />
We’ve been looking forward to this one. It’s the<br />
hometown show for Eureka, and we<br />
have a lot of friends<br />
there thanks<br />
to our ties<br />
with<br />
indie<br />
Happy<br />
Athens<br />
label<br />
Happy<br />
Birthday To Me.<br />
We’re playing an<br />
all-dayer<br />
called<br />
Slopfest, and are<br />
determined to make<br />
our mark – which<br />
goes<br />
swimmingly<br />
until halfway through<br />
the set, whereupon<br />
I break a string and<br />
swiftly discover that DIY<br />
in the USA doesn’t mean<br />
helping<br />
country – this is what you<br />
want from America, really, isn’t it? The locals give us<br />
a heroically rowdy reception, dancing and hollering with gusto.<br />
“You guys rock!” insists one girl as we pack away afterwards,<br />
repeating the statement to the extent that my earnest thanks<br />
genuinely don’t seem to be enough. Back home, we may be just<br />
other bands<br />
out. We jettison a few<br />
songs and muddle through,<br />
attempting to block the<br />
nagging suspicion that this<br />
may be a missed opportunity.<br />
Still, Derek, the promoter,<br />
seems pleased, repeatedly<br />
informing us we were great<br />
before buying shots for all and<br />
repeatedly flinging more beer<br />
tokens our way. So it must’ve<br />
been alright.<br />
At some point in Salem, Jake<br />
seems to have been struck down<br />
by a mystery bug but, despite<br />
having to extricate him from his<br />
sick bed, Eureka California are still<br />
magnificent tonight. Every track is<br />
a relentlessly catchy masterpiece of<br />
slacker-pop guts and Kinksian glory –<br />
they should be huge. Along with HHBTM boss Mike<br />
Turner, they’re also extremely nice folks, treating us to a weekend<br />
of mini-zoos, Mexican banquets and swimming in rivers. We feel<br />
pretty bloody lucky.<br />
29th July – Charlottesville, VA<br />
No-one’s sure how we’ve arrived at this point,<br />
but it’s the last show of the tour, and we’re all trying ridiculously<br />
hard to avoid being glum. It’s been more fun than we could’ve<br />
imagined – we’ve eaten so much ridiculous food, drunk so much<br />
obscene-strength IPA and generally had the best possible time<br />
with some of our favourite people. Almost as if to reduce the<br />
culture shock of returning to the UK, we appear to be playing<br />
Chester tonight. Or so the town of Charlottesville would have<br />
us believe: it’s small and charming, with quite possibly the<br />
best comic shop we’ve seen on this entire tour (just show me<br />
somewhere that sells Charles Forsman/Oily Comics stuff and<br />
I’m happy).<br />
Despite our prospective tears, tonight turns out to be one<br />
of the best shows of the whole run. Our host, Drew, plays in a<br />
terrific Superchunk-esque band called International Friendly, as<br />
well as being a rep for a local brewery called Champion. He fills<br />
us full of a deadly brew called Missile, lending sufficient bravado<br />
to me and Paul that we invade the stage for Eureka’s final song,<br />
grabbing the mics and honking along enthusiastically. It’s<br />
probably a shambles, but it feels right. Celebratory, even – Eureka<br />
California are the best. We don’t wanna go home. Don’t make us<br />
go home. We’re going home.<br />
The Eureka California/Good Grief split 7”, released jointly by<br />
HHBTM, Rok Lok and sncl, is available in the UK from sncl.collectivezine.co.uk.<br />
Eureka California will tour the UK again in November.<br />
goodgriefliverpool.bandcamp.com<br />
bidolito.co.uk
14<br />
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
grumbling<br />
Words: Patrick Clarke / @paddyclarke<br />
fur<br />
If you were to picture ‘psychedelic music’, what would that<br />
image be? You might be tempted to jump for the classics – the<br />
impossible riffs and improbable outfits of Hendrix and co, the<br />
inspired insanity of Syd Barett-era Pink Floyd, or the airtight pop<br />
opulence of Revolver and Pet Sounds. Equally, your first thoughts<br />
might be of the wacked-out majesty of The Brian Jonestown<br />
Massacre, indie-revivalists like Temples and Tame Impala, or<br />
the genre-bending headfuckery of Goat; it might even be The<br />
Monkees. Historically, it’s a genre so rich that it takes a scholarly<br />
effort to pin down a common gene amongst all those blurred and<br />
shattered frontiers.<br />
In today’s musical climate of hyper-accessibility, this most<br />
resurgent of scenes has seen new peaks of experimentation<br />
reached and boundaries deftly sidestepped, and that fertility is<br />
reflected in this year’s LIVERPOOL INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF<br />
PSYCHEDELIA. The line-up takes on a more than sizeable chunk of the<br />
genre’s now-mammoth musical kaleidoscope, but amid the myriad<br />
a few names stick out above the rest. Headliners GRUMBLING FUR<br />
are one such name. With new album Preternaturals affirming the<br />
plaudits of last year’s LP Glynnaestra, the duo (Alexander Tucker<br />
and Dan O’Sullivan) are now firmly in their stride and a prodigious<br />
reputation for pulling surprises in their live set precedes their<br />
upcoming performance at this year’s festival.<br />
The funny thing about Grumbling Fur, however, is that they<br />
garner attention for more than their talent – their new record<br />
has more in common with the dramatic vocals of 80s synthpop<br />
or the glide of leftfield 90s electronica than it does with the<br />
direct approach of many of their contemporaries, but equally the<br />
lifeblood of a psychedelic tinge is undeniable. “It’s not so much<br />
like pop but I think it’s more sort of ‘songs’ in a way, they have<br />
choruses and verses…” says Tucker when I ask about the release.<br />
“In our minds we were making this pop album and then a lot of<br />
the reviews for it and a lot of people are saying it’s still a pretty<br />
fucking intense, sonic experience, y’know?”<br />
Preternaturals has feet in two camps, neither a bloated<br />
freak-out nor remotely predictable; more than a mere fencesitter,<br />
the band’s sound hinges upon their wide berth: “Some<br />
days it just sounds like lots of particles are sort of just clashing<br />
and smashing together, and other days it sounds like quite<br />
straight songs in a way. I think that’s what psychedelic music is,<br />
something that hangs between two worlds, a structured world<br />
and a deconstructed one.”<br />
“Another thing about psychedelic music is what a band like The<br />
13th Floor Elevators taught me,” says the multi-instrumentalist<br />
on the subject of approaching that trickiest of genres, “about<br />
how in the nucleus of a song you can view it as one thing – as<br />
parts, as melodies – but also you can dive in and go to individual<br />
members. And when you do that it can seem like everybody is<br />
almost playing like a different song at the same time, that timewarping<br />
sort of thing that they do.”<br />
While walking the tightrope of accessibility and acclaim,<br />
Grumbling Fur still take the time to ensnare and exhibit as much<br />
bidolito.co.uk<br />
texture as possible, with guitars, strings, keys and Tim Burgess<br />
making their appearance in manifold forms. From the sparse<br />
futurebeat of White China Pencil to the lavish and subtly twisted<br />
strings of Feet Of Clay, and the looming and dissonant closer<br />
Pluriforms, it’s still an adventurous listen despite its accessible<br />
inclinations. In a suitable twist leftfield hip hop is cited as a<br />
key source of inspiration, one early idea being a beats album,<br />
though the additions to their sound remain rooted in strong<br />
songwriting. “I love songs and I’ve always loved songs but I still<br />
like the idea [that] a song can be played in an elastic band kind<br />
of way. You can go from just singing or making a sound with<br />
your voice or your throat then you can have this huge orchestral<br />
ensemble, and be putting together huge rich, lush songs. I like<br />
everything between.”<br />
Everything between it is then, and the duo can be proud<br />
of a worthily flexible album, but with it comes the wetting of<br />
many live whistles, especially given the upcoming headline slot,<br />
and you’d be right to wonder just how their textural variety is<br />
going to translate on stage given their slender membership.<br />
“We’re both swapping between bass, guitar, cello, viola, and<br />
then sometimes it’s just the electronics and vocals,” we’re told,<br />
along with a promise of an autoharp and what are only referred<br />
to as “objects”. “I think we’ve transposed these songs onto<br />
different instruments and different ways of playing it. On some<br />
of them the basic structure is quite simple in a way.” A pair of<br />
string musicians also joined the duo at their album launch in<br />
mid-August – “a violin player and, er, I can’t remember the name<br />
of it… some kind of baroque instrument” – and such a bolster<br />
to their depth could perhaps appear up in Liverpool come the<br />
closing days of <strong>September</strong>.<br />
Despite the twosome’s assorted leadings, should everything<br />
come together expect an unbridled experience: “It’s very much<br />
like a collective willpower to get the songs happening. If we’re<br />
not quite present or something it can sound a bit… not lacklustre,<br />
but it doesn’t gel; even though parts of it are on computer, those<br />
things have already been processed and reprocessed. A lot of the<br />
time we’re working off the grid, so we’re just having to keep the<br />
particles together.” It’s fair to say, however, that any fears of stray<br />
particles would be relatively unfounded. Though just a handful of<br />
albums into their career, the pair have more experience than their<br />
fresh sound might suggest. “I’m thirty-eight now and I started my<br />
first hardcore band when I was seventeen,” says Tucker, who then<br />
moved on to an experimental solo career. “Dan was producing<br />
my records, my solo stuff, and that’s how we started working<br />
together. From that point it was about coming up with separate<br />
things and coming together and building stuff up.”<br />
A fear for the future would be similarly naïve as, though we’re<br />
not far into Preternaturals’ lifespan, it appears there’s plenty<br />
more in the pipeline, with what is described as “pretty much a<br />
whole other album” nearing completion. Recorded in-between<br />
Glynnaestra and their current outing, the record’s sound looks<br />
to settle similarly sonically as it does chronologically, and we<br />
can look forward to a preview appearing on their setlist: “There’s<br />
a couple of tracks we’ve been playing live, one called Milky<br />
Lights, one called Sunny, which is this really kind of stretched,<br />
tolling, whooshing sort of beat. Really stretched, elastic bass<br />
and strings.”<br />
So the future looks bright for Grumbling Fur, but most<br />
importantly so does the present – to have earned such acclaim<br />
thus far already would be the envy of any musician; should<br />
everything come together live expect nothing but the best in<br />
exciting, leftfield pop from a band whose flame looks unlikely<br />
to burn out. Combine that with the dexterity of their new album<br />
and a slender but concrete back-catalogue, and it seems safe to<br />
expect an atom or two to be split.<br />
Grumbling Fur are one of the headliners of Liverpool International<br />
Festival Of Psychedelia, which takes place at Camp And Furnace on<br />
26th and 27th <strong>September</strong>.<br />
Preternaturals is out now on The Quietus Phonographic<br />
Corporation label.<br />
mothlite.blogspot.co.uk
NEW GIGS<br />
ANNOUNCED<br />
–<br />
CATRIN FINCH &<br />
SECKOU KEITH<br />
Wednesday 8 October 7.30pm<br />
St George’s Hall Concert Room<br />
PACO PEÑA<br />
Requiem for the Earth featuring<br />
Sense of Sound Singers<br />
Thursday 9 October 7.30pm<br />
The Metropolitan Cathedral<br />
Liverpool Irish Festival <strong>2014</strong><br />
MOXIE<br />
plus support: Anam<br />
Thursday 23 October 7.30pm<br />
St George’s Hall Concert Room<br />
DAVE GORMAN<br />
Gets straight to the Point*<br />
(*the Powerpoint)<br />
Thursday 11 November 8pm<br />
Liverpool Philharmonic Hall<br />
GRAHAM<br />
NORTON LIVE<br />
The Life and Loves of a He Devil<br />
Saturday 15 November 8pm<br />
Liverpool Philharmonic Hall<br />
JOHN GRANT<br />
with the Royal Northern Sinfonia<br />
Saturday 22 November 7.30pm<br />
Liverpool Philharmonic Hall<br />
Liverpool Irish Festival <strong>2014</strong><br />
WE BANJO 3<br />
plus support: Maz O’Connor<br />
Thursday 30 October 7.30pm<br />
St George’s Hall Concert Room<br />
Liverpool Irish Festival <strong>2014</strong><br />
THE GLOAMING<br />
Sunday 2 November 7.30pm<br />
St George’s Hall Concert Room<br />
BELLOWHEAD<br />
Monday 10 November 7.30pm<br />
Liverpool Philharmonic Hall<br />
Image Imelda May<br />
St Andrew’s Night Celebration with<br />
CAPERCAILLIE<br />
Sunday 30 November 7.30pm<br />
St George’s Hall Concert Room<br />
IMELDA MAY<br />
Friday 5 December 7.30pm<br />
Liverpool Philharmonic Hall<br />
DaDaFest International <strong>2014</strong><br />
STAFF BENDA<br />
BILILI<br />
plus support<br />
Saturday 6 December 7.30pm<br />
Liverpool Philharmonic Hall<br />
Liverpool Philharmonic Hall<br />
Box Office 0151 709 3789<br />
liverpoolphil.com<br />
Booking fees Online/Phone Orders £1.50 per ticket administrative fee<br />
applies + 75p per order postage fee (if required).<br />
In Person No fees for payment by cash or debit card. Credit card orders incur<br />
a 2% transaction fee. Cheque orders are subject to a 70p per order charge.
If, like us, you’re old enough to have had to rely on the PLAY/REC<br />
buttons on a knackered cassette deck to make your own bespoke<br />
playlist, then the charm of home taping will need no explaining to<br />
you. And yet the appeal of listening to music on cassette has had<br />
a resurgence of late, with the likes of Burger Records, Faux Discx<br />
and Cheesus Crust committing to exclusive runs of their artists’<br />
new records on cassette. With the second annual International<br />
Cassette Store Day (27th <strong>September</strong>) promising a swell of limited<br />
edition and one-off ‘tape only’ releases, we thought we’d indulge<br />
in the spirit a little (and try to expunge the memory of buying the<br />
Alisha’a Attic album from Woolies on tape all those years ago). In<br />
honour of ICSD <strong>2014</strong> we asked DAMON FAIRCLOUGH – author of<br />
the book Record And Play, and lover of all things ferric oxide – to<br />
imagine a new mixtape for us and write up some sleeve notes to<br />
accompany it. The results weren’t quite what we expected…<br />
There are things you expect to find in a cheap hotel room:<br />
translucent white soap wrapped in thick waxed paper; a packet<br />
of shortbread; Nescafé by the sachet; and maybe a teabag or two.<br />
But what you don’t expect is a shimmering 1980s Walkman lying<br />
on the bed, its orange sponge headphones looking good enough<br />
to eat. Tastier than the shortbread at any rate.<br />
That’s why I pause as I step into the room and notice it nestling<br />
on the duvet. For a moment I wonder if the space is already<br />
occupied, but blinking through the murk and snapping on the<br />
light, I can see that the bedding is tucked in and the room is<br />
clearly undisturbed.<br />
A loaded cassette machine on a hotel bed. I decide there’s only<br />
one thing to do.<br />
The headphones clasp my ears in their synthetic-sponge grip;<br />
it feels like a cuddle from an old and forgotten friend. This is 1995<br />
after all – my first night in Liverpool, in a hotel room paid for by<br />
my new employer – and the orange audio earmuffs already look<br />
like history’s off-cuts. And, once they’re in place, my hand moves<br />
automatically: my fingers find the PLAY button, and before I know<br />
it the tape’s concealed mysteries have begun their evocative<br />
journey through my head.<br />
I close my eyes, the night descends, and the apparently abandoned<br />
bidolito.co.uk<br />
magnetic tape unspools. There is music, and there’s a voice…<br />
Track One: No More “I Love You's” / Annie Lennox<br />
“Welcome to your Liverpool Ectoplasmic Audio Guide. If you<br />
have found this cassette, you have been selected to participate in<br />
beta testing of our prototype system – a phantom musical journey<br />
through your future in our city.<br />
“We begin where you came in – at the Burger King at Lime<br />
Street station, half an hour ago. You can picture it as if it’s<br />
happening as I speak.<br />
“You have just arrived from Sheffield with your girlfriend: you<br />
to begin a new job, a new life perhaps, while she has simply<br />
accompanied you on the journey and now waits for a train back<br />
home, wondering whether circumstance is about to drag you<br />
apart. You are excited; she thinks the end might have come. You<br />
scoff a spicy bean burger; she gazes into her coffee and listens to<br />
the record that's playing.<br />
“It's this record, a song whose melancholic crimes could induce<br />
a fatal rush of metaphor to the heart. And so it proves: while<br />
it doesn't register with you as you wipe ketchup off your chin,<br />
it's a sentimental soundtrack that leaves your girlfriend feeling<br />
shattered and in pain. You are oblivious, but as you swallow the<br />
last of your meal and prepare to kiss your girlfriend goodbye, you<br />
are leaving more than a gust of partially digested onion in the<br />
atmosphere between you.<br />
She feels it rushing through the air before it hits her. No more<br />
“I love you’s”: it delivers an emotional punch worthy of a different<br />
breed of Lennox altogether. Lewis, I mean. Not Annie.”<br />
Track Two: Things Can Only Get Better / D:Ream<br />
“Lime Street fades. Fortunately your relationship… doesn’t. And<br />
you and your girlfriend are back in the city, this time picking your<br />
way down Hanover Street past buffed and waxed humanity – the<br />
toned and tanned and tawdry all out on the town.<br />
“It’s a Saturday night two weeks from now; your first big night<br />
out in Liverpool. You follow your new work colleagues as they<br />
drag you from cab to pub to bar to club; they’ve led you from<br />
Smithdown via taxi and now nudge you through crowds towards<br />
a corner doorway into which you all plunge…<br />
“You're in Rosie O'Gradys, a low-ceilinged cellar bar that sits a<br />
half-storey below the street. At the bottom of the steps you come<br />
up against a dense pack of dazzling, bronzed specimens with<br />
spirits up, hair down, bottles of Labatt’s Ice clutched in their fists.<br />
You buy booze, and attempt small talk with the people you now<br />
work with – new friends with mysterious lives. But it's impossible<br />
to hear anything they say. There are two lads in the corner – one on<br />
keyboard, one on guitar – with a repertoire of pop-rave anthems<br />
they must have purloined from a service-station dance CD. The<br />
volume is impressive, the singing is not.<br />
“You think of Sheffield, now a fortnight behind you; you think of<br />
its more sullen brand of fun. And you take in the Celtic uproar that<br />
now surrounds you and wonder if things really will get better, or if<br />
detuned D:Ream covers are as good as it's ever going to get.”<br />
Track Three: Flash / Green Velvet<br />
“Here's your answer. Three years in the future, you're in a<br />
strobe-snapped bunker with camo drapes across the ceiling and<br />
there's a machine gun firing blanks in your skull. The room is tight<br />
and dark; it's crammed with bodies, each one writhing, twitching,<br />
beaming. And over and above this grinning mass there's a black<br />
man playing records, green swimming cap on his head, and, as he<br />
surveys the crowd and is pleased with what he sees, he begins<br />
to recite a deadpan prose-poem into the upturned ear-piece of a<br />
pair of headphones.<br />
“‘Good evening parents,’ he sneers. ‘Tonight I'm gonna take<br />
you on a tour of... Club Bad.’<br />
“But this is not Club Bad. This is Voodoo, in Liverpool. It's Club<br />
Good. It's where you drink Evian, hug strangers and partake in<br />
the pummelling techno hypnosis that's part shamanic ritual, part<br />
hedonistic rush. And part just a bloody good laugh.<br />
“Green Velvet is the twisted disco alter ego of Curtis Jones<br />
from Chicago. And this track, Flash, is a malevolent joke of a tune,<br />
a smirking stab in the back that both celebrates and sneers at<br />
this scene. You get the joke but you also submit to its enormous<br />
groove, as does everyone else in the room; for this might be the<br />
ultimate Voodoo moment, the peak which it will never surpass.
llustration: Hannah Cassidy / hannahcassidycreative.tumblr.com<br />
“And as you leave with your girlfriend by your side, she tilts her<br />
loved-up grin towards yours. ‘Amazing,’ she says, and you agree.<br />
‘Shall we get married?’ she says. And you agree.”<br />
Track Four: Follow Fashion / Misty In Roots<br />
“And here's a house, a tiny two-up two-down in Aigburth Vale.<br />
It's the home where you and that girlfriend of yours – now wife,<br />
remember – have sunk the coins and fluff and rubber bands that<br />
passed for savings, and it all belongs to you. And the Halifax<br />
Building Society.<br />
“It's late at night, or early morning; hard to tell. You stand in the<br />
middle of the living room floor with crumpled eyes and sagging<br />
heart. You're tired, wiped out. So why not go to bed?<br />
“Squint a little harder through the sodium half-light and it's<br />
clear to see why you remain here, gently rocking. Over your<br />
shoulder and in the fold of your chin there's a baby. He sleeps,<br />
at last. And it seems that as long as this deep roots rumble spills<br />
from your speakers and you ride that gentle rocking rhythm back<br />
and forth, he will stay asleep, content to curl up on his dad.<br />
“It took a while reach this point. You arrived home from the<br />
hospital with a human being in your hands, and placed his basket<br />
on the floor and shut the door and realised he didn’t come with a<br />
manual. So when he whined and shrieked well into the night, and<br />
wouldn't drink and wouldn't play, you plumped for the gentlest<br />
sound you know.<br />
“Misty In Roots: music whose spirit may be torched by a<br />
righteous fire, but which flows over your son's freshly minted<br />
head like cooling holy water from a font. Which is funny, because<br />
dozing in your living room listening to the chant of Jah is as close<br />
to religion as he's ever going to get.”<br />
Track Five: Leaving On A Jet Plane / Peter, Paul and Mary<br />
“Misty's dub echo ebbs from your ears: ‘It's just a dream,’ they<br />
sing. ‘Dreams pass away.’<br />
“And in that moment of not-quite-awakening, you realise<br />
you're no longer alone in a house, but are now one of a crowd<br />
in a school. You rub shoulders with the middle-aged: they are the<br />
balding, the baggy-eyed and tired, and you realise for the first<br />
time that you belong with them. These are your people.<br />
“You are parents perched on Polyprop chairs, and in front of you<br />
are your kids parked on brown varnished benches. In a hall that<br />
usually hangs heavy with insolence, disinfectant and cabbage,<br />
today there's some prize giving, speeches and talk of exciting<br />
careers yet to come. Then the head teacher, centre stage, scans<br />
the room and sighs. Another year group is about to fade from his<br />
life, heading for education’s next stage.<br />
“As the kids nudge and wink and stifle their chatter, another<br />
teacher scuttles over to a hefty old CD player and jabs a button.<br />
There's a booming strum of acoustic guitar as the intro kicks in far<br />
too loud; there's frantic knob twiddling; some stern glances. Then<br />
Peter, Paul and Mary begin their song – over-earnest perhaps, in a<br />
style from which it's easy to take the piss – and before you know it<br />
the kids have joined in and are belting out Leaving On A Jet Plane<br />
at the tops of their voices, hammering home to their mums and<br />
dads the fact that one day, rather soon, they'll be gone.<br />
“Your son is hiding on the back row, like he always does. You<br />
catch his eye and smile, and he smirks back; then he reddens, ducks<br />
behind his mate, and disappears once more from your sight.”<br />
Track Six: The Entry Of Christ Into Liverpool / The Liverpool Scene<br />
“Hope Street: a dappled morning; the approaching wallop of<br />
a marching band. Maybe it’s an Orange parade you think, or one<br />
of those Scouse samba groups that have stalked the streets ever<br />
since Capital of Culture set them free. But then you realise, as you<br />
cross junctions drawn in pixellated cobbles, that the drumming<br />
and trumpets are all in your head. Performed by the poetry/rock<br />
hybrid The Liverpool Scene, they carry with them a 1960s Liverpool<br />
echo – the voice of Adrian Henri reading his most evocative poem.<br />
“You and your family pause at the top of Mount Street and<br />
you glance across at the Georgian terraced house in which your<br />
favourite poet once lived. He's your favourite poet because he<br />
isolated the ephemera of his life and cast it adrift on a stream<br />
of melancholic thought – a stream piped from Liverpool gutters,<br />
from Mersey rain.<br />
“A ghostly parade passes by, conjured up by Henri's poem; it’s not<br />
Orange lodge or samba crew, but a gathering in honour of a kitchensink<br />
Christ with greasy locks and chip papers round his feet. And,<br />
as the spectral figures brush against your thoughts, and move on<br />
towards the Philharmonic, the Everyman, the Cathedral, you realise<br />
that this really is home now; for you, for your family... forever?<br />
“The music tails off; the images fade. Your Ectoplasmic Audio<br />
Guide is over…”<br />
“Thank you for listening. Please rewind the cassette and leave<br />
the player in its original location. You may like to know that our<br />
future plans include a past/present/future Christmas special,<br />
and cloud-based guided spirit journeys via an online streaming<br />
service. We look forward to leading you through the music of your<br />
life again soon.”<br />
And, with that, the sound cuts out; the cassette judders to a stop.<br />
I open my eyes and feel for the headphones, for the Walkman,<br />
for its chunky controls. I want to rewind and replay, to hear it all<br />
again. I want to know if it has really foretold my Liverpool future;<br />
I want to know if I can believe what I've heard.<br />
But, rather predictably, there’s nothing there. So instead I fill<br />
the mini kettle and listen to the music of its hectic, rolling boil,<br />
then I burst open the shortbread and sip Nescafé milked with<br />
warm UHT.<br />
My mind is all a-tumble; my thoughts seem woozy and<br />
stretched. There are marriages, children, new houses; there are<br />
Liverpool streets that I don’t yet know. But there’s something else<br />
too, another thought that just won’t let go. It isn’t the wife or the<br />
baby, the clubbing or the kids. It’s that thing they said…<br />
“Cloud-based online streaming service.”<br />
They’re words that seem like English, but together, they make<br />
no sense at all. I shrug to myself, weary and puzzled. Then I curl up<br />
on the sheets, and drift off with the city telling tales in my head.<br />
Damon Fairclough’s book Record and Play: Music, Memory<br />
and Six Imaginary Mixtapes is available in paperback from<br />
noiseheatpower.com.<br />
The Ectoplasmic Audio Guide is available as a Spotify playlist at<br />
bit.ly/EctoAugGuide.<br />
bidolito.co.uk
18<br />
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Edited by Richard Lewis<br />
Previews/Shorts<br />
JULIAN PEREZ<br />
Returning for their first event<br />
of the <strong>2014</strong>/15 winter season,<br />
MODU:LAR bring JULIAN PEREZ to the<br />
recently revitalised Magnet. Inspired<br />
by the sounds that emanated from<br />
Chicago and Detroit in the early 1990s, Perez cut his teeth in the clubs of London and Berlin. A<br />
firm fixture on the European festival circuit and a regular presence at Ibizan superclubs, expect<br />
tickets to move fast.<br />
The Magnet / 6th <strong>September</strong><br />
PATRICK WOLF<br />
Making a return visit to the city<br />
following a rapturously received<br />
show at The Epstein Theatre last<br />
year, PATRICK WOLF plays in the<br />
venerated surroundings of the<br />
Anglican Cathedral. Taking a magpie approach to genres, moving between electro-pop and<br />
baroque chansons, next month’s show is a one-off occasion between a run of European<br />
festival dates.<br />
Anglican Cathedral / 8th <strong>September</strong><br />
The musical alter ego of<br />
South London-born, Vienna-based<br />
SOHN<br />
Christopher Taylor, electronica artist<br />
SOHN, released debut LP Tremors<br />
to across-the-board critical praise in<br />
April. Winning favourable comparisons to James Blake and Rhye, the 4AD signing has notched<br />
up an impressive list of collaborations alongside his own work, including remixing Lana Del<br />
Rey track Ride.<br />
The Kazimier / 18th <strong>September</strong><br />
HOLLY HERNDON<br />
As part of the Syndrome<br />
sessions, the collective team<br />
up with Deep Hedonia to bring<br />
acclaimed electronic composer HOLLY<br />
HERNDON to the city. EP Chorus,<br />
released in February, has been critically applauded, with the title track receiving particular<br />
praise for its audacious sampling of Holly’s internet browsing history set to electronic backing<br />
– hailed by one reviewer as “arrestingly gorgeous and frightening all at once.”<br />
24 Kitchen Street / 5th <strong>September</strong><br />
David Thomas Broughton<br />
Appearing in Liverpool for the first time in five years, experimental folk musician DAVID THOMAS<br />
BROUGHTON visits MelloMello in mid-<strong>September</strong>. Returning to the live circuit with a score of festival<br />
appearances booked across the UK, his live show was described by Mojo in 2010 as “Straddling the line<br />
between music hall turn and avant-garde performance artist.”<br />
With three albums and a clutch of EPs to his name, following 2005 debut LP The Complete Guide To<br />
Insufficiency and the succeeding year’s It's In There Somewhere, a five-year gap ensued before the arrival of<br />
Broughton’s most recent album Outbreeding, released to near-unanimous acclaim in May 2011. After another<br />
lengthy gestation period, forthcoming LP 5 Curses is set to break Broughton’s recording silence. Inspired<br />
by Tom Waits and the confessional tone of Bill Callaghan’s Smog-era work, and compared to contemporary<br />
Sam Amidon, Broughton’s work features a large element of improvisation and spontaneity.<br />
Playing solo acoustic guitar and feeding sounds through loop pedals to create backdrops, as well as<br />
utilising elements of field recordings, Broughton’s sets have been known to feature plenty of wandering<br />
offstage to communicate with the audience, and also pressing various pieces of furniture into service<br />
as percussion. Support on the night comes from artist/folk musician CHIZ TURNROSS, MIKEY KENNEY<br />
(Ottersgear) and IN ATOMS, all for the ridiculously reasonable price of £4.<br />
MelloMello / 19th <strong>September</strong><br />
THE COSMIC DEAD<br />
Part of a space rock lineage that<br />
includes Hawkwind, Glaswegian<br />
prog/psych maximalists THE<br />
COSMIC DEAD make a welcome<br />
return to Merseyside in support of<br />
recent album Easterfaust early this month. The LP showcases their telepathic improvisatory<br />
skills, comprising two monolithic jams recorded in real time. Stellar support comes from<br />
former Bido Lito! cover stars MIND MOUNTAIN plus THREE DIMENSIONAL TANX.<br />
MelloMello / 5th <strong>September</strong><br />
Nashville trio NATURAL CHILD<br />
have been making waves with<br />
NATURAL CHILD<br />
their ragged take on roots rock.<br />
Sourcing The Stones, The Stooges,<br />
Neil Young and plenty of bong hits,<br />
the band’s recent Dancin’ With Wolves LP picked up praise Stateside from Spin and The<br />
AV Club. Former touring partners with Black Lips and almost constantly on the road, their<br />
current tour looks likely to be the springboard to bigger things.<br />
Parr Street Studio 2 / 16th <strong>September</strong><br />
Hope Fest<br />
Hot on the heels of the inaugural HOPE Fest in March, HOPE FEST: THE BIG ONE takes place between<br />
19th and 21st <strong>September</strong>, in aid of Merseyside’s homeless. Five venues across the city will be pressed into<br />
action for the event, playing host to around eighty bands over the three days. In partnership with The<br />
Whitechapel and Basement Advisory Centres, the gigs take place at locations in the city centre (The Brink,<br />
The Lomax, The Magnet), the Baltic Triangle (Baltic Social) and Lark Lane (The Albert).<br />
With the event staffed by volunteers and all the acts donating their time for free, uniquely for a charitybased<br />
event the entrance fee is not monetary: instead festivalgoers will be asked to make a donation<br />
from a list of much-needed items such as clothes and food. Donations can either be made on the door or<br />
in the form of a minimum donation for a wristband to all venues over the weekend.<br />
Clients of The Whitechapel and Basement Advisory Centres will be able to attend their own musical<br />
workshops, including singing with Balance Vocal Studios and guitar tuition with Liverpool Music School.<br />
Acts confirmed across the weekend include KALANDRA (pictured), THE SOUL RAYS, STEREO ELECTRIC<br />
MISTRESS, THE MONO LPS, WESTERN PROMISE, TJ & MURPHY, THE SCIENCE OF THE LAMPS, BLACK SEASONS<br />
and plenty more. Full details can be found at facebook.com/HopeFestLiverpool.<br />
Various venues, 19th – 21st <strong>September</strong><br />
bidolito.co.uk
++<br />
++ + +<br />
LIVERPOOL INTERNATIONAl FESTIVAL OF PSYCHEDELIA<br />
26 + 27 SEPTEMBER <strong>2014</strong> - Camp & Furnace / blade factory liverpool<br />
goat. WOODS. ALLAH-LAS.<br />
<br />
WHITE HILLS. SLEEPY SUN. ZOMBIE ZOMBIE.<br />
WOLF PEOPLE.CHRISTIAN BLAND & THE REVELATORS.<br />
AMEN DUNES. HILLS. GRUMBLING FUR.<br />
D <br />
THE EARLY YEARS. GNOD. HOLY WAVE.ISLET. THE JANITORS.<br />
<br />
MAZES. NUEVA COSTA. POW!. QUILT. ORVAL CARLOS SIBELIUS.<br />
SEPTEMBER GIRLS. TRAAMS. SUDDEN DEATH OF STARS.<br />
TEETH OF THE SEA. THOUGHT FORMS. Satelliti.<br />
THE VACANT LOTS. YOUNGHUSBAND.<br />
<br />
<br />
GLASS MOTHS. HALF LOON. JIBOIA. HELLSHOVEL. IN ZAIRE.<br />
<br />
<br />
strange collective. TEMPLE SONGS. THEO VERNEY.<br />
<br />
TRANSMISSIONS FROM THE OUTER REALMS PRESENTED BY <br />
FT. NOTHING IS DJs (CherryStones, Cage & Aviary, Little Dirty, Chris Reeder)<br />
THE CHIMES OF BIG BEN : richard norris.<br />
Justin Robertson. Bernie Connor. Richard Hector-Jones.<br />
<br />
EXCLUSIVE DAN TOMBS IMMERSIVE INSTALLATION.<br />
SONIC CATHEDRAL 'PSYCH FOR SORE EYES 2' LAUNCH HAPPENING.<br />
ADVENTURES AT THE OUTER REACHES SYMPOSIUM +<br />
<br />
PICCADILLY RECORDS WORLD OF PSYCHEDELIC WAX WONDERS.<br />
<br />
Plus...a myriad of cosmic audio voyages, installations and visual sensations.<br />
<br />
Tickets also available in person from Probe Records (Liverpool),<br />
Piccadilly Records (Manchester) & Jumbo Records (Leeds).
20<br />
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Reviews<br />
VEYU (Keith Ainsworth / arkimages.co.uk)<br />
ASTRAL COAST<br />
Floral Pavilion, New Brighton<br />
It’s not often you flippantly overlook an<br />
impending tempestuous bout of weather as<br />
easily as the festivalgoers at this year’s third<br />
annual ASTRAL COAST FESTIVAL did, particularly<br />
when said festival is situated in the ‘far-awayland-over-the-water’,<br />
New Brighton. Nothing<br />
says stay inside like an angry black sky baring<br />
all on the waterfront, right? Not this time: the<br />
atmosphere in the Floral Pavilion is nothing but<br />
cloudless and the line-up enough to crack the<br />
flags of this summer’s musical agenda. Arriving<br />
at the venue, artists and onlookers are mixing<br />
together, bearing testament to the Merseyside<br />
music scene’s infamous vibe of collaboration<br />
between the two. Beer in plastic cups, two<br />
live stages and a DJ booth, not to mention the<br />
impressive array of summer clobber dotted<br />
around (what thunder?) – it all feels bang on<br />
festival season. The age range varies from a<br />
tot donning ear defenders to Mum and Dad<br />
showing the kids that the funfair a short walk<br />
away is just a little bit silly compared to this.<br />
Wirral lads OXYGEN THIEVES steal the<br />
thunder’s thunder with a high volume and<br />
effortlessly arresting performance. With a new<br />
EP in their back pockets and a re-emergence<br />
on the Liverpool circuit, this is a group with a<br />
welcome new upwardly mobile momentum.<br />
VEYU have spent the first half of <strong>2014</strong><br />
cementing themselves as one of the UK’s most<br />
promising, about-to-go-cosmic guitar bands.<br />
Today their performance oozes composure and<br />
some of the nerves that hampered early outings<br />
are but a distant memory. Breakthrough single<br />
Running still provides a highlight, but more<br />
recent offerings, such as the brooding, grooveladen<br />
Every Time, certainly pour fuel on the<br />
idea that there is plenty to come from one of<br />
Liverpool’s hottest prospects.<br />
We don’t quite know what it is about THE<br />
WILD EYES’ talismanic frontman Huw Roberts:<br />
such a lovely, amiable chap off stage, but stick<br />
him on a riser with his dishevelled cohort<br />
of garage rock sidekicks and he becomes a<br />
skulking, angry, agitated beast - something<br />
akin to an aggravated, teased, Victorian circus<br />
lion, who’s clearly been tortured with repeat<br />
plays of early Stooges cuts and seems to have<br />
been finally set loose on his keeper onstage.<br />
He’s gnarly, it’s fabulous, and we love it.<br />
This is the first northern foray for London’s<br />
DAZES and must present quite a challenge,<br />
given the partisan nature of the bill and the<br />
audience. Despite nobody at the festival<br />
having really heard of them – nor their music<br />
– they give an accomplished, convincing<br />
performance, quickly dragging the assembled<br />
masses on side. It’s early days, but their boy/<br />
girl vocals and chunky guitar solos certainly<br />
provide plenty of fuel for encouragement.<br />
OK, I’m going to come clean, I struggle<br />
with ‘live’ performances consisting solely of<br />
a bespectacled, solitary chap leaning over<br />
a MacBook, looking all 'moody n that'. No<br />
matter how much he taps his foot, scrunches<br />
up his face, shakes his toosh, I just can’t get<br />
away from thinking “this cat’s just checking<br />
his emails.” For me, live performance needs<br />
to be that: a ‘performance’ with an element<br />
of the unknown, an inkling of danger. This is<br />
something GHOSTCHANT, no matter how good<br />
the tunes are (and in parts they’re exceptionally<br />
bidolito.co.uk
“We are proud to be<br />
supplying our unique<br />
services to Liverpool<br />
International Festival<br />
Of Psychedelia <strong>2014</strong>”
good) doesn’t provide. Even when LÅPSLEY takes<br />
to the stage to provide live vocals, it still all<br />
remains a touch constrained and neutered. The<br />
challenge here is to translate these prodigious<br />
young talents into a great live spectacle.<br />
A host of well-known names keep the music<br />
flowing between stages, with the likes of NICK<br />
POWER, REVO ZIGANDA of EVOL, HARVEST SUN<br />
and BIDO LITO! taking control of the DJ reins<br />
throughout the day. A cake stand raising money<br />
for The Open Door Centre – the Wirral-based<br />
mental health charity behind today’s festival –<br />
is readily available to provide for the inevitable<br />
beer and music munchies, and highlights the<br />
festival’s engagement with a cause that makes<br />
it feel all the more like a worthy day out.<br />
By now we’re in the home stretch, and the<br />
performances become more accomplished and<br />
that bit slicker. BILL RYDER-JONES knows, and<br />
indeed shows, that attention-grabbing shows<br />
aren’t all about wall-shaking ferocity, gliding<br />
through his piano-based set here with aplomb.<br />
It’s occasionally an effort to strain your ears<br />
to catch the full depth of these songs, but it’s<br />
worth the effort: Ryder-Jones’ breathy delivery<br />
of his delicate tracks (mostly taken tonight from<br />
the LP A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart) forces you<br />
to pay closer attention to them, and unearths<br />
the true majesty in his songwriting.<br />
BIRD are, forgive the pun, flying high at<br />
present, and for those who are seeing the band<br />
for the first time tonight it would seem like it’s<br />
ever been thus. The alchemy that they’ve found<br />
on their debut album is on show in spades here<br />
– no longer floaty, but weighty, and undulating<br />
around a daring beat – but it’s taken some time<br />
to refine. If they can continue to streamline<br />
their output (which is basically a deliciously<br />
Gothic Warpaint vibe) then albums two and<br />
three will be serious prospects.<br />
The influence of the night’s headliners THE<br />
TEA STREET BAND is beginning to show as the<br />
crowd thickens, so there’s some battling to<br />
be done to get to the front of the crowd to<br />
witness WE ARE CATCHERS’ first live outing,<br />
and I’m glad I got my elbows out. Peter<br />
Jackson leads the show on piano, alongside<br />
percussion and some spidery electric guitar<br />
work, but, much like his mentor Bill Ryder-<br />
Jones, the songs revolve primarily around<br />
Jackson’s lamenting delivery: Water’s Edge<br />
and If You Decide see eyes screwed tight as if<br />
blinking back the sting of tears (his or ours?).<br />
If Brian Wilson was born on the banks of the<br />
grey Mersey rather than the sun-kissed Pacific,<br />
this is probably how he’d sound.<br />
There’s just enough time to see the<br />
collision of Mazes and Parquet Courts that is<br />
a TEMPLE SONGS live set, before we all drift<br />
in to the main room for Tea Street Band to<br />
round things off. From the back of the room<br />
it seems as though the rolls of dry ice are<br />
being held aloft by the crowd, who have lost<br />
themselves in their own personal moment of<br />
bliss. And what a day of moments it’s been<br />
down on the water’s edge. Is New Brighton<br />
the new Brighton? I hope we don’t have to<br />
wait another 12 months to find out.<br />
Hannah McEvoy, Can Brannan and Dirk Hebel<br />
THE TWILIGHT SAD<br />
Strange Collective<br />
I Love Live Events @ East Village Arts Club<br />
When THE TWILIGHT SAD released their debut<br />
album Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters in<br />
2007, it was met with much critical acclaim and<br />
quickly gained popularity in the underground<br />
music world. Their next two records were<br />
greeted with similar good will, but the first<br />
effort remained somewhat of a glittering<br />
gem. On this, their most recent tour, they have<br />
been performing the record in its entirety<br />
to appreciative audiences. Judging from the<br />
abundance of dyed-black hair and bowl-cuts at<br />
tonight's show, this evening promises to satisfy,<br />
and to start things off STRANGE COLLECTIVE take<br />
to the stage.<br />
Fresh off the back of a series of highly<br />
successful support shows – particularly, an<br />
impressive display at this year's Sound City<br />
– Strange Collective seem to be riding on the<br />
crest of a momentous wave at the moment. The<br />
energy that they pour into every performance<br />
is quite staggering, and this is entertaining<br />
enough a spectacle, but the musical quality is<br />
also there to back it up. Still without available<br />
recorded material, the group rely solely on their<br />
live outings to spread their message, and that<br />
message appears to be getting through to their<br />
audience. With another blistering performance<br />
under their belt, a predictably raucous and<br />
dissonant finale, it is clear that this band are<br />
moving from strength to strength and, although<br />
the mystique of a purely live act is tempting<br />
to maintain, it would be nice to hear some<br />
recordings soon.<br />
On the subject of live reputation, the<br />
headliners are no strangers to sterling stagelit<br />
expectancy. Their shows have been touted<br />
as ear-splitting and memorable but, as The<br />
Twilight Sad launch into first track Cold Days<br />
From The Birdhouse, the volume is actually<br />
fairly palatable. Anyone who was expecting an<br />
MBV-style, tinnitus-inducing-head-fuck may be<br />
slightly disappointed, but this does nothing to<br />
detract from the show itself. Often regarded by<br />
critics as "perennially sad", the band are actually<br />
in high spirits, and between their discordant<br />
wails of lament vocalist James Graham<br />
indulges in light conversation with the crowd.<br />
A comment that has been frequently made is<br />
that their live shows differ greatly from the way<br />
the songs sound on record, and though this can<br />
never really be a bad thing, it is noticeable that<br />
for this tour the band do seem to have stripped<br />
the sound slightly, to emphasise the songs and<br />
lyrical content.<br />
The crowd, many of whom are wearing
24<br />
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Reviews<br />
t-shirts pledging their loyalty, is gratifyingly<br />
sizeable, and the band are clearly appreciative<br />
of their support, taking every opportunity to<br />
thank them for coming along. There seems to<br />
almost be an amount of surprise in Graham's<br />
gratitude, a humbleness that seven years<br />
of creative success has failed to quash. For<br />
anyone who has listened to the records, and<br />
in particular Graham's lyrics, an air of selfdeprecation<br />
should come as no shock, but it<br />
is always welcome to witness a musician who<br />
has not been jaded by attention. As they depart<br />
there is a sense in the room of completion,<br />
that something has come full circle. Though<br />
the beginning wasn't really that long ago, for<br />
those who have been fans since then, it will be<br />
gratifying to have witnessed this album in full.<br />
Ear-splitting? No. Memorable? Certainly.<br />
Alastair Dunn<br />
bunch of fields and called them stages; each<br />
arena has its own personality, designed to<br />
enhance your dancing experience. From the<br />
grassy coliseum of Pratty's Ring to the wooded<br />
wonderland of the Toil Trees or Chinese-themed<br />
open amphitheatre The Fortress, the sensory<br />
feast is as much for the eyes as the ears.<br />
Our labyrinthine yet picturesque journey<br />
The Twilight Sad (Darren Aston)<br />
of the site ends just in time for the arrival of<br />
JAGWAR MA, dripping their dubby beats over<br />
the setting sun. Despite showing the strains<br />
of a mammoth energy-sapping tour – the<br />
pared-down stage show proves most don't<br />
appreciate a drummer until they're not there<br />
– their hypnotic acid house tendencies play<br />
well here. While Liverpool’s THE FIRE BENEATH<br />
THE SEA certainly aren't lacking energy, they<br />
are short on elbow room as eleven bodies<br />
pile onstage. This football team of funk come<br />
flying out of the traps, spitting rhymes and<br />
flinging sweat with joyful abandon. When they<br />
proclaim “If you're not dancing, we wanna<br />
know why”, few people have a case to answer.<br />
The Smoky Tentacles tent lives up to its name,<br />
with steam escaping from every corner as we<br />
dance ourselves into a frenzy.<br />
I'm willing to bet it's been a long time since<br />
2 MANY DJs played somewhere for the first<br />
time, and perhaps it's that excitement at the<br />
unknown that allows them to rediscover the<br />
playfulness that made them great. A vibrant<br />
yet painfully short set features a cheeky nod<br />
to Saturday's headliner VITALIC at its climax.<br />
A.SKILLZ has never lost his playful nature, a fact<br />
of which I'm acutely aware, considering how<br />
many of his remixes feature in my DJ sets every<br />
weekend. Everyone from The Beatles to Beats<br />
International get the big-beat-with-added-beef<br />
treatment; the circular banks of Pratty's ring<br />
incubating a better atmosphere than the wide<br />
open spaces 2 Many DJs have to deal with on<br />
the main stage.<br />
Beatherder's brand of fun is less selfconscious<br />
than you find at bigger festivals, with<br />
even the increasingly ubiquitous fancy dress<br />
day feeling more like a party than a fashion<br />
parade. The long-threatened thunderstorm is<br />
greeted with no more than a shrug and the<br />
sound of the next can being opened. CHAINSKA<br />
BRASSIKA get the short straw of entertaining<br />
against the backdrop of sheeting rain, and take<br />
to the task manfully. A quick glance at the line-<br />
BEATHERDER FESTIVAL<br />
Ribble Valley, Lancashire<br />
Beatherder may not be high on the national<br />
radar, but it's developed into an important date<br />
in the party calendar for the people of the North<br />
West. Tucked away in the beautiful Lancashire<br />
countryside, it places itself on the outskirts of<br />
the mainstream in terms of music policy and<br />
attitude. The organisers know what makes<br />
their people dance, with every act picked with<br />
that sole intention regardless of genre. That<br />
attitude – and Beatherder's reputation as the<br />
friendly festival – is certainly infectious, with<br />
smiles branded on every person through the<br />
gate. They haven't dumped scaffolding in a<br />
Beatherder Festival (James Abbott-Donnelly)<br />
bidolito.co.uk
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A full season of art, music and events this Autumn<br />
The Companion:<br />
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19 –21 <strong>September</strong><br />
Performances, music and<br />
dance at venues including<br />
The Kazimier, The Black-E and<br />
The Philharmonic Dining Rooms<br />
Bloomberg New<br />
Contemporaries <strong>2014</strong><br />
20 <strong>September</strong> – 26 October,<br />
World Museum<br />
John Moores Painting Prize<br />
Open daily until 30 November<br />
with winner announced on 19<br />
<strong>September</strong>, Walker Art Gallery<br />
Frieze Projects: An Occasion<br />
hosted by Isabel Lewis<br />
30 <strong>September</strong>, Sefton Park<br />
Palm House<br />
Thinking City: Adam Chodzko<br />
2 October, Liverpool Docklands<br />
The 8th Liverpool Biennial<br />
Exhibition continues in venues<br />
across the city until 26 October<br />
Visit www.biennial.com<br />
for more information<br />
up tells you how popular their upbeat soulful<br />
ska is in these parts, and singer Ash Davies<br />
immediately endears himself to a healthilysized<br />
crowd by deciding to get as wet as we are,<br />
showing his full rude boy repertoire of dance<br />
moves. BADLY DRAWN BOY is known as an<br />
unpredictable performer, but after an opening<br />
salvo of “give us a cheer then you c*nts”, it's<br />
easy to guess where this show is heading.<br />
The Badly Prepared Manchild is lucky to be<br />
playing close to home, which can be the only<br />
explanation for so many forgiving his odd mix<br />
of hungover hostility and frank incompetence.<br />
The excruciating sight of a multi-platinum artist<br />
struggling with a pedal he bought yesterday is<br />
one I never wish to repeat. The effort to shake off<br />
the stink of that performance sends us hurtling<br />
headlong into the cyclone breaks of FAR TOO<br />
LOUD, making a much-anticipated debut just as<br />
day begins to turn into night. The sun gives its<br />
seal of approval by bursting through the clouds.<br />
Coupled with earth-shaking bass rumbles and<br />
hundreds of day-glo-daubed hands reaching<br />
for the sky, it gives the impression of some<br />
kind of tribal celebration. DJ FORMAT is surely<br />
the only artist to leave Beatherder with a tale<br />
of woe, as his set falls foul of an over-active<br />
sound limiter. A visibly livid Format battles for<br />
25 truncated minutes before realising he has<br />
no audience left. A frustrating end to a sevenhour<br />
journey for him and us. THE FAMILY RAIN<br />
could be forgiven for feeling out of place as one<br />
of very few bands flying the flag for visceral,<br />
chest-beating rock'n'roll. Holed up in the sweaty<br />
darkness of the Maison D'Etre is the best place<br />
for them, loosening support beams and fillings<br />
with every snare-drum snap.<br />
The inevitable tempo shift of a festival on<br />
Sunday lends itself excellently to comedy –<br />
let our mouths and minds do the work that<br />
our limbs and liver no longer can. In the stillstanding<br />
Maison D'Etre, a slightly dishevelled<br />
JAY HAMPSON impeccably captures the mood.<br />
Coming on like an Arndale Attenborough,<br />
Hampson squeezes his boundless knowledge<br />
of animals through the filter of his councilestate<br />
upbringing with hilarious results,<br />
riffing on bad parenting and panda porn. The<br />
gregarious JONATHAN MAYOR takes advantage<br />
of his “liberal trifecta” of black, gay and<br />
adopted. Horrifying, outlandish stories invoke<br />
the odd spectacle of people howling with<br />
laughter while peeking through their fingers.<br />
The increasingly energised crowd are now<br />
ready for the interactive comedy of PATRICK<br />
MONAHAN, who combines a lightning quick<br />
wit with a puppy's enthusiasm, to devastating<br />
effect. With the lingering sunshine rendering us<br />
all horizontal, DJ SHEPDOG leaves his up-tempo<br />
hip hop-flavoured reggae at home in favour of<br />
a lukewarm set of obscure classics that float<br />
over the heads of most. Unlike Shepdog, THE<br />
DUB PISTOLS are on a mission to rob us of any<br />
remaining energy. Suited and booted as usual,<br />
these reliable festival veterans proceed to skank<br />
everyone into a merry standstill. JAMES LAVELLE<br />
clearly didn’t get the ‘make em dance’ memo. A<br />
listless, nearly beatless set packed with flimsy<br />
mid-tempo remixes of watery indie misses<br />
the mark completely, and produces a mass<br />
exodus to find some real party people. As THE<br />
HAPPY MONDAYS are introduced by a raucously<br />
received party political broadcast from Bez,<br />
it's obvious how much their music has been<br />
overtaken by the mythmaking in the minds of<br />
the audience. Tonight's performance appears<br />
designed to redress that balance. A forceful<br />
opening of Loose Fit and Kinky Afro showcases<br />
a tighter collective who've remembered the<br />
benefits of rehearsal. Even Shaun Ryder is<br />
singing the right words, even if it's sometimes<br />
to the wrong song. The simmering tensions<br />
associated with any band reforming for the<br />
money are occasionally visible, but for the<br />
most part they're having as much fun as we are.<br />
Even the disappointingly early midnight curfew<br />
doesn't curb enthusiasm, as revellers return to<br />
the campsite en masse to finish any remaining<br />
supplies and party until sunrise.<br />
Maurice Stewart / @Bear_Necessity<br />
D/R/U/G/S<br />
D R O H N E<br />
Liverpool Calling @ The Magnet<br />
Back in my teenage years – a drunken<br />
wilderness admittedly – The Magnet was<br />
one of the best venues in Liverpool to go and<br />
see underground acts and bizarre, celebrity<br />
DJ performances. Then it closed for a while,<br />
supposedly for a refurbishment, and faded into<br />
the ether as new and exciting gig venues began<br />
to sprout up all over the city. Recently it has once<br />
again opened its doors; however, seemingly<br />
nobody has yet bothered to turn up. This may be<br />
because the interior looks exactly the same as<br />
before the re-furb, the fact that the other shows<br />
as part of today’s Liverpool Calling Festival are<br />
swelling to bursting point, or just the result of<br />
competition from an oversized puppet show<br />
enrapturing the city. All this aside, local boys<br />
D R O H N E open proceedings for tonight.<br />
For a band that has quite recently returned<br />
from a tour with Factory Floor, the modest<br />
audience at tonight's show must come as a<br />
bit of a low blow. This, however, has nothing<br />
to do with the popularity of the electronic duo,<br />
who have been making waves in the Liverpool<br />
music scene over the past few months. Their<br />
set is predictably impressive, and highlights<br />
the dichotomous quality of the songwriting.<br />
Both haunting and uplifting, with screeching<br />
guitars and spacey synths, it is remarkable to<br />
see how much the two have evolved as an act<br />
in the relatively short space of time since I last<br />
saw them play.<br />
Headliner D/R/U/G/S emerges to a crowd that<br />
has now swelled to about twenty people; he<br />
is, though, unfazed and provides a display that
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28<br />
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Reviews<br />
Neon Waltz (John Johnson / pooloflife.co.uk)<br />
would be worthy of a much larger audience.<br />
Indeed, as a performer he is used to bigger<br />
shows, and it is indicative of his integrity<br />
that the tiny audience does nothing to mute<br />
his performance. His LCD Soundsysteminflected<br />
grooves are captivating and intensely<br />
danceable, and those few who are present are<br />
clearly compelled to move. Performed with<br />
a quiet intensity, the mixes are subtle and<br />
refined, whilst still revealing enough to make<br />
them endearingly hooky, and with enough<br />
repetition to demand complete attention. It<br />
is obvious why D/R/U/G/S has been the act<br />
on many critical lips of late, and if tonight is<br />
anything to go by the word shall continue to<br />
spread.<br />
Though the turnout is disappointing, it is<br />
gratifying to see great acts still more than<br />
willing to turn up and put on a blinder of a show,<br />
and there’s also the fact that some of the most<br />
legendary gigs in popular music history have<br />
been to crowds numbering less than twenty to<br />
provide solace. So props to Liverpool Calling:<br />
it's been a privilege to witness tonight’s show<br />
in such intimate circumstances. There probably<br />
won't be many more opportunities to do so.<br />
NEON WALTZ<br />
Black Rivers – Bill Ryder-Jones<br />
Alastair Dunn<br />
I Love Live Events @ The Shipping Forecast<br />
The first live gig I ever saw was a Doves show<br />
in Mountford Hall, and I’ll always remember<br />
the electro wig-out at the end of their set,<br />
which was completely alien to anything they’d<br />
played over the previous hour. I later found<br />
out that this was an old song of theirs from<br />
when they were a Haçienda-inspired dance act<br />
called Sub Sub. It’s funny what you remember,<br />
isn’t it? All those memories come crashing<br />
back tonight when I hear BLACK RIVERS’ setcloser<br />
The Ship, which is a neat précis of where<br />
brothers Jez and Andy Williams have gone with<br />
their post-Doves career. It’s a flitting set of<br />
electronic pulses and krauty insistence, as the<br />
newly minted five-piece get out on the road to<br />
give their embryonic project a test on the live<br />
circuit before a series of bigger shows. Taken<br />
alongside Doves frontman Jimi Goodwin’s<br />
fairly sparse solo album, you can see who gave<br />
Doves their bite.<br />
The royal burgh of Wick, situated all the way<br />
up in the Highlands, is an isolated place. It is<br />
the place where tonight’s headliners NEON<br />
WALTZ call home and, while you might think<br />
that this landscape might bear fruit to cold<br />
and desolate introspection, this six-piece show<br />
us that it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s a<br />
fireside warmth to Neon Waltz’s soundscapes,<br />
that feel shaped by the buffeting of the winds<br />
of the North Sea. Sounds cosy, doesn’t it?<br />
There’s a raw feel about Bare Wood Aisles as<br />
it floats in serenely on a gorgeous synth part,<br />
which then spars with some guitar noodling<br />
throughout to push the track along, but the<br />
band are far from ragged. They’ve been holed<br />
away in their remote wilderness fine-tuning<br />
these songs and, though there’s a soft dreamy<br />
element to it all, Neon Waltz still pack a fair<br />
punch. Sombre Fayre is perhaps a perfect<br />
bidolito.co.uk
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@MancAcademy<br />
Friday 5th <strong>September</strong><br />
Friday 19th <strong>September</strong><br />
Axis of Awesome Monday 22nd <strong>September</strong><br />
Tuesday 30th <strong>September</strong><br />
<br />
Saturday 11th October<br />
Saturday 18th October<br />
Saturday 8th November<br />
John Waters Wednesday 12th November<br />
John Garcia Tuesday 4th December<br />
A Certain Ratio Saturday 13th December<br />
<br />
Oxford Road, Manchester<br />
<br />
showcase for them as a band, exhibiting nifty<br />
dynamic swells that switch between stabbing<br />
guitars and a mournful organ melody. Their<br />
strength undoubtedly lies in the balance and<br />
simplicity of their tunes, which means that the<br />
combined sound of all six members doesn’t<br />
descend in to a competing mess. So far they’ve<br />
got it spot on.<br />
Jordan Shearer’s voice is the prime thing you<br />
remember from it all though, with its nagging<br />
tug on the heartstrings. It may seem a little<br />
obvious but there are definite similarities with<br />
a young Bobby Gillespie in the delivery from a<br />
mop of tangled hair. Unquestionably though<br />
there’s a huge dose of Scouseness about Neon<br />
Waltz and, while Shearer may be trying to<br />
channel Ian McCulloch, he comes across more<br />
like Ian Skelly.<br />
Halfway through the band are joined by BILL<br />
RYDER-JONES (who performed a brief opening<br />
solo set earlier on) for a cover of Mick Head’s<br />
Something Like You. Prior to this – and indeed<br />
after it – Ryder-Jones had been sat at the side of<br />
the stage drinking in the whole performance in.<br />
A sign of further collaborating to come? Watch<br />
this space.<br />
Christopher Torpey / @CATorp<br />
KEVIN DEVINE<br />
Ed Poole - Two Glass Horses<br />
Mama Presents @ East Village Arts Club<br />
Awkwardly fumbling around the performance<br />
oLito.1<strong>48</strong>x117.MASTER.indd 1 12/08/<strong>2014</strong> space, 12:33tuning their guitars as people arrive, are<br />
the relatively new outfit TWO GLASS HORSES.<br />
After more bodies have filled the venue they<br />
slide into their set with ease. Their sound is<br />
melancholic, but rich and lavish, with vocal<br />
harmonies and stirring chord progressions. It's<br />
easy to hear some of their influences: they'd<br />
be very much at home on a bill with Foals,<br />
Local Natives or Editors. The hubbub of voices<br />
gradually decreases as heads turn towards the<br />
stage. For an acoustic outfit, Two Glass Horses<br />
are loud, powerful, and – given that this is their<br />
first live performance since the band’s birth –<br />
an impressively accomplished troupe. As they<br />
make their exit, they've managed to turn a<br />
room full of indifferent spectators into one full<br />
of captivated supporters.<br />
ED POOLE is next up to the stage. His voice is<br />
heartrendingly sorrowful, but his performance<br />
seems to lack sincerity. The performance is<br />
technically impressive and honest to a certain<br />
extent, but I can't help but notice a heavy<br />
American affectation permeating Ed's voice<br />
and persona. Indeed, Ed Poole clearly seems<br />
to be a fan of Dashboard Confessional. That's<br />
not a bad thing; it just seems as though he's<br />
taken a little too much instruction from Chris<br />
Carrabba et al. Ed is a good player, singer and<br />
performer. The range and volume of his playing,<br />
throughout the performance, is enthralling but<br />
more development is needed for the Liverpoolbased<br />
singer songwriter to truly bloom.<br />
There is a hushed air of anticipation as KEVIN<br />
DEVINE picks up his guitar and introduces<br />
himself. The crowd shuffle closer to the stage,<br />
giving the proceedings a neat feeling of<br />
intimacy. Early in the setlist, Little Bulldozer<br />
has the small but strong audience hanging on<br />
New Yorker Devine's every note. His voice is<br />
soulful, grating and rich, with a rasp that adds<br />
emotional depth to his lyrics – which are one<br />
of the most impressive parts of his act. The<br />
poetry that's entwined within songs such as<br />
Ballgame or Private First Class offers a cryptic<br />
dynamic that adds to Devine's originality. His<br />
statements are articulated in a unique and<br />
honest way, giving the listener a glimpse into<br />
his inner workings. Added to these musical<br />
discourses is a strong selection of politically<br />
motivated songs, including Another Bag Of<br />
Bones, which further demonstrates Devine's<br />
unique strength in communicating ideas and<br />
sentiments through song.<br />
Devine's beguiling guitar-playing is<br />
performed with a nonchalance that makes the<br />
guitar appear as another limb. The crowd are<br />
offered a chance to shout out requests, and so<br />
we're treated to a glut of songs old and new.<br />
We hear all sorts: from Knife and Brooklyn<br />
Boy to Between The Concrete And Clouds and,<br />
from Devine's old band, Miracle of 86, Redbird<br />
and Every Famous Last Word. It's a cathartic<br />
performance and, as Devine leaves the stage,<br />
there remains a lighter air in the East Village.<br />
KENDAL CALLING<br />
Lowther Deer Park, Lake District<br />
Christopher Carr<br />
When tent, wellies, comical item of your<br />
choice and other festival essentials are packed<br />
and you’re ready to set off, donning your<br />
denim shorts and Ray Bans, your expectations<br />
of summertime frolics could be somewhat<br />
downcast by the torrential onslaught greeting<br />
you as you open the front door. This sense<br />
of trepidation is quickly forgotten, however,<br />
when welcomed by the astounding views of<br />
the Lake District surrounding Kendal Calling<br />
Festival. Teamed with the fact that those used<br />
to the area are more than comfortable with<br />
a little rain, what certainly isn’t dampened<br />
are the spirits of festivalgoers carrying their<br />
gear in rented wheelbarrows to the site. The<br />
rain subsides and the views come into their<br />
own the moment we peg down our tent in<br />
the spacious and friendly campsite; a treat for<br />
anyone used to the major UK festivals and their<br />
claustrophobic and chaotic counterparts.<br />
After a muddy yet sociable exodus to the<br />
arena, DE LA SOUL kick off Friday with an<br />
unfortunate late start – this thankfully hasn’t<br />
deterred the excitable crowd. They apologise for<br />
their resulting short set by playing a whirlwind<br />
of classics that has everyone ready to start
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32 Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Reviews<br />
the weekend to come. Over at the Calling Out<br />
stage, a large and enthusiastic crowd gather for<br />
CATFISH AND THE BOTTLEMEN. Their hefty riffs<br />
and strong presence prove that they’re worthy<br />
of all the anticipation surrounding their new<br />
album. With a bit of time in-between planned<br />
sets The Chai Wallah tent is a good bet to head<br />
for a constant stream of great music from every<br />
Frank Turner (Gaz Jones / @GJMPhoto)<br />
genre. MR SCRUFF plays his headline set to a<br />
brimming crowd that keep dancing until 3am<br />
to his eclectic repertoire of funk and groove.<br />
Saturday hails an alternative morning to<br />
yesterday’s energetic excitement, as campers<br />
awake dewy eyed, pull on mud-layered wellies<br />
and wade through the now overdeveloped<br />
mudslide that is the pathway to the arena.<br />
Hundreds gather at The Glow Tent to take part<br />
in a mass moonwalk to Billie Jean – “Why?” you<br />
say? Just because. That’s why. The sun must be<br />
impressed because its rays are beaming over<br />
the Main Stage where NEWTON FAULKNER is<br />
strumming his trusty acoustic and onlookers<br />
are enjoying a sing-along to Teardrop. The<br />
aforementioned summertime frolicking is now<br />
in full force and ATHLETE continue to entice<br />
the dreamy crowd; their final song, Wires,<br />
has everyone singing. Evening-time quickly<br />
comes and FRANK TURNER and his SLEEPING<br />
SOULS break onto the stage and give us all<br />
a truly special headline act. This is his third<br />
time here at Kendal and he thanks the crowd<br />
with a genuine appreciation for being here, for<br />
headlining especially. His thanks shine through<br />
the powerful folk-punk performance, which is<br />
filled with all the classic crowd-pleasers which<br />
have everyone singing, clapping and dancing,<br />
as well as a new song which goes down a<br />
storm despite a broken string.<br />
There’s no Sunday lull that sometimes<br />
hits on the third day of a weekend festival<br />
– thanks to CLEAN BANDIT, who make sure<br />
anyone with the vaguest sense of losing<br />
steam are reenergised, with their house hits<br />
playing to a huge crowd. TOM ODELL takes
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Mellowtone<br />
AUTUMNAL<br />
UPCOMING<br />
Mellowtone at LEAF<br />
with Little Sparrow and Laura James<br />
18 th <strong>September</strong><br />
8pm, £5.00 adv<br />
Mellowtone & Liverpool Comedy Festival at<br />
LEAF<br />
with Dave Owen, Dylan Owen<br />
and more tba<br />
1 st October<br />
8pm, £5.00 adv<br />
King Creosote at the Epstein Theatre<br />
th<br />
8<br />
October<br />
8pm, £15.00 adv<br />
James Yorkston at<br />
LEAF<br />
Save the date!<br />
14 th<br />
October<br />
8pm, £12.50 adv<br />
Wednesday 26 th November<br />
w<br />
mellowtone.info<br />
@mellowtoneclub<br />
mellowtoneclub
34 Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Reviews<br />
tales of from where they stemmed in her life.<br />
The real treat though is seeing THE TEA STREET<br />
BAND take the headline slot; that’s what these<br />
guys are made for: playing their unique and<br />
electro/disco-based tunes from their debut<br />
album to a crowd devoted to dancing. The tent<br />
is full of people who’ve turned up to Kendal for<br />
all manner of artists and we join to form one<br />
hell of a crowd dancing to one hell of a set in<br />
a final hurrah for what has been a weekender<br />
that has fast become a true gem in the North.<br />
Tilly Sharp / @TillySharp<br />
ANDREW WK<br />
White Blacula<br />
Evol @ East Village Arts Club<br />
over and we go from heavy beats to pianoled<br />
tunes, keeping the dancing going along<br />
the way. His mesmerising voice becomes the<br />
perfect Sunday afternoon accompaniment to<br />
the three-day-dried-on-mud-covered spectators<br />
enjoying the last day of the niche food stands<br />
(Piggie Smalls being a personal favorite),<br />
independent trinket stalls and art installations<br />
Kendal Calling (Gaz Jones / @GJMPhoto)<br />
made by local artists dotted around the arena.<br />
The Calling Out stage seems like the place to<br />
be today, as JESS GLYNE plays her songs to a<br />
more than appreciative crowd while telling us<br />
When it was announced a week or so before<br />
this highly anticipated show that Liverpool’s<br />
own WHITE BLACULA would be playing main<br />
support, it seemed like the perfect choice.<br />
They’re fun, they’re weird, and they know how<br />
to work a crowd. Tonight though, they are<br />
marred with sound problems from the start,<br />
which has a visible effect on their confidence.<br />
In spite of this, they still put on a hell of a<br />
show, culminating in their cross-dressing<br />
saxophonist diving into the crowd and blazing<br />
through a solo on top of them. Overall though,<br />
it’s a lukewarm reception from this crowd,<br />
which is more than a little unfair. I’ve said in the<br />
I DESIGN<br />
BIDO LITO!<br />
// LUKE-AVERY.COM<br />
// INFO@LUKE-AVERY.COM<br />
// 07729 308307
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
35<br />
Making Liverpool<br />
sound great ...<br />
call: 0151 707 1050<br />
email: info@parrstreetstudios.com<br />
rs<br />
visit: parrstreetstudios.com<br />
Parr Street Studios: 33 – 45 Parr Street, Liverpool L1 4JN<br />
JOAN ARMATRADING . CHINA CRISIS . GO WEST<br />
DEAF SCHOOL . RICK VITO . PAUL CARRACK<br />
MARTIN SIMPSON . RUMOURS OF FLEETWOOD MAC<br />
ANDY FAIRWEATHER LOW & THE LOW RIDERS<br />
JOE BROWN . GARY MURPHY<br />
+ OTHER ACTS & WORKSHOPS<br />
For details of performances contact our box office on<br />
0151 666 0000 or visit our website www.floralpavilion.com
36<br />
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Reviews<br />
Andrew WK (Adam Edwards / @adamedwardsfoto)<br />
past that White Blacula are the most outright<br />
entertaining live band in the city. I stand by<br />
that. Tonight just wasn’t their night.<br />
ANDREW WK burst onto the scene with<br />
debut album I Get Wet back in 2001, when the<br />
rock world was full to the brim with turgid,<br />
self-pitying nu-metal bands, and his rampant<br />
positivity and energy as an artist and performer<br />
was like an oasis in a desert. Tonight, as he<br />
bursts onto the stage and launches into album<br />
opener It’s Time To Party, it’s reassuring that<br />
the preceding 13 years have clearly not dulled<br />
his spirit one bit. He bounds around the stage<br />
to the backing track with fervour, flipping<br />
between hammering away at the keyboard and<br />
working the room into a frenzy. The suddenly<br />
animated crowd is fantastic, and the mutual<br />
affection between artist and audience couldn’t<br />
be more obvious.<br />
From there on out, the show doesn’t<br />
lose momentum for a second, and all the<br />
favourites are out in force – New York City,<br />
We<br />
Want Fun, and of course the breakthrough<br />
anthem Party Hard – big, dumb major-key<br />
rock songs that make you pump your fist<br />
in the air and leave you smiling from ear to<br />
ear. Aside from the glorious spectacle of this<br />
living, sweating piece of iconography doing<br />
what he does best, it’s easy to forget that he<br />
is also actually a very accomplished musician,<br />
as demonstrated in his mid-set extended<br />
techno-based keyboard solo.<br />
In theory, it could be easy to be sceptical<br />
of the concept of this tour – a string of shows<br />
that is basically Andrew WK doing Andrew WK<br />
karaoke, but it in practice works so much better<br />
than you’d imagine. Finally, he wraps things<br />
up with the incendiary I Get Wet, resulting in<br />
a stage invasion of such magnitude that Mr<br />
WK is no longer visible, and then we leave<br />
exhausted, drenched, and exhilarated.<br />
He’s always been a polarising figure for<br />
music fans, but it’s clear from tonight that<br />
those on board are on board 110%. For a brief<br />
hour, the grey world outside disappeared, and<br />
all that existed was uninhibited positivity. Long<br />
live the party.<br />
Alex Holbourn / @AlexHolbourn<br />
GREEN VELVET<br />
Dixon – Tom Trago – Sub-Ann<br />
Circus @ East Village Arts Club<br />
Tonight’s line-up for the latest instalment<br />
of Yousef’s CIRCUS is enormous. Innervisions<br />
boss DIXON makes his first appearance in<br />
Liverpool since topping Resident Advisor’s<br />
much-lauded DJ Of The Year poll in 2013, and<br />
GREEN VELVET, the man behind the behemoth<br />
that is Bigger Than Prince, completes a<br />
knockout one-two of headliners. Dutch future<br />
house champion TOM TRAGO and One Records<br />
honcho SUB-ANN aren’t to be snarled at either,<br />
with Yousef and his team flexing their clout<br />
as the most forward-thinking and balanced<br />
bookers in town.<br />
The redevelopment of East Village Arts<br />
Club may still be a polarising topic among<br />
Liverpool’s clubnight crowd, with arguments<br />
that the shiny new walls and crowded bars<br />
detract from that gritty, DIY aesthetic that once<br />
made it great. With its enormous stage and<br />
concave, forward-facing dance floor though,<br />
it feels purpose-built for nights like this. It<br />
certainly marks a contrast to the increasingly<br />
dominant warehouse scene, where it’s easy to<br />
spend your whole evening getting fucked up,<br />
trying to cop off, or just generally ruining your<br />
chances of getting that American visa without<br />
bidolito.co.uk
38<br />
Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2014</strong><br />
Reviews<br />
DIGGING A LITTLE DEEPER<br />
with Dig Vinyl<br />
Bold Street’s latest wax junkies DIG VINYL know a thing or two about the weird and wonderful<br />
depths of people’s record collections, and each month they’ll be rifling through their racks and<br />
picking out four of their favourite in-stock records. Keep digging…<br />
bidolito.co.uk<br />
TERRY RILEY<br />
IN C<br />
This is one of the works that put minimalism on the map. TERRY<br />
RILEY's In C has been called The Rite Of Spring of our time. Drop<br />
the needle to hear a whole tapestry of interlocking sounds start<br />
to unfold, and find yourself slowly getting immersed in In C.<br />
You don't really listen to this piece; the effect is much more like<br />
immersion, as the very gradual shifting of patterns is more like<br />
organic growth, instead of the architectural jumps and skips found in the work of Philip Glass<br />
or Steve Reich.<br />
TANGERINE ZOO<br />
THE TANGERINE ZOO<br />
This classic album scores highly due to its great swirling organ<br />
– on occasion bringing Vanilla Fudge to mind – biting lead guitar<br />
playing and some great period psych tracks like Trip To The Zoo,<br />
Symphonic Psyche and Crystalescent Heaven.<br />
Gloria has probably been done a million times, but this is 1968<br />
and quite an early cover version, and besides that their noisy<br />
garage psych version, with piercing lead guitar breaks and shimmering organ, is a worthy take<br />
on the old classic.<br />
NEW YORK DOLLS<br />
CAUSE I SEZ SO<br />
After finding themselves in the unenviable position of difficult<br />
second album for a second time, the rejuvenated NEW YORK<br />
DOLLS were always gonna be up against it. Apart from a naff cover<br />
pic, they deliver a solid, if a bit maverick and mature-sounding,<br />
New York Dolls album.<br />
At times it sounds as if it’s a blast from the past, but minus the<br />
heavy clouds of a drug-intoxicated group that set 1974 on fire, with Todd Rundgren this time<br />
keeping them in check.<br />
CEYLEIB PEOPLE<br />
TANYET<br />
This is the obscure, possibly studio-only, raga-psych band's<br />
sole album, originally released in 1968. It features Ry Cooder on<br />
guitar and, as expected, combines early Magic Band mutant blues<br />
playing with some well-thought-out psychsploitation.<br />
For 1967, this is definitely hippy experimental music, hopping<br />
from guitar riffs to sitar drones to mellotron rambling and back,<br />
with little regard for convention.<br />
Head to bidolito.co.uk now to stream the latest Dig Vinyl Podcast, featuring a mixture of new,<br />
old and half-forgotten classics.<br />
ever knowing who the person behind the<br />
decks is. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing of<br />
course, but there is something immeasurably<br />
powerful about a room full of people dancing<br />
towards the same beat, the same purpose,<br />
as the sounds permeating from the speakers<br />
create a tangible sense of being part of<br />
something bigger than yourself.<br />
Tom Trago is an icon among his houseleaning<br />
Dutch motherland and, like his<br />
recorded output to date, rhythm is central to<br />
his set tonight, concealing more immediate<br />
dancefloor anthems inside beats almost<br />
overwrought with intensity. The top-shelf<br />
productions of his own Use Me Again and<br />
Steppin’ Out and their instantaneous euphoria<br />
are usurped in favour of a deeper sound that<br />
looks to slowly nudge its audience towards<br />
that level of sonic bliss.<br />
DIXON steps in after an obligatory coolset-bro<br />
hug with Trago, with a slow-burning,<br />
progressive-leaning set more akin to the likes<br />
of Digweed rather than fellow Berliner Ben<br />
Klock and his Panorama Bar contemporaries.<br />
Holding back on the kickdrums and those<br />
widescreen, techno downpours, Dixon<br />
instead offers slow, gentle swells of<br />
gratification in a way that builds and builds<br />
but never quite releases. This exercise in<br />
restraint clearly has one eye on the clock,<br />
which, with over two hours remaining, is<br />
evidence of a DJ with an appreciation for the<br />
bigger picture of the clubnight experience<br />
in its entirety, rather than the short window<br />
of his own set. There is a reason he was<br />
named the best DJ in the world just a few<br />
months ago; it’s a testament to his own<br />
versatility that if he was on last tonight we<br />
would likely be treated to something almost<br />
entirely different.<br />
The eccentric Green Velvet approaches<br />
bearing a fittingly green Mohawk, smiling<br />
serenely behind his spherical glasses as if he<br />
has just stepped into a wedding reception.<br />
Employing his trademark, snarled vocals<br />
over the likes of Lazer Beams, Flash and<br />
the aforementioned Bigger Than Prince, he<br />
provides those moments of rapture the rest of<br />
the evening had been teasing at throughout<br />
a blistering two-hour performance. It seems<br />
staggering that these songs came out in<br />
the mid 90s, as they sound every bit like<br />
electronic music does in <strong>2014</strong> and hold their<br />
own alongside the likes Paul Woolford’s<br />
Erotic Discourse as if we are listening to one<br />
of those end-of-year podcasts. It’s telling<br />
that a recent Hot Since 82 remix has brought<br />
Bigger Than Prince back to a new generation<br />
of listeners so seamlessly, as Green Velvet<br />
proves that, as timeless as he is as a<br />
producer, he can absolutely keep up with the<br />
relentless forward momentum of electronic<br />
music and maintain his position as a truly<br />
world-class DJ.<br />
Mike Townsend / @townsendyesmate<br />
IMMORTAL TECHNIQUE<br />
East Village Arts Club<br />
Hip hop is a genre and a culture that is often<br />
plagued with negative preconceptions by<br />
casual observers. While this is unfair, it certainly<br />
can’t be said that those misconceptions come<br />
from nowhere. All you have to do is turn on<br />
4Music at any time of the day or night to<br />
see some multi-millionaire flavour-of-themonth<br />
rapper reeling off the usual clichés<br />
– casual misogyny, advocation of mindless<br />
violence, glorification of money above all else.<br />
Thankfully, these mainstream anomalies aren’t<br />
at all representative of the culture, and in reality<br />
hip hop couldn’t be more different. Scratch the<br />
surface and you will find a rich, vibrant culture<br />
which more often than not promotes selfempowerment<br />
and investment in knowledge.<br />
Over the top of a phat beat, naturally.<br />
Tonight, EVAC is packed to the rafters, and<br />
there’s not a casual hip hop fan in sight. Almost<br />
everyone who is here couldn’t possibly have<br />
chosen to go anywhere else tonight, and all<br />
have been looking forward to this for months.<br />
As soon as IMMORTAL TECHNIQUE takes the<br />
stage and busts out the opening bars of The<br />
Martyr, it’s obvious the masses are not about<br />
to be disappointed. His vocal delivery is crisp<br />
and potent, and his ability to work the crowd is<br />
impressive. The audience is behind Technique<br />
100%, singing their lungs out to the chorus of<br />
Harlem Streets, a grim, lyrical portrait of police<br />
corruption and the everyday struggles of the<br />
working classes.<br />
Musically, the beats are always on point, and<br />
provide a great canvas for his searing lyrics.<br />
Even when he throws in a tongue-in-cheek<br />
ABBA sample on Rich Man’s World, his craft as<br />
a lyricist is strong enough to make it work.<br />
“I heard Liverpool was a town full of madmen<br />
and soccer hooligans” he says after a few<br />
songs, baiting the crowd into becoming even<br />
louder. Inter-song speeches are a huge part of<br />
his performance, and at times this feels less<br />
like a hip hop show and more like a political<br />
rally with a DJ behind it. Immortal Technique<br />
is a self-described revolutionary, and he’s not<br />
afraid to make his case. No topic is off-limits<br />
– misogyny in the media, government coverups,<br />
the military-industrial complex: you name<br />
it, he breaks it down good and proper, and<br />
leaves you with no mistake over how he feels.<br />
Any other artist talking between songs about<br />
these wholly serious subjects to such an extent<br />
would risk coming across as overly earnest and<br />
pompous (Bono, I’m looking at you), but Tech<br />
speaks with such sheer conviction and depth of<br />
knowledge that you can only respect it. Whether<br />
or not music really can save the world is a point<br />
that can be argued until the cows come home.<br />
One thing that’s hard to dispute though - it’s<br />
reassuring that a few artists still try.<br />
Alex Holbourn / @AlexHolbourn
We<br />
Buy<br />
White Albums<br />
FACT and Liverpool International Music Festival Present: Rutherford Chang’s We Buy White Albums<br />
15 August - 15 <strong>September</strong><br />
FACT Loading Bay / 12pm - 5pm<br />
New York based artist Rutherford Chang, travels the world buying first edition copies<br />
of The Beatles White Album. His entire collection will be on show in our Loading Bay.<br />
fact.co.uk/whitealbum
REOPENING PARTY - SAT 20TH SEPT <strong>2014</strong><br />
BICEP. SKREAM.<br />
BEN PEARCE. ARTWORK. PBR STREETGANG.<br />
JOHN McANDREW. SAM LEWIS.<br />
YOUSEF PRESENTS...<br />
SAT 27TH SEPT <strong>2014</strong><br />
MK. YOUSEF. HOT SINCE 82.<br />
CASSY. PAUL WOOLFORD. wAFF.<br />
LEWIS BOARDMAN. SCOTT LEWIS.<br />
VENUE: EAST VILLAGE ARTS CLUB, 90 SEEL ST, LIVERPOOL. INFO: 0151 706 8045, INFO@CHIBUKU.COM TICKETS ONLINE: WWW.TICKETARENA.CO.UKSKIDDLE.COM,<br />
TICKETLINE.CO.UK, RESIDENTADVISOR.NET, TICKET STORES: 3B RECORDS (NUS) 0151 353 7027, THE FONT (MT PLEASANT) RESSURECTION (BOLD ST)
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