25/02/09 - Brooke's Fine Art Fundraiser at The Wheatsheaf

Das Pop, playing at the O2 Arena, held no pull for me. A small indie gig at one of my favourite pubs was more my kind of thing. Wired from weed, several cups of coffee and a pre-listen of the band list on myspace, my photographer and I were ready, if a little uncertain what to expect. For the moment, we were ignorant of what was to come. We were out for a good time after all, and to check back into the local scene.

I had been invited by Graeme Murray, the drummer of the brilliant upcoming Oxford band Youthmovies. He was my contact for the evening and my only link to the social mess we unearthed. A small, soft spoken guy, unassuming in appearance, his ability at the drum-kit is undisputed. Two well known bands, Youthmovies and Jonquil, were to join forces as Vertical Montanas and headline the night; they had attracted quite a crowd.

Our curse as outsiders - my photographer and I never really felt welcome. They seemed to us to be a distant group. The new Indie Oxford wave is a different breed altogether. Fortunately, the music made up for the crowd and their perpetual blank, staring eyes. Navel-gazing and pretentious they stood like dead trees swaying to themselves. I attempted to arouse my photographer into a fighting frenzy, set him loose and see what would happen, all for the sake of bringing some excitement to a sedated atmosphere. Where was the beautiful chaos? If a bomb went off on stage, or one of the band members blew their own head off with a shotgun, these people wouldn't even raise an eyebrow. I was itching for a cattle prod.

The biggest, overall disappointment was missing Lee Riley, or better known as Euthedral, a one man electronic army. Shunned to the early evening slot, no doubt the audience wasn't interested. After hearing a couple tracks on his myspace page I was hooked. Sounding like Kevin Sheilds crossed with Nine Inch Nails while drawing from Sunn O))) and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Euthedral bellows forth heavy static doom-drones in intriguing variation and colour. Occasionally, out of the overbearing darkness, there appear subtle melodies like lights in a fog. Moments cycle between an orchestra breaking the sound barrier and the primal howling of a god-like machine or mythical beast. I could only hope he offended as many indie kids as was humanly possible.

Witnessing it first hand however, it was not to be and we ended up arriving just before the last two bands. I bought a pint and we squeezed to the front. The second-to-last group strolled on. Reminiscent of 65 Days of Static and Minus The Bear, but with half the available instrumentation, they were an impressive trio. Cascading melodies and intricate quick-fire guitar duets, it went down like firey whiskey. Tempo and texture were suficiantly explored but I felt they could have done more with their choppy rhythms - a minor point, it was elegant and promising Smart-Rock.
When they finished, I asked a bystander who the band was. I couldn't recognise them from what I'd heard on myspace. He stumbled over the pronunciation.
"I think they're called he-red-ra? hred-da?"
Ahh Hreda, the name was confusing, common of many new bands. Sure, you can be all flavours of awesome, but creating new words in the English language can be arrogant and alienating to your audience.

My photographer had had his fun with taking pictures and crept to the corner to moan and pout about the clientele. The stage was being reprepared, pedal lights were blinking like a Christmas tree. With two drum kits already set up, this wasn't to be a typical set. By doubling up two bands and the band members, there by making a force of eight, it allowed those performing to relax and concentrate on a minimal, layered approach. Building a slow evolution of sound from one movement to the next, it was easy to loose yourself in the warm-sunlight tone but then be jostled back by jarring cross rhythms. The music took on the feel of a zoetrope, spinning grainy images around and around. They drew attention from Yannis Philippakis, the lead wizard of Foals. He had come possibly for the very same reason we had.
On seeing him, my photographer whispered casually in my ear.
"I want to hurt him" he said and downed the remainder of his drink.

He hates his voice you understand, and my photgrapher is a man who can be driven off the hindge over of the smallest things: boils, dirty socks, the scratching sound of wet sand. It's best to leave him be in these situations, trust me.

Despite the boredom, it was worth attending. For both bands, Vertical Montanas was a side project that displayed their improvisational capabilities as active and prominant musicians. If I had to draw a comparison between each band (difficult due to the overall variation) it would be their similar emotional goal, they were all striving towards the same sense of the 'sublime'. By stretching their materials and avoiding pigeon hole’ing, they are taking ground and putting up a flag for Oxford. My photographer however could not get over the dull, unwelcoming atmosphere. We felt trapped. The chaos we'd longed for earlier on seemed like the last thing we wanted now. Simultaniously, we both made the decision to escape into the medieval ally ways. We ended up talking shit to a chip van man and an attractive social worker girl who seemed far too interested in what we, two drunk and stoned fools, were both up to. Suspicion took hold. Even the usual gauntlet of Big Issue sellers frightened me. "We must get out of town immediately!" I thought, and my photographer and I ran for my house like children avoiding some horned devil.

(© Copyright 2009 Brendan Morgan)

Let's finally say 'Fuck Off' to self perscribed Retro

Do you ever feel like you're living in reverse, or in a remake of an old film? We live in an age of permanent denial. It's an age of... what? What is it that will define us? Well, I sincerely hope isn't apathy, blissful ignorance and an incredible lust for hyper-reality. It's become increasingly difficult to view music videos or band photos and guess when, in what year or decade, they were produced. I ask you, why listen to a current artist attempting to emulate a specific sound of the past when you can just go and listen to the bands of the past? It's because some poor fools can't let the past be the past. They slouch around wishing it was like it was in the old days, or, if they happen to be younger, feel alienated from the world around them. They see the freedom that once was and seek out music representative of this. The Music Industry is more than happy to respond. Welcome to the world of google-search shopping, databases and advertisements that know you better than your own mother. And if you've got an original idea, there's probably already a niche market and a demographic for it. Enough is enough! I want to feel alive in the unpredictable 'now', in my own god-damn decade and part of my own generation. I refuse to be constantly nostalgic of eras long gone that I didn't grow up in.

In The Guardian today, a live review written by Kitty Empire of a budding pop starlett called La Roux brought all this to my attention. More than often The Guardian is guilty of fanning the flames of hype. Before a music scene has the chance to achieve maturity or greatness the newspaper is all over it like a walrus in a swimming pool. I can't say I've read anything from Ms Empire that exceeds empty drivel. This review, however, topped it. In the opening paragraph she tries to describe the music to the reader but with no success "[La Roux] cites early Eurythmics as guiding lights. She borrows shamelessly from Prince's 'When Doves Cry'". It's boring, and what's worse, completely uninformative. Later on Kitty meanders about appearence, as all morons do, to convay at least something to us. "La Roux's other touchstone is her hair [...] It is a hairdo that speaks a thousand words". So why didn't the hairdo write the article then? At this point, I'd filed La Roux under forget-and-move-on.

In Kitty Empire's own words "the 20-year-old La Roux is perhaps the most obsessed with a decade she is too young to remember". She's not alone in this regard. Like Lily Allen and Adele, these over privilaged, born-into-fame-spawns write music like they live on the moon, looking down on the earth through their hazy telescope. Never thought I'd say it but even Kate Nash is better than this. These icons are given the 'voice of a generation' garland, but they are false prophets.

Instead, give us a new form of Bob Dylan, a down and out, someone who makes mistakes, an everyman with understanding and wisdom. That's the kind of Retro For Recession we need. Not, to quote Kitty, "an Eighties revival so vivid it classes as a re-run". Haven't we already seen plenty of eighties comebacks? If not, someone should tell Sissor Sisters, Interpol or Late of the Pier. I'm sure these artists, and many others, would like to know they'd been screwed. Are we going to be spinning our wheels for eternity? Maybe, because all this has happened before, over and over and over again.

MIA - "Do Something Pretty" Fanzine

The internet has made gigantic nerds of us all. Every single one of us now is plugged in, discussing bandwith, sharing in petty conversation. The stereotype of the computer saddo is gone and has been inverted. Unconnected, you're seen as a fool, backward or a second rate citizen.

A term sounding almost dated today, 'surfing', is in need of a replacement. The word implies purposeless exploration, casually clicking here and there, letting your impulses dictate what you view. These days, we hardly 'surf', no way, we hunt! We stalk the cyber wilderness, red eyed and hungry with intent. We check our bankstatements, we spend hours on wikipedia references, we look intensively on blogs and disographies for unreleased material. It's our livelyhood. We track the rare, unseen beasts and the more we hunt, the better we get and the better we get, the bigger the game we bag. But the cyber forest is also getting older, more dense and perhaps a little darker too. Some creatures go unnoticed and lurk quietly in the shadows. It takes skill or fluke to locate them.

A couple weeks ago I decided to spend a free afternoon racking up as many fanzines and online music magazines as possible. I settled down with a mug of tea, a few vanilla cigarettes and an assorted selection of chocolate bisuits. Simon Reynolds from The Guardian appeared to share in my quest and published an article several days later (Christ! Sometimes these beasts you track are actually tracking you). In it, he discusses the comeback of the traditional, hand made fazine. It was inspiring, but right before I zoomed off to get my crayons and glue stick I discovered something - an example of the fore mentioned fluke. It was an online fanzine called 'Do Something Pretty' that hadn't been updated since the 20th of June 2005. Typical of many fanzines, due to one reason or another, it no longer functions. An internet mystery, now gathering dust in the Lost and Found. I attempted to speak with those involved but it's impossible to contact anyone who ran it due to an unfortunate script error. I can only guess from the live reviews list that the 'zine was centralised around Manchester.

It's a damn shame, but as Echo and the Bunnymen taught us, "Nothing Ever Lasts Forever". Some of the signed and unsigned bands they included are worth listening to. Some of them are still going, some are not. 'Do Something Pretty' claims in its underscore to be "dedicated to all things pretty in alternative, independent music & D.I.Y Culture". According to its own copyright dates, the site was set up in 2001. Therefore, it would have beared witness to a huge evolution in indie culture; the return of everything we loved about music, the movement from our brief flirtation with retro in the early decade to the foundations of our current experimental and arty pop scene. In retrospect, we can also see how the fanzine concluded on what was just starting up at the time: Folktronica. Four Tet's Everything is Elastic was one of the final albums to be reviewed and the other bands featured in 2005 share a similar style. There's a short news alert heralding the Arcade Fire debut Funeral which has become somewhat of a landmark as well as a review of the searing and insane The New Fellas by The Cribs. Even the fanzine title hints towards self impossed naivity and DIY expression, with perhaps with just a pinch of sarcasm. In all this, Beat Happening would be pleased.

'Do Something Prettys' last ever album review is of a band called Super Reverb with the halariously named title 'Avant Garde Is The French Word For Shit'. With swaggering confidence and a highly varied approach, it's quite a find. They balance perfectly between low-fi punk and jingly jangly psychadelia; but this is only the begninning. An extended viewing of the archives brings many other unknown bands into light and a few interviews with The Longcut and The Secret Machines feel very old indeed. There's a pre-mainstream-fame interview with the Kaiser Chiefs sporting a stupidly aimless quote from Ricky Wilson: "...who wants to see a band onstage anymore that think they’re cooler than you?" True words, Ricky. Too bad that attitude didn't stick. Hanging out with Girls Aloud proves they no longer relate to their audience on the level they once did.

Personified, 'Do Something Pretty' is like your best friends little sister, who's a fan of Belle and Sabastian, does arts and crafts and wears colourful querky clothes. Except reading it four years on feels like that little girl has all grown up and moved far away. Left as it is, in silent and untouched charm, it's a small piece of nostalgia.