Your correspondent is tired and weary, drowning in a sea of hipsters, trying not to booze due to previous late messy night après gig and "advancing years". Yeah, right... Lotta cool cats about. DJ is playing garagey sorta stuff with a blues flavour - I notice the Black Keys and the Bellrays emanating from the ones and twos, amongst others. This is a late show, 10 - 2, so has more of a club night feel to it. Efforts have been made appearance-wise, in the main. You could be at Pigs. More of a New York kinda thang than on an indie-student feet-shuffling tip. You know what I mean. Anyroads, allegedly Endgunn were meant to be the headline act here tonight but they cancelled last minute, so Black Wire have stepped up to fill their shoes. Errr... who are Endgunn? I may be ignorant here, but I thought the 'Wire were headlining anyway. And so did they apparently. No friggin' matter. The music, man, the music...Relative newcomers The Pistol Apostles are first to hit the boards. Good cowboy hat action and sleeveless T-shirt bedecked with "fantasy art" of dubious taste. What we have here is unreconstructed, raw and swampy blues rock, replete with gravel vocals befitting of an old black gent from the Delta regions. It swaggers and stomps and goes down pretty damn well. This is blatantly not ground-breaking stuff but it does the job nicely, slightly sloppy in places but this kind of thing goes well sloppy. Reminds me of early Stones even, rather than the MC5 or anything like that. Hipness Quotient: medium to high.
Quite a strange line-up, the black sheep of which are The Bilderberg Group. I'd heard of these boys previously but wasn't sure exactly how they got down. There are blues blueprints here also, but less of the grind-and-holler thing than a more "musical" blend - we're talking close harmonies, some more complex arrangements and a bit of a country/Mersey style to it. A cheap journo comparison would be the Coral methinks, though my pal reckoned Ocean Colour Scene. Damn. In light of this, where do you think these chaps are gonna score on the Hipness Quotient?... It's good, it's ambitious, I wouldn't buy it (but then most people wouldn't buy GG Allin or Norwegian black metal) and it splits the crowd right down the middle. Literally, like a Great Dane mounting a Chihuahua. There's a lot dancing and whooping, but a lot clearing off to the bar also. One hepcat behind me SCREAMS "FUCK OFF!! YOU'RE THE WORST FUCKING THING I'VE EVER SEEN!!" or words to that effect, which I thought was a trifle harsh but free country innit? They did play for too long though.
In the absence of Endgunn, some random heavy jazz fusion dudes take to the stage to "jam" for a while. I shit you not. Now then, this starts out A-OK in my book, heavy distorted noisy tackle redolent of "On The Corner"-era Miles. I'm feeling this, and a few of the more open-minded cats present are too. BUT it all goes a bit horribly wrong. These people are GENUINE MUSICIANS on a JAZZ TIP, which means: 1) They end up going on for WAY too long, 2) They start to noodle and masturbate incessantly, with scant regard for crowd who are here for concise punkish action, and 3) They start to lose the dark Miles-y shit and end up reminding me of Acid Jazz Gone Bad. Brrrrrr... End result? Fucking loads of people go home, much to an increasingly drunken Black Wire's chagrin. Hipness Quotient: N/A.
Black Wire are filming this for their forthcoming video. They have been drinking booze, and as noted above, are irritated by jazzbos trying to steal their light and the go-home-early complacency factor which is on display. This all makes for good venomous abusive carry-on, frontman Dan cussing out many people from stage, attempting to stir the remaining (still fairly healthy) populace into movement. These boys are all hair and Cramps-meet-Dolls stylings, and must have about 3 grams of body fat between 'em. Confrontation and mither makes for many a great show (ask Iggy, Martin Vega or M E Smith) and this is no exception. Don't fuckin' ask me about individual songs. One is called "Brain Dead", I remember that and "is about a zombie fucking your mother" apparently. So it's sort of a cross between Travis, Stereophonics and early Starsailor, then. Drum machine pounds and rattles, bass chunders, guitars scratch, vocals yelp. Cold early 80s new-wave styles with early 70s CBGBs swagger. Floor is fallen on. Stuff is thrown. Crowd are baited like bears. Eventually audience invade stage, and band invade dancefloor. Band rejoin audience on stage finally and there's some damn nice footage, I shouldn't wonder. Black Wire are victorious in the face of adversity, and go down screaming like banshees. Those who went home early missed out on the most rock'n'roll shit of the evening.
Hipness Quotient: Two middle fingers and a bag of glue, F.U.C.K Y.O.U.
