Category: Music

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Happy World Goth Day 2025

 

From unsplash.com / © Maryam Sicard

 

It’s May 22nd, which a quick check on Google informs me is Sherlock Holmes Day, Harvey Milk Day, International Day for Biological Diversity, Buy a Musical Instrument Day, and, thirst-quenchingly, both Chardonnay Day and National Craft Distillery Day.  But most interestingly for me, in honour of the planet’s spookiest and blackest-clad musical sub-culture, it’s World Goth Day.

 

With that in mind, here are YouTube links to a dozen Goth tunes that I’ve been listening to recently.  Be prepared, though, for a few annoying YouTube ads for fast-food outlets, perfumes and designer footwear before you get to the delights of the music itself.

 

First off… I knew nothing about Sidewalks and Skeletons before I stumbled across this number, Born to Die, on YouTube a little while ago.  According to a Google search, “Sidewalks and Skeletons is the solo project of UK artist of Jake Lee, who grew up in Bradford, England”.  Lee was at one time a deathcore guitarist but during the past two decades has been attracted more by ‘dark electronic music.’  Anyway, as well as being an impressive (if rather intense) listening experience, Born to Die comes with a video that’s a memorable amalgamation of epileptic-seizure-inducing lighting effects and quaint-but-creepy clips from some old, black-and-white silent movies.

 

Here’s a song called Edison’s Medicine by the San Francisco band In Letter Form.  A track on their 2016 album Fracture Repair Repeat, it manages the tricky feat of sounding a bit like late 1970s legends Joy Division, whilst having enough personality of its own to also sound like something other than a song by Joy Division.  (There’s a whole sub-genre of bands out there who sound like Joy Division and nothing else – I’m looking at you, Editors – a sub-genre I like to call ‘Joy Revision’.)  Anyway, it’s great  The only thing to sour the experience of hearing its melancholy gorgeousness is knowing that, tragically, the band’s singer Eric Miranda passed away the same year it was released.

 

© Sacred Bones Records

 

And there’s a pleasant (but again not too derivative) Joy Division vibe running through my next choice, Cyaho, by the Belarussian band Molchat Doma.  It appears on their 2018 album Etazhi.  Popular belief has it that Goth music evolved in wintry, out-of-way cities in northern England in the Margaret Thatcher-dominated 1980s.  So perhaps it’s unsurprising that a similar sound emerged from Minsk, the wintry (during the coldest months its temperature drops to minus seven degrees) out-of-the-way capital of Alexander Lukashenka-dominated Belarus.  Though apparently, they’re now based in Los Angeles.

 

If all this Joy Division-influenced music is making you feel glum, here’s the cure.  I mean it.  Here’s the Cure.  In 2000 Robert Smith and co. released their eleventh studio album Bloodflowers, which was greeted by some snotty reviews in the music press.  “Goth-awful!” exclaimed the now-defunct Melody Maker, hilariously.  What a lot of nonsense.  Bloodflowers is a great Cure record.  Incidentally, it’s currently the album I listen to most on my elderly iPod while I subject my equally elderly bones and joints to a workout in my local gym.  And the very best thing on it is the second track, Watching Me Fall, a mighty, majestic thing indeed.  It’s like listening to a Gothicised version of a relentless Led Zeppelin stomper such as When the Levee Breaks (1971) or Kashmir (1975).

 

My next song is Troops by London-based singer Grace Solero and her eponymous band.  It originally appeared on their first album, New Moon, in 2009.  I don’t know if Ms. Solero would be pleased to be described as a purveyor of Goth music, but there’s an amount of witchy darkness here, though mixed with some radiant, soaring moments too.  In fact, it’s the song’s polarities – its rawness and tenderness – that appeal to me.

 

There was a time when Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave, famous for performing with his band the Bad Seeds and for once fronting the raucous punk-Goth outfit the Birthday Party, seemed a Jekyll and Hyde character.  Sometimes you’d get Nice Nick, singing gentle, pretty songs like Into My Arms (1997) that you ‘d happily let your granny listen to.  Yet you’d also get Nasty Nick, responsible for such sonic assaults as Stagger Lee (1996) where Cave hollered about slobbering on people’s heads and filling them full of lead while Blixa Bargeld shrieked apocalyptically in the background, which you’d only let your granny listen to if you wanted her to die so you could inherit her money.

 

© Mute Records

 

Some have lamented the fact that as he’s grown older, Nice Nick has come to dominate Cave’s musical output while Nasty Nick has mostly disappeared.  But I just go with the flow…  Here’s an example of what I consider Nice Nick at his best, the ballad Sweetheart Come from 2001’s No More Shall We Part.  I can’t understand why it hasn’t received more attention, praise and love as I think it’s a marvellous song.  Though the lyric “And if he touches you again with his stupid hands / His life won’t be worth living” suggests a smidgeon of Nasty Nick lurking in the mix.

 

As someone who’s also a fan of heavy metal, I should enjoy the crossover of it and Goth music known as ‘gothic metal’.  But with a few exceptions, such as County Suffolk’s awesome Cradle of Filth, the bands don’t appeal to me.  HIM, the Rasmus, Nightwish, Charon, Unshine…  Their music seems all a bit too tasteful and pretty for my tastes, and the ones with female singers appear to be doing their best to sound like Evanescence, a very successful band who never floated my boat.  Plus they all seem to come from Finland – is being a member of a gothic-metal band a prerequisite for getting Finnish citizenship?

 

However, here’s one Finnish gothic-metal outfit I do like, the melodramatically-named Eternal Tears of Sorrow.  This song, Sweet Lilith of My Dreams, the opening track on their 2006 album Before the Bleeding Sun, begins daintily enough, before gathering speed and volume.  It’s just a shame that Eternal Tears of Sorrow announced their disbandment three months ago.

 

And just to show there are gothic-metal bands with female singers whom I like too, here’s Lacuna Coil, from Italy (not Finland).  Two years ago, Lacuna Coil played a gig in my current city of residence, Singapore, and I’m still annoyed at myself for missing the opportunity to see them then.  This song, Blood, Tears, Dust, from their 2016 album Delirium, nicely combines the operatic vocals of their singer Christina Scabbia with the growlier and more traditionally-metallic tones of their other singer, Andrea Ferro.  And musically, it rattles along.

 

That’s enough about gothic metal.  Now it’s time for another hybrid – Goth music blended with twangy surf music.  The song in question is from the 2022 EP Surf-Goth by Melbourne artist Desmond Doom and its called Get Me Out.  Actually, the dark sounds and dark sensibilities mixed with springy surf guitars put me in mind of some earlier efforts by feedback-loving alternative rockers the Jesus and Mary Chain.  (If Jim and William Reid knew I had mentioned the Jesus and Mary Chain in a piece about Goth music, they would probably come around to my house and kill me.  So don’t tell them I did that.)

 

© Desmond Doom Music

 

Come to think of it, though, back in 1998 I bought a Goth compilation album called Nocturnal, which had two Jesus and Mary Chain tracks on it…  And also on that album, near the end, was my next choice, Big Hollow Man by the singer, producer and artist Danielle Dax.  I thought the song  was charming, even though it seemed lighter and poppier than most other stuff on the record.  But should anyone doubt Ms. Dax’s credentials for appearing in a list of Goth tunes, I’ll point them to the fact that in 1984 she played the wolf-girl in Neil Jordan’s masterly film adaptation of Angela Carter’s short story The Company of Wolves (1979).  There’s nothing Gothier than that.

 

I’ve described the veteran band Killing Joke in the past as a ‘Goth / industrial juggernaut’ with a ‘crunching, thunderous urgency’.  The next song, I am the Virus, from Killing Joke’s 2015 album Pylon, does nothing to make me change my opinion of them.  With its Beatles-baiting title, it takes retrospective aim at George Bush Jr, Tony Blair, the War on Terror, the second Iraq War et al: “There’s a darkness in the West,” roars singer Jaz Coleman, “oil swilling guzzling corporate central banking mind-f**king omnipotence.”  I suppose in 2015 Bush and Blair’s catastrophic intervention in the Middle East seemed the worst thing that could ever happen.  Mind you, since then…  According to their Wikipedia entry, the band have been ‘inactive’ since the death of guitarist Geordie Walker in 2023.  But now, in this dire era of Trump II, I feel we need them more than ever.

 

Finally, here’s Dead Can Dance, another band who combine Goth music with something else – in their case, ‘world music’, the patronising catch-all term Westerners use to describe traditional music from non-Western countries.  Dead Can Dance have been mixing genres enthusiastically since 1996’s Spiritchaser, although on this song, Amnesia, from the band’s 2012 album Anastasis, the world-music elements are less in evidence.  Well, apart from the insistent chime of band-member Lisa Gerrard’s yangqin, which Wikipedia describes as a ‘Chinese hammered dulcimer’.  Whatever, Amnesia is both a stirring and a wonderfully-mellow composition and it makes a good item with which to end this list.

 

Happy World Goth Day 2025!

 

© Procreate

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The Boss versus the dross

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ralph_PH

 

I have another reason to loathe Donald Trump, the 45th and also, alas, 47th president of the United States of America.  He’s made me like Bruce Springsteen.

 

On May 14th, at Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena, on the opening night of his Land of Hope and Dreams tour, Springsteen – the famously sideburned, famously plaid-shirt-wearing singer-songwriter-guitarist from New Jersey – kicked off proceedings by making a speech.  He declared: “…my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.  Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!”  Later on, he described the head of that ‘corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration’, i.e., Trump, as an ‘unfit president’ and proclaimed, “The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people.  So we’ll survive this moment.”

 

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before Trump’s overworked posting-thumb was busy knocking out a retort on his Truth Social platform.  He called Springsteen ‘as dumb as a rock’ and added: “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare’. Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

 

Also joining in was Trump’s number-one music-industry sycophant Kid Rock, now a not-so-kiddish 54 years old.  It’s telling that the only song I’ve heard by him was the 2008 hit All Summer Long – a Kid Rock number whose best bits weren’t actually written by Kid Rock.  They come from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama (1974) and Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London (1978).  “Just another person with TDS (Trump derangement syndrome) at the highest levels,” Kid Rock said of Springsteen.  “To be in Europe talking junk about our president who gets up and works his ass off for this country, every day, and his administration is doing such great things…  Thank God for him.  But to do that in Europe… what a punk move.”  Kid Rock, please note.  To me and many folk my age, calling Bruce Springsteen a ‘punk’ is amusing.  But it’s not the insult you think it is.

 

Since Kid Rock believes Trump’s administration is ‘doing such great things’ for the USA, he’s surely a big fan of Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant policies.  Incidentally, the restaurant he’s licensed in Nashville, the not-at-all-stupidly-titled Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse, lately and mysteriously sent kitchen-staff home during a weekend when Trump’s brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency were conducting operations in the city.  I’m sure the reason for this wasn’t anything dodgy.  Not because, say, the restaurant was employing people who were immigrants lacking permanent legal status and might get dragged off and incarcerated.

 

I first encountered the musical oeuvre of Bruce Springsteen, or ‘Loose Windscreen’ as I liked to call him, while I was a fifth-year pupil at Peebles High School in the early 1980s.  Fifth and sixth-years pupils, the senior members of the student body known as the ‘Upper School’, were entitled to their own common room, where there was an elderly record-player and speakers you could play music on during the morning, lunchtime and afternoon breaks.  This was normally monopolised by the Upper School’s sizeable heavy-metal contingent and it blasted out a lot of AC/DC, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead, Rainbow, the Scorpions, Thin Lizzy and Whitesnake.

 

© Columbia Records

 

However, once in a while, somebody would manage to get past the phalanx of heavy-metal fans surrounding the record player and slap something a little different on it.  One such record was Springsteen’s 1975 breakthrough album, Born to Run.  Hearing it, I thought it was all right and, at the time, the title track seemed a stormer.  (Nowadays,  having heard it a zillion times, I’m less keen on it.)  So, Mr Windscreen’s, sorry, Mr Springsteen’s music seemed perfectly fine to me.  But it wasn’t anything I’d go out of my way to listen to.

 

Incidentally, a few years earlier, my favourite band had been the Boomtown Rats, the new wave outfit fronted by Bob Geldof.  Last week, I listened to Rat Trap, the Boomtown Rats song that topped the UK charts in 1978, for the first time in decades.  And I was surprised by how, well, Springsteen-esque it sounds now.

 

By the mid-1980s I was a student at Aberdeen University.  I quickly discovered that a number of my fellow-students were seriously into Bruce Springsteen.  They were so into him they apparently knew everything about every second of music he’d ever committed to vinyl – that, say, if you played the third of the nine tracks on the Belgian version of the 1973 LP Greetings from Ashbury Park N.J. backwards, you’d hear him break wind in the studio.  Yes, stuff like that.

 

These Bruce-fans – whom some unkindly referred to as ‘Bruce-bores’ – were, without exception, male.  Actually, a good proportion of them seemed to be engineering students and had names like ‘Morris’.  Also, they never called their hero ‘Bruce’, but used the annoying moniker ‘The Boss’.  This struck me as paradoxical since they were always going on about what a man of the people he was.  Surely, then, a blue-collar, working-class guy like him would be against the bosses?

 

© Columbia Records

 

This was a bad time if, like me, you were surrounded by Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans, and you didn’t believe as they did that Springsteen was the greatest thing to have happened to music since Mrs Beethoven gave birth to little Ludwig van.  For, in 1984, he released Born in the USA, an album that sold over 30 million copies worldwide and spawned no fewer than seven singles.  As with most of Springsteen’s output, it struck me as perfectly decent, but not remarkable, journeyman rock music.  But it subsequently became annoying because people around me never seemed to stop playing it.

 

The Born in the USA singles received heavy rotation in the place where I worked part-time during my second year as a student, Ritzy’s Nightclub.  At Ritzy’s I was a member of the floor-staff – meaning I spent most of my time collecting empty glasses and loaded ashtrays from the punters’ tables, cleaning them, and returning the glasses to the bar-shelves and the ashtrays to the tables.

 

I’ve said before on this blog that of the many jobs I’ve had in my life, I hated the Ritzy’s one most.  I had to work until 2.00 AM every Friday and Saturday night while my mates were out partying.  The glasses I collected were often phenomenally grotty with cigarette ends and even puke floating around in them.  Many of the punters were workers in Aberdeen’s then-flourishing oil industry, who made tons of money and believed their hefty earnings allowed them to behave like knob-heads at all times, especially towards serfs like myself.  And the music spewing out of the nightclub’s speakers was gruesome – all the vacuous New Romantic stuff like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Wham that dominated the UK charts during 1984-85.  In that company, Springsteen’s songs didn’t seem so bad.  But having to hear them repeatedly in that environment quickly made me sick of them too.

 

The first Born in the USA single out of the blocks was Dancing in the Dark, which I came to associate with a mid-week gig I had at Ritzy’s.  This was a regular evening the nightclub held for the over-30s, which was known in local parlance as ‘Grab-a-Granny Night’.  It featured a live band who performed cover versions of songs currently in the charts and Dancing in the Dark seemed a particular favourite of the band’s frontman, a bloke called Stan.  The sound of Stan warbling his way through the song, and the sight of him simultaneously attempting some Boss-like dancing onstage whilst apparently in possession of two left feet, are burned into my memory.

 

In the summer of 1985, I developed a fully-fledged aversion to Bruce Windscreen, sorry, Springsteen.  The summer was going badly for me for various financial, personal and health reasons, and my mood wasn’t helped by the fact that every single day that July and August saw rain piss down relentlessly on Aberdeen, turning the grey granite the city was built with oppressively black.  At one point I found myself sharing a flat with a good friend, one Andrew J. MacRury, who was also having a bad summer.  And yes, Andy was an avid Bruce-bore, sorry, Bruce-fan.  I worked night-shifts and, a dozen times each day, while I was in bed trying to snatch some sleep, I’d be rudely awoken by my friend playing the title track of Born in the USA in the next room, at full blast, in a desperate attempt to cheer himself up.  Repeatedly, every day, I was practically blasted out of bed by the sideburned one hollering: “Booooorn… in the US-Aaaa!  I wuz booooorn… in the US-Aaaa!”

 

Thereafter, if anyone show signs of talking enthusiastically about Bruce Springsteen, let alone play some music by him, I’d run for the hills.  In March 1992, when to great fanfare he released two albums on the same day (Human Touch and Lucky Town), I think I went into hiding.

 

© Columbia Records

 

Now any Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans reading this will no doubt be shocked by my attitude towards their hero and accuse me of being deficient in musical taste.  To that I would reply I wasn’t the only person on the planet unswayed by the charms of Mr Springsteen.  The legendary radio DJ John Peel, for example, once said of Springsteen’s appeal: “It utterly mystifies me.  I can’t see it at all.  I mean, when he first started out… it sounded to me like sub-Dylan stuff.  And it just doesn’t ring true.”  Indeed, the John Peel Wiki notes that Peel “almost never played any of Springsteen’s material on his show and scarcely missed an opportunity to compare him unfavourably with other artists such as Half Man Half Biscuit.”

 

Certain musicians have been less than enthralled by him too.  The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, while describing Springsteen as ‘a nice guy, a sweet guy’, has been scathing about his musical ability.  He wrote in his 2010 biography Life, “If there was anything better around, he’d still be working the bars of New Jersey.”  Meanwhile, Irish folk-rock troubadour Van Morrison once grumped about what he saw as Springsteen’s lack of originality.  As far as Van Morrison was concerned, he’d nicked all his ideas from, er, Van Morrison.  “For years people have been saying to me, ‘Have heard this guy Springsteen?  You should really check him out!’  I just ignored it.  Then four or five months ago I was in Amsterdam, and a friend of mine put on a video.  Springsteen came on the video, and that was the first time I ever saw him, and he’s definitely ripped me off.”

 

However, in times of great adversity, you have to take sides – even the sides of folk whom, until now, you’ve regarded as your enemies.  For instance, the cops had to join forces with the prisoners in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) when faced with an onslaught by the murderous gang Street Thunder.  And James Bond (Roger Moore) had to team up with Jaws (Richard Kiel) in Lewis Gilbert’s Moonraker (1979) to overcome the genocidal plans of Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale).  I feel the same way about Bruce Springsteen.  I’ve found much of his music stodgy, and at times his fans have driven me up the walls, but I’ll back him all the way in his struggle against Trump, who’s busy turning Springsteen’s homeland into an authoritarian state run by white supremacists, loopy evangelical Christians, billionaire tech-bros and environment-wrecking oil barons.

 

Indeed, if Springsteen can do anything to get Trump out of office – arrange, say, for a million Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans to storm the White House – I’ll happily grow sideburns, and wear a plaid shirt for the rest of my life, and listen to Born in the USA a dozen times a day.  Hail to the Boss!

 

Also, while I don’t have much regard for Springsteen’s music, I still think it’s light-years better than that Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll shite peddled by Kid Rock.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Carl Lender

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Even bloodsuckers get the blues

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

A few days ago my partner and I went to see Sinners, the new horror-cum-gangster film directed, written and co-produced by Ryan Coogler.  Here are my thoughts on it.  And before I go any further, a word of warning: there will be spoilers.

 

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a great deal, as I’d heard something about its plot and it sounded horribly like 1996’s Robert Rodriguez-directed, Quentin Tarantino-scripted From Dusk till Dawn.  Although a few misguided souls nowadays look back on that film as a neglected and misunderstood classic, I have to say I f**king hated it.  In part, this was because From Dusk till Dawn began so well, as a nastily-effective little crime thriller wherein two fleeing bank-robbing brothers (Tarantino and George Clooney) kidnap a pastor (Harvey Keitel) and his family and force them to smuggle them over the US / Mexico border.  Disappointingly, things then go south in all senses of the phrase.  The group arrives at a mysterious Mexican bar called the Titty Twister where the staff and many of the patrons prove to be – surprise! – vampires.  The rest of the film is a ludicrous, tongue-in-cheek splatterfest where the humans battle against waves of bloodsucking undead.  While From Dusk Till Dawn’s sudden change of tone has been praised in some quarters for its audacity, I found it a vertiginous plunge into cheesy bollocks.

 

Anyway, the structure of Sinners is not dissimilar.  Its first half plays out as a period gangster story, then vampires show up and its latter half becomes an exercise in horror.  Set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, it’s about the homecoming of black gangster twin brothers Stack and Smoke (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who’ve recently left Chicago where, it’s suggested, they worked for Al Capone.  On their home turf, they embark on a new project – purchasing a disused sawmill and turning it into a juke joint, i.e.. a place for live music, dancing, drinking and gambling whose customers are from the local African American community.

 

To ensure the juke joint’s opening night is a success, they staff it with trusted friends, family members and associates: Smoke’s ex-wife, the occult-dabbling Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and Chinese shopkeepers Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao) to handle the catering; hulking buddy Cornbread (Omar Miller) to man the door; and boozy old bluesman Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), slinky singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) and young, startlingly-talented guitarist Sammie (Miles Caton) to provide the music.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

Despite a few obstacles – two thieves who soon regret tangling with the take-no-prisoners Stack, the fact that the sawmill’s former owner is head of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and the disapproval of Sammie’s dad, a preacher who believes music is only virtuous if it’s used to further the word of the Lord – the juke joint opens, pulls in the crowds and is soon swinging.  And then the vampires arrive.

 

Yes, I was dreading this moment – because I had really enjoyed the non-fantastical part of the film.  Coogler did a great job depicting the minutiae of the 1932 Mississippi Delta.  This was a world where the black population was just a couple of generations removed from the official slavery of the Confederacy and most of them now toiled in the racket that was sharecropping, a form of unofficial slavery.  At the same time, they were crafting a musical culture, the blues, that would ultimately revolutionise American and global music through its influence on rock and roll.  One touch among many that I liked here was the portrayal of the Chinese shopkeepers, Grace and Bo, who thanks to their ethnicity are able to run stores in both districts of the Mississippi town of Clarksdale, the black one and the white one.

 

Anyway, when the vampires show up, does the film turn to shite as From Dusk till Dawn did?  Thankfully, no.  Coogler provides some foreshadowing to prepare us for the twist, so it doesn’t come as a credibility-straining bolt from the blue.  During the opening sequence, a voice-over talks about certain types of music being “so pure it can pierce the veil between life and death, past and future” and attract supernatural creatures – an idea that’s echoed later when the vampires admit Sammie’s miraculous guitar-playing has drawn them to the juke joint.  (Even before the vampires arrive, Coogler treats us to a phantasmagorical sequence where Sammie’s playing seems to conjure up among the dancing crowd the spectres of music past and future – West African shamans, Chinese Xiqu performers, hip-hop DJs and an electric guitarist who looks like he’s a member of George Clinton’s P-Funk collective.)

 

Also preparing viewers for the tonal switch is an earlier sequence where a white man, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), flees from a squad of Choctaw Native Americans and takes refuge in a cabin inhabited by a hard-up white couple.  The pursuing Native Americans politely warn the couple that they’re sheltering something evil.  But as KKK robes are visible inside the cabin, it’s no surprise that the couple believe the story of their white visitor rather than that of the ‘Injuns’.  Noticing the sun is setting, and with a shotgun pointed at them, the Choctaw decide discretion is the better part of valour and retreat.  Which leaves Remmick to reveal himself as a vampire and infect his two saviours.

 

Coogler leaves this bit of world-building unexplored – which makes it wonderfully intriguing.  Why are the Choctaw acting as vampire hunters?  It also reminds me of the start of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), where a dog – actually the titular thing in canine form – is chased by a pair of wrathful Norwegians in a helicopter.  Compared to the Norwegians, though, the Native Americans are more pragmatic and level-headed.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

Later, Remmick and the vampirised Klan couple appear on the threshold of Smoke and Stack’s new juke joint, bearing musical instruments and pleading to be let in (“We heard tell of a party”) so that they can have a jamming session with Sammie.  Sinners makes much of the belief that to get onto a premises, a vampire has to be invited – and Smoke and Stack, suspicious of white folks, are in no hurry to invite this trio inside.  So they bide their time outside, biting and vampirising anyone who goes home early or nips out of the building for a pee.  While they wait for their opportunity to get inside, their numbers grow…

 

In a smart move, Coogler makes Remmick Irish and gives him a taste for music as strong as his taste for blood.  So, lurking outside, the vampires knock out a few tunes themselves – a charming version of the Irish / Scottish folk number Wild Mountain Thyme, for instance, and when there’s enough of them to stage a full-scale vampire hooley, a raucous rendition of Rocky Road to Dublin, during which Remmick indulges in some step-dancing.  This makes being a vampire look like fun and Remmick, entreating the folks in the juke joint to surrender to him and his horde, makes a persuasive-sounding case for being vampirised.  Once you’re a vampire, it doesn’t matter what skin-tone you have.  Black vampires are treated no worse than white ones: “This world already left you for dead.  I can save you from your fate.  I am your way out.”

 

There’s a snag, of course.  Remmick, as the Count Dracula / Mr. Barlow-style lead vampire, calls the shots and his minions have to do his bidding.  Indeed, they seem parts of a giant hive-mind – evidenced by their chorused singing of Rocky Road to Dublin, which contrasts with the individuality Sammie expresses with his guitar.  And Remmick’s interest in Sammie and his music isn’t motivated by an impulse of sharing but by a desire to assimilate them.

 

It’s fun to speculate who or what Remmick symbolizes.  When he makes his first pitch at the juke joint’s door, begging to be let inside while Sammie, Delta Slim and Pearline perform, I was reminded of those white British rock-and-roll bands of the 1960s, like the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds.  Influenced by the likes of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, they started their careers desperate to play blues music and become known as bluesmen themselves.  Which prompted Sonny Boy Williamson II to quip caustically: “These English boys want to play the blues real bad… And they do, real bad.”

 

But maybe it makes more sense to compare Remmick to the white-owned American music industry.  His hunger for Sammie parallels how that industry gobbled up black artists, of blues, jazz, gospel, soul, funk, whatever, and made a fortune off their music whilst giving them as little credit, money and control over their work as possible.  Often, their songs ended up being sung by someone else, someone white – see Pat Boone singing a version of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti just five months after its release in 1955 – with precious few royalties making it their way.

 

Incidentally, late on, Remmick comes out with a sob story about how he was persecuted and deprived of his land in Ireland – presumably at the hands of the British and presumably back in the days when he was still human.  That a victim of oppression has become a supernatural killing machine, one with a fascistic disregard for the lives of the people he feeds on, is Coogler’s way of reminding us that many poor white people, treated like dirt in their home countries, emigrated to other parts of the world where they treated indigenous people and black people like dirt too.  It’s a sad reflection on human nature that people near the bottom of the pile have a psychological need to believe there are people even further down the pile whom they can mistreat and regard as inferior.  Though this observation would no doubt delight Elon Musk, who recently grumbled that the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”.

 

I’ve spent a lot of time analysing Sinners but I should also say it’s a supremely entertaining movie.  It’s exciting, scary, funny and atmospheric.  Furthermore, it proves a point that many filmmakers overlook – if you want a horror film to grip an audience, give them likeable and sympathetic characters to identify with.  That way, they have an investment in those characters and things feel much more tense when bad stuff starts happening.

 

© Cedric Burnside Project

© Silvertone Records

 

It goes without saying that the soundtrack is great too.  I’m particularly pleased to see that Cedric Burnside had a hand in performing some of the blues tunes – I attended a cool gig by Burnside at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival in 2015 and afterwards got his signature on a CD as a present for one of my mates.  Also, don’t rush off when the credits start rolling at the end.  There’s still a scene to come, one set in the early 1990s and featuring the venerable bluesman Buddy Guy.  (By a coincidence I saw Guy perform in the early 1990s, though obviously the early-1990s Guy in Sinners is a good bit older than the one I witnessed.)  It’s a coda that’s both sinister and affecting.

 

And the acting is excellent.  Michael B. Jordan is impressive in the twin roles of Smoke and Stack.  I soon forgot that both characters were being played by the same person.  It’s a pleasure seeing Delroy Lindo again, whom I fondly remember as the villain in the 1995 adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty and from numerous Spike Lee movies.  And as Sammie, Michael Caton is a revelation.  He’s young and naïve, as the script demands, but he’s blessed with a deep, prematurely-old voice that totally persuades you this lad can sing and play the blues.

 

One thing about the casting, though.  Jack O’Connell is perfectly fine as Remmick.  But since the character is a scary old monster who’s Irish and musical, I don’t know why they didn’t cast the obvious candidate for the role: Van Morrison.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

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Buck Rogers in the 21st century

 

 

After the rock band Feeder – consisting of Welsh vocalist and guitarist Grant Nicholas, Welsh drummer Jon Lee and Japanese bassist Taka Hirose – appeared in the 1990s, I bought their first few albums: Polythene (1997), Yesterday Went Too Soon (1999) and Echo Park (2001).  I enjoyed them at the time, but don’t remember much about them now – just a few songs like High (1997) and their biggest hit, Buck Rogers (2001).

 

After Echo Park, I stopped listening to Feeder.  This wasn’t because of a decline in their musical quality.  I moved around a lot in the 2000s and 2010s and lost touch with many of the bands I’d been into during the previous decade.  Often I was living in countries where it was impossible to hear about and buy new music by Western rock bands.  And YouTube isn’t much help if you’re somewhere with little or zero Internet connectivity.

 

Also – in an echo of the tragedy that befell fellow Welsh rockers the Manic Street Preachers – Feeder lost their drummer Jon Lee when he committed suicide in 2002.  I actually suspected the band had called it a day after that.  However, now I’ve done some research, I see that Nicholas and Hirose have soldiered on and produced nine further albums to date.

 

Anyway, it was recently announced that, as part of their current Black / Red tour, Feeder would perform at Singapore’s Hard Rock Café on April 2nd.  Though the band are now officially a two-man outfit, Nicholas and Hirose are accompanied by rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist Tommy Gleason and drummer Geoff Holroyde.  So, I purchased a ticket and, come April 2nd, got myself along to the Hard Rock Café.

 

 

This was the second gig I’ve attended at that venue.  With uncanny symmetry, the previous band I saw there was another Celtic one who came to prominence during the Britpop era playing indie / punky rock music, Northern Ireland’s Ash.  Consequently, I couldn’t help but compare this Feeder gig with the Ash one… and it seemed slightly inferior.

 

For one thing, it was shorter.  Feeder played for 80 minutes.  I think they could have chucked in a couple of extra songs to get the gig to the hour-and-a-half mark.  A more important issue, though, was the crowd.  Ash had attracted a good mixture of Western expatriates and Singaporeans, who’d bopped to the band’s songs with great enthusiasm.  The Feeder audience, however, consisted mostly of expats in their thirties and forties and they were, frankly, a bit lame.  Stuck at the back of the crowd, I found myself staring across a sea of sensible T-shirts, slightly-greying hair, bald-spots, baseball caps (strategically placed to conceal bald-spots) and shaven scalps (strategically shaven to camouflage bald-spots).  When they were at their most enthusiastic, they reacted to the music by, well, jiggling a bit.  (Admittedly, that’s what I did – I jiggled a bit.  But I have an excuse.  I’m a frail old man now.)  I felt sorry for Grant Nicholas when he suggested, “Let’s get a 1990s mosh-pit going…”, and nothing happened.

 

My mood was also dampened by the fact that the gig took place in the Hard Rock Café – surrounded by such holy rock-and-roll artefacts as J.J. Cale’s guitar, Michael Jackson’s cymbals and, er, the drumkit of Rob Blotzer from RATT.  Yes, with the café’s tables and chairs removed for the evening, you get the feeling you’re in a small, sweaty, standing-room-only venue where the band are just a few yards away.  That intimacy is great (and uncommon in Singapore).  However, the Hard Rock Café doesn’t have a stage – or, if it does, it has no stage to speak of.  It looks like the bands play on a strip of floor at one end of the main room.  Thus, even if you aren’t far from the performers, you won’t see much of them over the heads of the spectators at the very front.

 

 

There’s the matter too of having to pay Hard Rock Café prices for your drinks.  A pint of Carlsberg set me back a blood-curdling 28 Singaporean dollars, which is 16 British pounds sterling.

 

Still, despite the subdued crowd and the problems with the venue, once I relaxed and focused only on the show, I did enjoy it.  Bravely, Feeder didn’t go down the easy route of pandering to 1990s nostalgia, which is currently modish thanks to the hype over this summer’s reunion tour by the Gallagher siblings, and they played just four songs off those first three albums I mentioned earlier – though the songs were well-received and Buck Rogers inevitably got a good reception late on in the set.  On the other hand, they devoted more than half their set to material off their three most recent albums, Tallulah (2019), Torpedo (2022) and Black / Red (2024) and it was absolutely fine.  The standout for me was their 2024 song Playing with Fire – I definitely prefer Feeder when they’re being heavier and Playing with Fire was a good essay in heaviness.

 

Kudos, by the way, to drummer Geoff Holroyde (who looks like a slightly-better-groomed Alan Moore) for wearing a Flying V Bar T-shirt and thus giving a plug to Singapore’s premier heavy metal pub.  Mind you, I was in the Flying V a week earlier and they had a big banner up promoting tonight’s gig, so perhaps he was just returning the compliment.

 

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My safe space

 

 

The world is in a terrible state at the moment.  It’s apparently morphing into a real-life version of the scenario imagined by George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), wherein the planet is divided into three authoritarian superstates, Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania.  We now have Russia run by Vladimir Putin, China run by Xi Jinping, and the USA run by the grotesque triumvirate of orange gobshite Donald Trump, viper-in-hillbilly-form J.D. Vance, and the chainsaw-wielding, ketamine-popping, Seig Heiling, superrich super-dickhead Elon Musk.  All three countries have been open about their territorial ambitions, about their wish to expand and become real-life, continent-engulfing equivalents of Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania.  Very bad news if you live in Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, Taiwan, Panama, Greenland or Canada.  Pretty bad news for the rest of us.

 

Thus, in these troubled times, it’s a relief to have a safe space: a little cubby hole you can retreat to, and hide in, and where your brain can function removed from all the awfulness happening outside for a while.  For me, that space is provided by the Flying V bar, Singapore’s self-styled ‘heavy metal headquarters’, which is hidden away in a back corridor in the basement of the Adelphi Shopping Centre on the city’s Colman Street.  Actually, the shopping centre is next door to the National Gallery, which makes the Flying V an ideal spot to sit with a beer after a visit to the gallery and ruminate on all the artwork you’ve just experienced.

 

 

A Singaporean shopping centre may seem an incongruous place to find a heavy metal bar.  However, it isn’t the only music or metal-related business in the Adelphi.  On your way there, you pass a few units containing shops that sell vinyl records, many of the heavy-metal variety.

 

 

Inside, the walls of the Flying V are slathered with old posters and flyers advertising heavy-metal bands, concerts and festivals.  Even if you don’t touch a drop of alcohol, you can spend a pleasant hour in the place just reading the items crammed over the walls and enjoying the little glows of nostalgia they kindle in you.  On my part, for example, I gave happy sighs when I discovered an Art Nouveau-inspired poster for the mighty space-rock band Hawkwind, designed by the graphic artist Barney Bubbles; a picture of the late, great Ronnie James Dio tricked out in sword-and-sorcery gear, as was Ronnie’s wont to wear; and a poster for the much-missed Motörhead on their 1980 world tour, promoting their greatest-ever album Ace of Spades.

 

 

On the other hand, when I took my cat-loving partner there, she was delighted to find this proclamation about the feline species emblazoned on the wall behind our table.

 

 

The Flying V’s drinks menu includes a beverage called Trooper Premium British Beer.  Trooper’s vivid label-design gives you a clue as to who produces it.  Yes, it’s the result of a project involving veteran heavy-metal band Iron Maiden, singers of such anthems as Number of the Beast (1982) and Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter (1990).  The latter song will always be close to my heart because of the fact it knocked Cliff Richard’s sanctimonious Saviour’s Day (1990) off the coveted Christmas Number One slot in the 1990 British singles chart.  The band produce Trooper in partnership with England’s Robinson’s Brewery.  So, if you spend an afternoon getting sloshed on the stuff in the Flying V, you’re not being wasteful or unproductive.  You’re actually helping to fund Iron Maiden.

 

As I’ve said, the world is in a dire state just now and it sometimes feels tempting to retreat into the Flying V and hole up there for good.  However, the place does contain a warning against staying on the premises for too long.  You might end up like this guy.

 

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Thom is da bomb

 

 

I don’t know when I became a fan of the band Radiohead.  They seemed to creep up on me by stealth.  I’d been aware of them for years before suddenly, one day, I realised: “Hey! I really like them!”

 

Appropriately for a band who crept up on me, the first song by them I heard was Creep from their debut album Pablo Honey (1993).  Though a massive hit, I didn’t actually like Creep, finding it dull and plodding.  My disdain for it was shared by Radiohead themselves, with guitarist Ed O’Brien saying of their performances of the song during the early 1990s: “We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again.  It was incredibly stultifying.”

 

At this time I worked as a university lecturer in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo.  One day  in 1995 I received a gift from a cool indie-kid in one of my classes, Yoko Koyama, who’d discovered that despite my outward veneer of grumpiness and grouchiness I was, underneath, a sensitive soul who was heavily into music.  The gift was a cassette recording of Radiohead’s newly-released second album, The Bends.  I diplomatically accepted it, not expecting to like it much on the basis that I hadn’t been impressed by Creep.  But when I listened to it, I thought, “This is actually pretty good.”  Not brilliantly good, but definitely good.

 

Around then, Radiohead visited Sapporo and played a gig, but the night of their concert was one when I had to teach a couple of evening classes at the university.  So I missed the chance to see them.  The next day, I went into one of my regular Sapporo drinking hangouts, the Beifu-tei Bar, and got talking to a mate of mine, a Scotsman from St Andrews called Stevie Malcolm.  Stevie informed me, “Aye, thon English rock band were in here last night after their gig.  What dae ye call them?  Thingmie-heid.”

 

“You mean, Radiohead?”

 

“Aye, Radio-heid!”

 

I got the impression Stevie had chatted away to Radiohead barely knowing who they were.  Though from the band’s unconventional approach to the music industry and their discomfort with the trappings of superstardom, they probably liked chatting to strangers in bars with barely any idea of who they were.

 

In 1997 Radiohead released their third album OK Computer, which even my snobbiest, most purist music-loving friends, who’d dismissed Pablo Honey and The Bends with a contemptuous flick of the hand, had to admit was an awesome record.  It still figures prominently when music publications list the best rock albums of all time and retrospective reviews frequently award it a full five stars.  And though subsequent albums – Kid A (2000), Amnesiac (2001), Hail to the Thief (2003), In Rainbows (2007), The King of Limbs (2011) and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) – never created quite the same stir, and often made demands on the listener by veering off into the avantgarde, experimental and left-field, I’ve found all of them laudable.

 

It helped that, unlike other bands who at various times were massively loved by audiences and hailed by critics as world-straddling musical colossi, Radiohead never seemed in your face that much.  So you didn’t grow sick of them.  Whereas for a few years U2 or Oasis, or even REM, seemed to be everywhere in the media, with the result that their ubiquity led to a backlash – the public losing interest, the critics getting disenchanted, familiarity generally breeding contempt – Radiohead were more subtle, less intrusive and lower profile.  Perhaps their credibility endured because of that.

 

Even their appearances in popular culture tended to be wry and quirky and happened in unexpected, and cool, places.  For example, I remember the very last episode of Father Ted (1995-98) when the suicidal priest Father Kevin (Tommy Tiernan) gets cured of his depression by Ted playing to him Isaac Hayes’ joyous Theme from Shaft (1971) – only to lapse back into suicidal depression when he hears Radiohead’s Exit Music (For a Film) (1997) playing on the radio in a bus.  Or when they turned up in a 2001 episode of South Park called Scott Tenorman Must Die and added a final layer of torment to the unfortunate Scott Tenorman of the title.  Scott is a kid who’s been tricked by Eric Cartman into eating the minced bodies of his dead parents.  When he discovers what he’s done, he understandably bursts into tears.  Just then, his favourite band, Radiohead, happen to stroll past, see him and cruelly mock him for being a ‘cry-baby’.

 

From x.com / © Hat Trick Productions

© South Park Studios

 

Anyway, last week on November 5th, Radiohead’s vocalist and main songwriter Thom Yorke rolled up here in Singapore to play a solo concert as part of his Everything tour.  Yorke has a long history of making music on his own, from his 2006 album The Eraser, through 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, to 2019’s ANIMA, and he’s also been involved in a couple of side-bands like Atoms for Peace and The Smile, so it’s not a surprise to find him performing without the rest of Radiohead.  I attended the gig accompanied by my better half, Mrs Blood and Porridge, who wouldn’t have missed this occasion for the world.  She’s such a dyed-in-the-wool Radiohead fan that the other day she even made our cat watch the video for 2016’s Burn the Witch on YouTube.

 

Yorke played at the Star Theatre, which I’ve visited a couple of times in the past.  At previous gigs there, I was not greatly impressed by the crowd, many of whom seemed more interested in filming the event on their phones than getting into the excitement and vibe of the music itself.  As I wrote a while ago about a Deep Purple concert: “Why remove yourself from the occasion and gaze zombie-like at tiny figures moving about a tiny stage on a tiny screen…?  It’s also, needless to say, disrespectful of the performers onstage…  Honestly, there were times when the auditorium was so densely flecked with glowing phone-screens you felt you were flying over Las Vegas at night.”  But tonight’s audience, Singaporeans and foreigners alike, seemed to be genuine Radiohead fans and Thom Yorke-lovers who knew the great man wasn’t going to appreciate having a thousand phones pointed at him by a thousand glaikit dimwits.  So, thankfully, phone-usage was at a minimum.

 

It wasn’t the most physical of performances.  Yorke spent most of his time on a patch of stage encircled by musical equipment, including several keyboards, and looked like a cross between Rick Wakeman of Yes and Captain Nemo tinkling out Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on his organ.  He did, occasionally, venture towards the audience to play guitar or indulge in some shuffling dancing.  The latter drew affectionate cheers.  I have to say seeing Thom make his funky moves brought a smile to my face, as it seemed to prove there was at least one person on the planet whose dancing is even worse than mine is.

 

 

But what of the music?  I’d read a worrying review of a gig from earlier in the tour, in Sydney, where the writer observed, “Each Radiohead song that’s played – they make up just under half the setlist – is met with a hushed reverence, while loud chatter is heard every time something else gets an airing.”  Maybe that means modern-day Sydney concertgoers are disrespectful bozos, for that certainly wasn’t my impression of the Singapore crowd.  Yes, the ten Radiohead numbers he played during the set – coming from a range of the band’s albums, though nothing featured from Pablo Honey, Hail to the Thief or The King of Limbs – were enthusiastically received.  But the audience showed their appreciation of the non-Radiohead stuff as well.  This included material from all three of Yorke’s solo albums, two new songs (Back in the Game and Hearing Damage), and two he’d composed for the 2018 soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s remake of the Dario Argento 1977 horror classic Suspiria.

 

It all meshed together nicely.  The solo material evoked at different times the sounds of the Aphex Twin, Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails and I even wondered if Yorke was getting a bit disco-y at one or two points.  Naturally, electronica-rooted Radiohead numbers like Idioteque, Everything in its Right Place or Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box (off Kid A) slotted in seamlessly among that lot.  Surprisingly, though, the band’s more conventional – dare I say more tuneful – songs, like How to Disappear Completely (Kid A again) Fake Plastic Trees (off The Bends), and All I Need (off In Rainbows) fitted in smoothly too, making it an impressively cohesive set.  Maybe it was because Yorke’s falsetto – often mocked, but inimitable, haunting and gorgeous – provided the aural thread that stitched together all these disparate pieces of musical cloth.

 

 

Praise is due too for the accompanying light show, with several tall screens treating the audience to dazzling and dizzying displays that, during the evening, seemed to range from daubs of luminous green graffiti to blizzards of multicoloured confetti, from drizzles of Matrix-style code to what looked like, frankly, masses of glowing spaghetti.  Occasionally, these gave way to stark white light, and darkness, where, at his consoles, Yorke looked like a torturer operating his torture-machines in a gothic dungeon.  Occasionally too, the chaotic patterns coalesced into the ghostly features of the man himself.  Thus, the show was an impressively visual as well as aural experience.  I have to say it was easier on the eyes than the screens at the previous gig I’d been to at the Star Theatre, which’d subjected me to regular, unflinching close-ups of the 78-year-old visage of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan.

 

By the concert’s end it seemed the many diehard fans in the crowd had got their money’s worth.  Their frequent cries of “I love you, Thom!” had never lessened in enthusiasm while the 22-song set wound on.  And presumably the guy who shouted, before the gig and behind us on the escalator while we rode up to the theatre’s entrance, “Please, Thom, don’t play Creep tonight!”, went home happy too.

 

A good evening, then.  It certainly took our minds off the horror that was happening elsewhere on November 5th.

 

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A bash with Ash

 

 

The passage of time is a strange and frightening thing.  When they first got airplay on Britain’s Radio 1, the three members of the indie-pop-punk-rock band Ash were still at school in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland.  At that point the combined ages of their three members, vocalist and guitarist Tim Wheeler, bassist Mark Hamilton and drummer Rick McMurray, must have added up to a number in the low 50s, similar to (perhaps less than) the average age of a member of the Rolling Stones back then.  In other words, they seemed stupendously young to me.

 

So, it was a shock when I went to see Ash perform at Singapore’s Hard Rock Café last Friday night and discovered that suddenly all three are now well into their 40s.  How did that happen?  Surely, it was only a few months ago that I bought their first album after reading a good review of it in Q magazine?

 

But actually, that was back in 1996.  Where does the time go?

 

I think it was also in the now-defunct Q magazine, in the 1990s, that I read how Ash were rumoured to be the favourite band of a young Prince William.  Well, it has to be said that Ash in 2024 have weathered the years rather better than their royal fan, who these days is first in line to the throne.  Unlike the follicly-challenged Prince William, Wheeler and Hamilton still have full heads of hair – although, suspiciously, McMurray sported a baseball cap throughout the gig.

 

 

The many Western expats present in tonight’s audience looked of a similar vintage to Ash and Prince William — teenagers back in the 1990s but now middle-aged.  Incidentally, the crowd also contained a fair sprinkling of Singaporeans.  From what I can gather, this was Ash’s fourth visit to the city-state, so they’d evidently acquired a few local fans too.

 

Tonight was the first time I’d attended a gig in the Hard Rock Café.  I’m not a fan of this particular dining franchise, though I have to admit they did a good job of transforming it from a restaurant to a concert venue – a venue with an old-fashioned ‘small, sweaty club’ vibe, which was especially welcome in Singapore, where too often you have to watch bands in sedate, sit-down establishments, stuck among endless rows of seats, unable to move about and shake a leg.  The café could have done with a higher stage, however.  I felt sorry for the shorter Ash fans.  Jammed behind taller folk, probably all they could see of the band were the tops of Wheeler and Hamilton’s still-hirsute heads.

 

One other feature of the Hard Rock Café I wasn’t thrilled by was its bar prices.  A small glass of Carlsberg beer cost 14 dollars, which meant you’d be paying in the region of 30 dollars for something approximating a pint, a costly sum even by Singapore’s standards.  Presumably because the café wanted to do some normal Friday-evening business beforehand, Ash didn’t come onstage until ten o’clock, with the doors opening for the gig at nine.  I arrived shortly after nine, saw the prices, popped out again and headed along the street to the craft-brewery bar-and-restaurant Brewerkz, where a pint cost me a slightly less eye-watering 23 dollars.

 

When I returned to the café just before ten, it was mobbed.  Since I wouldn’t see much of the band from the back, where the bar was, I decided to forego further boozing, burrowed my way through the crowd, secured myself a spot about two yards from the barrier before the stage, and stayed there for the show’s duration.  Even there, my view wasn’t perfect – I saw Wheeler and Hamilton’s upper halves, though they often vanished when excitable people in front of me waved their arms in the air, and I needed to stand on tiptoe to see McMurray at his drumkit.

 

 

And mounted on the wall above my head was an example of the rock-and-roll memorabilia that famously decorates the Hard Rock Café franchise all over the world.  This was the drumkit of Rob Blotzer, drummer with the 1980s hair metal band RATT.   I’d completely forgotten about the dreadful, poodle-headed RATT until I saw that drumkit.  But now I remember them again.  Thanks for that, Hard Rock Café.

 

The omens were not good when Ash began the gig.  Firstly, a forest of hands shot up around me, clutching smartphones, all filming, and I had a sickening premonition of being surrounded by dozens of tiny glowing screens, each showing a tiny glowing image of the band, for the next hour-and-a-half.  Secondly, it quickly became obvious that there were sound problems, with Wheeler’s vocals almost buried by the noise of Hamilton’s bass.  Thankfully, most of the phones were soon lowered again – the crowd had just wanted some footage of their heroes coming onstage – and, a few songs in, the sound-mix became more balanced.

 

And what followed was very enjoyable.  The crowd, at least where I was, had fun and Ash looked like they were having a good time too.  Unlike a number of bands I’ve seen at gigs in various parts of the world, this band gave the impression that they knew, and appreciated, where they were.  For example, at one point, McMurray told the audience a funny anecdote from the previous time they’d played Singapore.

 

Also, due to the fact that I was standing near one of the main speakers, I was left partially deaf for the next 24 hours.  Which was a pain in the arse at work the next day, but surely a sign that I’d been to a good gig.

 

 

The 40-something Ash fans in attendance must have found it a nostalgic treat, because half of the 18-song setlist came off the two hit albums of their early years, 1977 (1996) and Free All Angels (2001).  These songs included Angel Interceptor, Goldfinger and Girl from Mars from the former and Shining Light, Burn Baby Burn and Sometimes from the latter.  Oh, and the famously Jackie Chan-referencing Kung Fu from 1977 got an airing too.  (I’m sure Ash were delighted when Kung Fu actually got used in a Jackie Chan movie, playing during the bloopers reel at the end of 1995’s Rumble in the Bronx.)  To give proceedings a slightly more up-to-date feel, they also played three tracks from their most recent album, 2023’s Race the Night.  When, between songs, Wheeler mentioned the album they’d ‘recorded last year’, an Ash fan behind me remarked in a loud and serious voice: “Surprisingly good!”  So maybe I should check it out.

 

Alas, the Ash album I like best – the guitar-heavy Nu-clear Sounds (1998), which was released between 1977 and Free All Angels, got a mixed reception from the critics and had disappointing sales – was represented by just one song tonight, Wildsurf.  I would have loved to hear them play more songs off it, especially the singles Jesus Says and Numbskull, which I think are cracking tunes.  The same thing happened last November when I went to see the Manic Street Preachers (they played only one song from my favourite Manics album, 1993’s Gold Against the Soul) and Suede (ditto for my favourite Suede album, 1994’s Dog Man Star).  Maybe this is a quaint Singaporean curse I’ve fallen victim to.

 

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No way-sis

 

From wikipedia.org / © Will Fresch

 

I’ve just Googled ‘the universe’s smallest sub-atomic particle’ and been told that, from what we currently know, the title belongs to those classes of particles known as quarks and leptons.  So, let me say that even a quark, or a lepton, is considerably bigger than the amount of enthusiasm I can summon about the news that legendary 1990s rock band Oasis have reformed and will embark on a five-city / 17-gig tour of Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland in the summer of 2025.  (The tour has already sold out, which suggests some folk are more enthusiastic about the reunion than I am.)

 

Oasis have not been a thing since 2009, when the arguing, quarrelling, sniping and feuding that’d always featured in the relationship between the band’s two mainstays, Mancunian siblings Noel and Liam Gallagher, finally went supernova – as opposed to going Champagne Supernova – resulting in the band’s break-up and the pair not sharing a stage or studio since.  From 2009 until recently, they’ve only acknowledged each other’s existence by flinging insults.  Liam, the younger and less cerebral Gallagher, has frequently called his older brother a ‘potato’ and referred to his post-Oasis band the High Flying Birds as the ‘High Flying Smurfs’.  Noel, meanwhile, has memorably described his little brother as “a man with a fork in a world of soup.”

 

Oasis first appeared on my radar in the mid-1990s, when I was working at Hokkai-Gakuen University in Sapporo, capital of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.  A student approached me one day and inquired if I was ‘Bra’ or ‘O-aaa-sis’.  (No, I’m not trying to indulge in Sofia Coppola-style mockery of how Japanese people speak English – I’m simply describing how the student, with her pronunciation, sounded to me at the time.  I’m sure my Japanese sounded even weirder to her.)  I realised she wasn’t referring to a lady’s undergarment but to British rock / pop band Blur.  She was also talking about Oasis, with whom – if the British press was to be believed at the time – Blur were locked in the bitterest and most vitriolic rivalry since the Hatfields and the McCoys.  (Noel Gallagher once remarked, “I wish Blur were dead, John Lennon was alive and the Beatles would reform.”)  Not very familiar with either band – there was no Internet in those days and it was much harder to keep up with events in the UK – I visited Sapporo’s Tower Records soon after and bought a couple of their albums.

 

How would I answer that student?  Was I Blur or Oasis?

 

© Creation Records

 

The Oasis album I bought was 1994’s Definitely Maybe and by my reckoning it’s a very good record.  It’s not particularly innovative, with the ghosts of the Beatles, T-Rex and Slade never far away, but it has several memorable toe-tappers and stompers like Columbia and Supersonic and one genuinely great track, Live Forever.  The latter made me think that if I was a teenager, I could seriously fall in love with these guys.  The song encapsulates those feelings of hope and optimism you have in your teens, no matter how humble or ordinary your origins, about your whole life being ahead of you and great things possibly awaiting – no more so than when the refrain kicks in near the end, “Gonna live forever!”

 

The songs of rock’s previous big thing, the Seattle-centred grunge movement, had been introspective, melancholic, downright miserable at times, and on April 5th, 1994, less than five months before Definitely Maybe’s release, its biggest star Kurt Cobain had blown his brains out.  So, in Britain at least, young music fans must have been ready for something more joyous.

 

Hope was also in the air politically.  After a decade-and-a-half of Britain being ruled by the Conservative party – peachy for anyone living in booming, investment-heavy south-east England, crap for anyone living in the now-post-industrial rest of the country – and with the current Tory government of John Major looking clueless, a brighter future seemed to be on the cards.  The Labour Party was reinventing itself as ‘New Labour’ and, mindful of the prevailing Zeitgeist, its shiny, photogenic young leader was keen to rub shoulders with Oasis, Blur and other representatives of the country’s burgeoning new rock scene that’d become known as ‘Britpop’.  That smiley, nice-seeming Prime Minister-in-waiting was called Tony Blair…  Well, okay.  We know how that worked out.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Raph_PH

 

I also acquired Blur’s Parklife (1994) and liked it less.  If Oasis drew on the Beatles for inspiration, then the spark for Parklife-era Blur was another 1960s British band, the Kinks.  This resulted in a number of chirpy, quirky songs that I found irritating and made me agree with Noel Gallagher, who slagged them off as ‘chimney-sweep music’.  That said, the title song (‘Shite–life’ as Liam once dubbed it), which has actor Phil Daniels babbling non-stop while singer Damon Albarn shouts “Parklife!” every so often, has been stuck in my head ever since.  Even today, when I find myself in a work-meeting with a superior who drones on endlessly, their voice dripping with meaningless corporate jargon, I have to fight off the urge to shout “Parklife!” at half-minute intervals.

 

Anyhow, though I  regarded Blur’s album as the weaker one, I still liked them.  This was because I could remember seeing them live – at London’s Brixton Academy back in 1992, when hardly anyone had heard of them, on a bill that also included the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr.  I thought they’d been all right.

 

So, during the Blur vs. Oasis wars, I ended up neutral.

 

The 1990s continued.  So did Oasis, Blur and the Britpop craze, which spawned dozens of bands I only have vague memories of now: Cast, Kula Shakur, Ocean Colour Scene, Heavy Stereo, Sleeper, Echobelly, Dodgy, Menswear, Mansun…  Actually, I’ll admit to having a strange fondness for Mansun’s song Take It Easy Chicken.

 

© Creation Records

 

In 1995 Oasis unveiled their second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, which went on to sell 22 million copies worldwide and became one of the decade’s most acclaimed records.  I wasn’t impressed, though.  The opening number (and first single) Roll with It seemed shockingly generic to me – no wonder Damon Albarn nicknamed them ‘Oasis Quo’ – and it also spawned one of the world’s worst jokes: “Why did Oasis choose soup on the menu?  Because they got a roll with it.”  Some people adore the anthemic Don’t Look Back in Anger and Champagne Supernova but I’ve always found them overwrought.  And while initially I thought the ballad Wonderwall was quite nice, I got sick of it after hearing it for the 10,000th time.  (My partner and I were in a restaurant a fortnight ago when, from a speaker, Liam started intoning, “Today is gonna be the day…”  We groaned and rolled our eyes.)

 

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’s huge, if in my opinion undeserved, success meant Oasis became even more of a rock-and-roll behemoth, doing all the customary rock-and-roll things.  Cocaine-fuelled excess?  Check.  Infighting?  Check.  Disappearing drummers?  Check.  Hanging out with Johnny Depp?  Check.  Marrying Patsy Kensit?  Check.  With so much going on, it was inevitable that the band’s third album, 1997’s Be Here Now, would (a) be presaged with more, over-the-top hype than ever and (b) prove a bloated disappointment whose sales were only a third of those of its predecessor.  It brought the band’s ascendancy to an abrupt end and helped pop the bubble of Britpop itself.  Afterwards, Oasis made more albums and I think I’ve heard most of them.  But I can’t remember a single song off them.

 

© Creation Records

 

The band’s boorish, obnoxious image put me off them too.  And when people criticise Oasis for boorishness and obnoxiousness, it’s basically Liam they’re complaining about.  While some of the abuse he’s doled out raises a smile – grumbling, for instance, that Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine “sounds like someone’s stood on her f**king foot” – there’s other stuff he’s said and done that just makes him seem like an arsehole.  An incident at Q magazine’s awards ceremony in 2000 where he heckled Kylie Minogue by yelling ‘lesbian!’ at her is also a reminder that, over the years, a fair amount of homophobia has issued from the younger Gallagher’s gob.

 

Yet, despite this, many journalists and critics have given Liam an easy ride – even when they’ve been on the receiving end of his loutishness.  One possible reason why is the belief that because he comes from an ‘authentic’ working-class background in Manchester, Liam is somehow the ‘authentic’ voice of the working class.  Therefore, if you criticise his antics, you’re being ‘class-ist’.  Indeed, this argument has re-ignited in the wake of the news about 2025’s reunion tour.  The British media is suddenly full of commentators accusing other commentators, ones not delighted by Oasis’s return, of being snobbish and anti-working class.

 

But I don’t think any of this holds water.  For one thing, I’ve known working-class people who’ve also been unimpressed by Liam’s yobbishness.  And, in my time, I’ve seen plenty of middle-class and upper-class people make knobheads of themselves, and their social status didn’t make me think they were any less arseholey than the Oasis frontman.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Alexander Frick

 

Tellingly, Mark Lanegan – singer with 1990s grunge band the Screaming Trees and somebody whose upbringing in Ellensburg, Washington, sounds much tougher than the Gallaghers’ in Manchester – didn’t have a high opinion of Gallagher the Younger.  In his 2020 autobiography Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan recalls how in 1996 the Screaming Trees supported Oasis during a North American tour.  At the tour’s start, Liam accosted Lanegan with a mocking cry of “Howling Branches!” – Howling Branches, Screaming Trees, get it?  Lanegan described his response thus: “‘F**k off, you stupid f**king idiot’ was my brief blasé retort, spoken as if to a bothersome mosquito.”

 

This was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  Lanegan came to detest Liam so much that he wrote: “I couldn’t believe someone hadn’t beaten, knifed, or shot him to death by now, such was the reckless, witless, and despotic nature of his insufferable façade.”

 

So, I wasn’t subject to even a fleeting moment of temptation to spend hours in a Ticketmaster queue and shell out eye-watering sums of money to see Oasis perform next summer.  As far as I’m concerned, the band have only one really decent album behind them.  Besides, I’m not sure they’ll even make it through the tour.  Noel may well bail out before the end, deciding that occupying the same airspace as his tosser-ish brother again is more than his sanity is worth.

 

© Food Records / Virgin Records

 

Finally, returning to the old Blur-Oasis rivalry, I have to say I’m now in the Blur camp.  I think they’re the better band because, in the end, they’ve produced more good songs that Oasis have: This is a Low (1994), He Thought of Cars, The Universal (both 1995), Beetlebum, Song 2, Death of a Party (all 1997), Coffee & TV (1999), Out of Time (2003)…  Incidentally, given that Oasis were always supposed to be hard-men northerners while Blur were poncy, studenty southerners, the video for The Universal, inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), makes Blur look far more disturbing than their Mancunian adversaries ever looked.  Damon Albarn and co. make great Droogs.

 

But if I had to choose one band that represented the peak of Britpop, it wouldn’t be Blur or Oasis.  No, it’d be Sheffield’s Pulp, led by the sublimely sly Jarvis Cocker.  Pulp’s Common People (1995), for instance, brilliantly captures one of the indignities of being working class – that of having moneyed people trying to ‘slum it’ by hanging out with you in order to look cool.  No wonder that in 2004 Common People received the ultimate accolade – William Shatner sang a cover version of it.  I can’t imagine the former Captain Kirk ever wanting to wrap his tonsils around Wonderwall.

 

© Island Records

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A marriage made in Deafheaven

 

 

San Francisco band Deafheaven performed at the Ground Theatre in Singapore’s *SCAPE installation on Monday, July 15th.  I was introduced to their music several years ago when I heard their acclaimed 2013 album Sunbather.  Some have categorized Deafheaven’s sound as ‘blackgaze’.  This means it combines the screeching vocals and apocalyptic edge of black-metal music – the subgenre that began in the 1980s with the likes of Bathory, Mercyful Fate and Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s greatest-ever metal band Venom, and gained notoriety in the 1990s with Norwegian black-metal bands like Burzum and Emperor, some of whose members were not adverse to burning down churches and murdering each other – with the more reflective, swirly, dreamy sound of the 1980s shoegaze movement that embraced bands like Ride, Lush, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Swervedriver and the masterly My Bloody Valentine.

 

Initially, I have to admit, that sounded to me like a marriage made in hell.  However, when I listened to Sunbather, I was pleasantly surprised.  I found its songs intense but also captivating.

 

© Sargent House

 

Fast-forward eight years to 2021, and Deafheaven released their fifth and most recent album Infinite Granite.  This took the bold step of toning down the black-metal element in their sound, with singer George Clarke providing ‘clean’ – i.e., non-growly – vocals, and emphasizing the shoegaze component.  Infinite Granite got some excellent reviews in mainstream outlets.  In the Guardian, for instance, it was given a five-star rating and praised as ‘rock at its most majestically beautiful’.  However, not all of the heavy-metal world was taken with its less abrasive approach.  In his monthly roundup Columnus Metallicus in The Quietus, for example, Kez Whelan described it as Deafheaven’s “most drab, soulless outing yet, a conveyor belt of clean, perfectly pleasant but entirely unexciting jangle pop that sounds uncannily like an assortment of American Football B-sides.”  Ouch.  You spurn heavy metal at your peril.

 

Anyway, not knowing what to expect, I went to the Ground Theatre on Monday evening.  The venue was surprisingly cavernous, with a high ceiling, and though the gig was sold out the premises looked like they could have accommodated a bigger crowd.  The disparate elements in Deafheaven’s sound was mirrored by the variety of T-shirts being worn by the audience.  In addition to the bog-standard heavy-metal T-shirts (like Slayer), I saw Goth (Siouxsie and the Banshees), electronica (Crystal Castles) and, yes, shoegaze ones (Slowdive).  Though I’m not sure what the lady in the Heart T-shirt was expecting.

 

 

The support band tonight was a Singaporean outfit called Naedr, who allowed me to sample another hybrid subgenre I’d heard about, but never before experienced live – they proclaimed themselves a screamo band.  Screamo, according to Wikipedia, “is an aggressive subgenre of emo… strongly influenced by hardcore punk.”  To be honest, Naedr sounded pretty metallic to my ears.  But I enjoyed them.

 

Before the main attraction came onstage, I tried to position myself appropriately – close enough to the stage to get a decent view of the band and feel the full force of their music, but not so close that I got sucked into any moshing that might break out among the more excitable spectators at the front.  I have nothing against moshing, but I’m a frail old man now and my body can’t handle such violence.

 

And then Deafheaven’s five members emerged into the stage-lights and got down to business.  It was an impressive performance, helped a lot by George Clarke’s antics as front-man.  He leered, glared, pointed and gesticulated fiercely at the audience, looking rather like the actor Matthew McConaughey – a younger, messianic and rather demented version of him.

 

 

The first part of their set consisted of older numbers, including Sunbather, the title song from their groundbreaking 2013 album.  I should say that when they started playing material from Infinite Granite, namely the songs In Blur and Great Mass of Colour, and Clarke’s shrieking black-metal vocals suddenly gave way to conventionally sung ones, the tonal shift was jarring.  But I found their new stuff as hypnotic as their old stuff.  It was a gig where it was best to switch off your forebrain and simply immerse yourself in the tide of noise advancing out of the speakers.  That was true of both the more aggressive and the less aggressive songs in the band’s repertoire.

 

And, though I didn’t hear anyone in the crowd complaining afterwards, it was probably sensible that they kept the hardcore metallers happy by ending the gig with Dream House – the stormer that was the opening track on Sunbather back in 2013 and that first marked Deafheaven as a band to take notice of.

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My favourite gigs

 

© Chrysalis

 

My previous blog-post was about seeing Deep Purple live in concert.  This was the most recent of many gigs I’ve been to.  Indeed, by my calculations, I’ve seen about 160 musical acts perform live, starting with veteran Scottish hard rock / heavy metal group Nazareth, whom I saw in Aberdeen in 1984.

 

Anyway, this has got me thinking about the best gigs I’ve ever been to.  Here are my favourite eight.

 

The Proclaimers – Aberdeen Ritzy, 1987

I didn’t know what to expect when some mates got me along to a concert by Craig and Charlie Reid, better known as Scottish folk-pop duo the Proclaimers.  I liked the Reids – their hit song that year, the politically charged Letter from America, was already becoming Scotland’s great anti-Maggie-Thatcher anthem – but I had no idea what they’d be like live.  Also, they were performing at Aberdeen Ritzy, a place I had an aversion to because I’d once worked there as a member of the floor-staff and it was the least enjoyable job I’d ever had.

 

I had no reason to be apprehensive.  The gig felt like a giant, joyous football match where the entire crowd supported the same team and that team was winning 10-0.  I suspect one reason why the Proclaimers went down so well that night was because the Aberdonian audience could relate to their song Throw the R Away, which is about the frustrations caused when standard English-speakers can’t understand your accent.  Which is a common hazard if you speak Aberdonian.

 

The Jesus and Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr, My Bloody Valentine, Blur – the Rollercoaster Tour, London Brixton Academy, 1992

From Craig and Charlie Reid to two more Scottish siblings called Reid.  These were Jim and William Reid of the feedback-drenched East Kilbride noise-niks the Jesus and Mary Chain.  Their Rollercoaster Tour date at Brixton Academy in 1992 offered not only excellent support from American alternative rockers Dinosaur Jr and dreamy, swirly shoegazers My Bloody Valentine, but also a chance to sample a young, up-and-coming band called Blur.  Though my reaction when I saw Damon Albarn onstage wasn’t that he was destined to be an icon of the future Britpop movement but that he resembled a very young, musical version of Norman Wisdom.

 

© Blanco y Negro

 

Meanwhile, the headliners blew me away.  Promoting their recent album Honey’s Dead (1992), which was packed with behemoth tunes like Reverence and Sugar Ray, the Jesus and Mary Chain performed in silhouette against a giant blood-red backdrop.  This made them look like the imperious Masters of the Universe.

 

The Manic Street Preachers – Sapporo Penny Lane, 1993

Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers were promoting their album Gold Against the Soul when they turned up in the Japanese city of Sapporo, at whose Hokkai-Gakuen University I worked at the time as a lecturer.  Though in Britain they were seen as having a punk edge, the Japanese took their fondness for glam clothes and eyeliner as meaning they were another Guns n’ Roses.  Thus, their gig at Sapporo’s Penny Lane drew a lot of Japanese girls wearing silk scarves and floppy hats, who kept squealing “Rich-ee!” at the Manics’ guitarist, Richey Edwards.  The gig was both excellent and dramatic – the drama coming when the highly-strung Edwards freaked out about an illuminated fire-exit sign at the other end of the auditorium that he claimed was putting him off his performance.

 

Since then, that gig has haunted me in two ways.  Firstly, around the same time, I bought the Japanese edition of Gold Against the Soul.  Years later, long after Edwards’ tragic and never-explained disappearance in 1995, I listened to it again and discovered the CD case contained a second tray that I hadn’t noticed before.  In it was a bonus CD, a live one of them performing in Japan.  When I played it, I felt poignantly transported back in time – for there, in the crowd, were those Japanese girls shouting “Rich-ee!” again at poor, doomed Richey Edwards.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Masao Nakagami

 

Secondly, when I saw the Manic Street Preachers again last year, in Singapore, they played a new song called Still Snowing in Sapporo, which I learned was inspired by that long-ago gig in 1993.  How weird, I thought, to be in the audience listening to them playing a song about a concert 30 years earlier… knowing I was were probably the only person in the audience who was at that concert.

 

The Beastie Boys – Sapporo Jasmac Plaza, 1995

I almost didn’t attend this gig, which also took place while I worked at Sapporo’s Hokkai-Gakuen University.  The show was due to begin at 7.00 PM – concerts in Japan tended to start when the tickets said they would – and the same evening I had to give a late lecture until 7.20 PM.  Plus I calculated that by the time I got from the university campus to the venue, the Jasmac Plaza, the Beastie Boys would already be an hour into their gig.  It didn’t seem worth it.

 

However, a few weeks before the concert, it was announced that work had been completed on a new Sapporo subway line, which had a station called Gakuen-Mae directly below the campus where I was working.  I also discovered that the next station along the new line, Hosui-Suskino, had an exit that was only a block from the Jasmac Plaza.  And a subway train left for Hosui-Susukino from Gakuen-Mae every evening at 7.30.  I figured that if I caught the 7.30 train, and moved very fast, I could be at the concert hall in the Jasmac Plaza ten minutes later – hopefully not yet halfway through the Beastie Boys’ set.  Fate seemed to be urging me to buy a ticket, so I did.

 

That evening, I finished my lecture on the stroke of 7.20, ran like hell for the subway station and charged down what seemed like half-a-dozen escalators, descending deeper and deeper into the earth.  The train was already at the platform and I ran and jumped through its about-to-close carriage doors.  At Hosui-Susukino, I sprang out of the train, ran up more escalators, ran along a city block into the Jasmac Plaza and up several staircases to its fourth floor, where the concert hall was.  Live music blasted out of speakers above me.  I dashed into the hall, gasping for breath, my university lecturer’s suit, shirt and tie soaked in sweat…  And I discovered that the Beastie Boys weren’t on stage at all.  What I was hearing was a support act that hadn’t been mentioned on the bloody ticket.  The Beasties didn’t appear until forty minutes later.

 

After that, it needed to be a superb gig to justify all the hassle and indignity I’d suffered.  Which, thankfully, it was.

 

© Mute

 

Nick Cave – Edinburgh Princes Street Gardens, 1999

During the 1999 Edinburgh Festival, goth-rock troubadour Nick Cave – without his band the Bad Seeds – performed in Edinburgh’s Princess Street Gardens, which meant he had the craggy Edinburgh Castle rock, crowned by the battlements of the castle itself, as a spectacular backdrop.  But there was a problem.  Taking place in the castle was the Edinburgh Tattoo, that celebration of tartan-swathed, bagpipe-wailing Scottish military kitsch held every August; and the Tattoo organisers were not happy about having to compete against a concert below in the Gardens.  Indeed, a few evenings earlier, the Gardens had hosted the psychedelic / space-rock outfit Spiritualised and their percussive beats had caused the Lone Piper – the bagpiper who appears on the ramparts at the Tattoo’s finale to play the lament Sleep Dearie Sleep – to lose concentration and mess up the tune.  This evening, to placate the Tattoo, Cave wasn’t allowed to start playing until it had finished, meaning the audience turned up at the time specified on the tickets but then had to wait an hour.  To keep us entertained, some local performance-poets were brought onstage, including the late, lamented Paul Reekie.

 

One consequence of this was that when Cave finally did come on, the end-of-Tattoo firework display was erupting above the castle.  Talk about a spectacular entrance.  And the ensuing gig was worth the long wait.  The songs, mostly stripped-down versions of stuff from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call and 1996’s Murder Ballads, were wonderfully enhanced by the gothic surroundings – the rock, the castle and finally a gorgeous full moon ascending into the starry Edinburgh sky.

 

The Waterboys – Newcastle, Tyne Theatre and Opera House, 2003

In the mid-1980s, there was a considerable buzz about the Waterboys, who were expected to go stratospheric and join U2 and Simple Minds as one of the big Celtic rock bands of the era.  Instead, under the leadership of Edinburgh man Mike Scott, they decamped to Ireland, became a folk band for a while, and rock superstardom never arrived.  I actually preferred their folky stuff (like 1988’s When Ye Go Away) to their rather bloated rock stuff (like 1985’s The Whole of the Moon).

 

For this 2003 gig in Newcastle, the band did an hour of gentle, melodic music, kicking off with a version of the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses, which Scott decided to play because he’d “had it in his head all day,”  There was an interval during which the Geordie crowd enjoyed a pint or four in the Opera House bar.  And then it was back into the auditorium for a second hour of up-tempo rock music.  The relaxed and nothing-more-to-prove Scott clearly wanted to have a good time and wanted to give his audience a good time too – which he did, in spades.

 

© Geffen Records

 

Alabama 3 – Newcastle, University of Northumbria, 2005

This was the best blues / country / techno / electronica / indie / trip-hop / acid-jazz gig I’ve seen, courtesy of the best (and possibly only) band in the world whose music ticks all those boxes, the Alabama 3.  They’re not from Alabama, but from South London.  Also, there’s eight or nine of them rather than three.  With so many band-members onstage, and such a stew of different sounds, this gig at the University of Northumbria was inevitably a bit of a shambles – but what a glorious shambles.  Their track Woke Up This Morning, which at the time served as the opening theme for The Sopranos (1999-2007), was particularly epic.

 

Primal Scream – Norwich UEA, 2009

I wasn’t expecting a great deal in 2009 when the Bobby Gillespie-fronted alternative rock band Primal Scream turned up at the University of East Anglia, where I was in the middle of doing a full-time MA.  Feeling creaky and long in the tooth by then, I assumed my best gig-going days were behind me.  I was too old for the mosh-pit, for jumping around and getting into the exuberant spirit of things.  Meanwhile, I’d seen Primal Scream a few times before and found them a bit hit-and-miss.

 

But I ended up really, really enjoying myself.  I managed to snag a position right at the edge of the stage, giving me a perfect view.  And Gillespie and the gang were in blistering form.  Primal Scream concerts can feel schizophrenic because their music veers between harsh, experimental electronica (like 2000’s Kill All Hippies) and loose-limbed, traditional Rolling Stones-style rock ‘n’ roll (like 1994’s Jailbird), but here it didn’t matter.  They just alternated.  They’d do one hardcore electronica number (accompanied by a brain-frying lightshow), followed by a Stonesy number, then another electronica one, then another Stonesy one, and so on.  Somehow, tonight, it worked brilliantly.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Phil Guest