INNER
CITY UNIT
The
Brunswick, Hove, Sat 8th April
For
those not up on the minutiae of these things, Inner City Unit were
first formed by Nik Turner after he was booted out of Hawkwind back
in 1980. Their sound was perhaps best summed up by the title of their
'84 album 'Punkadelic'. By that point Hawkwind
themselves had moved away from their freak-out space-jam origins,
into New Wave-influenced numbers that even started to resemble songs.
But ICU took all that further. Tracks tended to be punchy, punk or
garage rock influenced, almost always single-length and packed with
wry, absurdist wit. Even great bands can have their expiry date and,
truth to tell, in that era ICU were actually coming up with better
goods than Hawkwind themselves. Ironically, Dave Brock and Turner's
legendary antagonism actually delivered for us fans!
'Bones
of Elvis' was almost their mission statement, the verses a
sardonic slab at music biz machinations (“No-one needs a
star that walks/No-one has to pay a corpse”), the chorus
a cry boldly stating their intent to get back to the roots -
“We're going to raise the bones of Elvis!”
...all
of which, you may note, was many years ago. But, now in his Seventies
and starting to resemble William Hartnell, Turner's a good advert for
growing old disgracefully. Even if his voice isn't what it was, he
remains an effective front-man. And, though they only play
irregularly these days (with their website not naming another gig
till late July) the band remain remarkably tight. To be honest, I can
find Dino Ferrari's drumming a bit plodding, but the other players
excel. True there's less of a punk element than in days of yore, with
something like 'Skinheads in Leningrad' not making
an appearance, but that throws them further into garage rock. What
came from the stage wasn't memories or re-enactments but neat energy.
They
dedicate their set to ex-member and legendary Brighton character
Judge Trev, who sadly died three years ago. In fact his last ever gig
was for the Real Music Club, who put on this very night.
From
their previous visit to Brighton, at the Hydrant (which I couldn't
make for some reason)...
Those
up on Hawkwind gossip may find this funny. (Tho' others will just be
nonplussed...)
THE
TYBURN TREE: DARK LONDON
Brighton
Dome, Wed 5th March
The
Tyburn Tree, for those not in the know, was actually not a tree at
all but London's principal gallows. It serves as the title here for
a song cycle taking “an atmospheric,
sometimes shocking musical walk through the London streets and among
London’s ghosts”, a collaboration between composer John Harle and
Marc Almond. (Ex-Soft Cell front man. But you knew that already.)
The
titular Tree was near modern Marble Arch, not that you'd know that
nowadays. Indeed, it's perhaps significant that the dark old London
should be celebrated now, when the city's rapidly being turned into a
Johnsonite playpen for the super-rich. The cut-throats and
prostitutes have been replaced by yuppies and smartphones, for better
or... well actually, just for worse. And now the poor no longer fear
hanging, just long journeys in from Zone 5 or 6 to their early
morning cleaning jobs, perhaps London's only future (at least
culturally speaking) lies in its past.
Marc
Almond is great, of course. Arriving in a cassock to rapt applause,
he looked uncannily like a character from a Carl Dreyer film. (Though
someone told me afterwards they thought of Blackadder.) His almost
uncanny ability to combine the histrionic with the heartfelt remains
unabated, and he prowled the stage with something between a snarl and
a leer. His post-interval appearance certainly galvanised events
after the non-stick plonky jazz of the first half, where the applause
was about as polite as the music. (You were better off regarding all
that as the non-memorable support band, who merely happened to share
all the same musicians as the main act.)
And
there were highlights - 'Poor Henry' (a song about
a hanging which morphs into a Music Hall singalong), 'My
Fair Lady' (about slitting a prostitite's throat over an
argument about change) and the spendidly titled and klezmer-like
'The Vampire of Highgate'. All three had a
directness to them, like arrows shot true after first being dipped in
the blackest of humour.
But
ultimately all the elaborate arrangements, all the cleverness,
just got between you and the subject matter - when a more direct
approach might have connected. Perhaps the piece suffered by
comparing unfavourably with the tonally and thematically similar song cycle the Tiger Lillies gave us
in this very room only last year. But it came to feel like
that most dreaded of all things, a project.
Despite the highlights, despite Almond's invigorating presence,
ultimately it's a souffle where it should have been one of Sweeney
Todd's meat pies.
And
it's become such a token of this sort of thing that Blake has to get
cited. (They choose 'London' and
'Jerusalem' needless to say.) Blake is becoming
for affected literariness what Captain Beefheart is to in-the-know
music, the name to drop to your audience to suggest you're cultured
but slightly edgy. It's like luvvies citing Shakespeare, the
reverence is just displaced self-importance. Seriously, when was the
last time you heard something refer to Blake where it genuinely
deserved comparison to him? (Perhaps either Mark Stewart's or the Fall's versions of
'Jerusalem', both of which worked hard and
inventively to defamiliarise the material.) Blake after all wrote
“drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead”, and
perhaps its time to let the poor old Londoner lie.
Anyway,
talking about those Vampires of Highgate...
KODO:
ONE EARTH TOUR
Brighton
Dome, Fri 28th Feb
Kodo
are described in the programme as “the taiko drummers from Japan's
remote and inspiring Sado Island”. Handed to you as you went in, it
went on to depict them in somewhat idyllic terms - like a hippie
commune living in harmony with nature, growing their own food and
making “eco-conscious furniture”. (Sideboards that remind you to
do your recycling?) Perhaps that was just targeted at the Brighton
demographic, and the next week they'd be in Portsmouth telling the
locals they were famed for their discipline and drilling.
If
so, Portsmouth might have got the more apt description. For as they
started up it became clear there was something almost martial about
them, clad in black vests on an unadorned stage, either playing in
unison or standing stock still – as if to attention. There seemed
to be two women performers out of the whole troupe. Alcohol was
banned from the auditorium, as if we were all on duty.
The
drum is of course a physical instrument, in a way a piano or guitar
simply isn't. Something like the motorik beat of Neu! might sound gliding and effortless, but that's the
exception rather than the rule. And, remote island or not, Kodo go to
town on that. It would be hard to over-emphasise the sheer
showness of their show. The exhilarating
physicality of seeing fourteen drummers drumming, limbs a blurry
whirligig of motion, makes them performers by the simple virtue of
their playing. Some of the drums themselves, well over a metre
across, seem so large you can hardly believe they could be carried on
stage. In the best way they're an act made for DVD, rather than CD.
The
first half is given over to contemporary compositions, including
works by “artistic director” Tamasaburo Bando. You think of drum
music as building up a head of steam, then using it to plough a
groove. But these pieces, in their own words “weaved constant
rhythmic patterns together with highly irregular ones”. Each
segment was musically quite straightforward, but the compositions
moved between them with bewildering speed, often given a visual
correlative by the players leapingly changing places mid-beat. At
times it almost reminded me of contemporary composers I've been to
see, such as Julia Wolfe. At times, I do confess, I found myself wishing we
could have stayed with some of those great grooves a while longer.
My
favourite piece of the first half was the last, 'Ibuki'
by Motofumi Yamaguchi, composed of openly-tuned bamboo flutes and
what I took to be accumulated rim shots, building up strange
skittering sounds which sounded almost like nothing else – at once
earthly and unearthly. The piece was apparently “composed as an
homage to all living things”. And some of the hippie spirit must
have reached my seat by then, for that description started to make
sense to me.
The
second half was devoted to more traditional numbers, starting with a
folk dance in demon masks, from back in the day when music was
thought to make the crops grow. Colourful period costumes replaced
uniform black. For one piece drummers played from a lying position,
reproducing the way they'd perform on carts as they passed from
village to village. Overall, it was perhaps the second part which
appealed to me the most, as it seemed to more naturally incorporate
the ritual element of seeing music being made.
Though
never accompanied by anything more than those flutes and occasional
outbreaks of the human voice, such was the sonic variety that you
easily forgot you were listening to 'just drumming'. (Comparison to
Seventies drum solos need not apply.) Even as your eyes took in the
pummelling exertion, your ears registered the input simply as music.
The programme described the giant o-daiko drum as “possessing a
deep tranquility yet tremendous intensity”. Which would make a
pretty good description of the whole night...
They
were strict on filming, perhaps recognising it wasn't something that
would necessarily convey on YouTube footage. So instead here's a
promotional video, which hopefully gives some sense of what it would
be like to see them perform in situ...
Following some attempts at trolling, I’ve had to turn on comment moderation. I’ll do my best to approve genuine comments as quickly as I can. Should any delays creep in, apologies in advance.
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