I’ve done my best to attend the Juice and Source new music nights religiously since I started the blog, so when this month came around and they both ended up on the same night, I was in a bit of a quandary. There was only one thing for it – attend both nights. The Juice night started a little bit earlier and finished a bit later, so my plan was to get to the Haunt for the opening act, then head over to the Pavilion Theatre, then back to the Source for their headliner. Continue reading →
I was wondering when I’d get to write about The Levellers. As out of fashion as they might be, they were probably the first band I acknowledged as being from Brighton, back in my student days when I’d jump up and down at The Event, drunk on watered down Snakebite, to the sounds of One Way.
The new Levellers single, called Truth Is, comes out Saturday 21st April. Most singles normally get released on mondays, but this is coming out on the saturday to coincide with Record Store Day, where their contribution to the many limited items available will be the single released on 7″ red vinyl.
You probably don’t need telling what the Levellers single sounds like – just close your eyes and picture the words “folk rock”.
Last time I saw Abi Wade, back in December of last year, she was playing the acoustic spot at the Source New Music night at the Pavilion Theatre. Her ‘Of Blood and Air’ EP had just been released, but she was playing to a largely unappreciative audience. In the past three months a lot has changed, because last Thursday night she played to a packed out hall at the Old Market, where the crowd were hanging on every note. Support came from Dan Edwards & Max Crawford, and Luke Sital-Singh. Rumours of me having missed the support because I was distracted in The Conqueror around the corner are unfortunately true. We arrived just as Abi’s set started, and my companions marvelled at both the simplicity and the complexity of her setup. With just one person on stage, it is quite incredible that the sound of a whole band is produced. Somehow, with the aid of a tambourine and a stomp box on drum pedals, cello strings being bowed, and plucked, and the cello body being tapped with the bow, and drumsticks and even a hairbrush, and warm rich sound was created which, had you not been watching, that thought that it was only being created by one person wouldn’t have even crossed your mind. For three quarters of an hour, we were treated to a selection of tracks from the debut EP, and a whole host of other material, including an interesting cover of One Hand Holding by The Maccabees. We were left wanting more, which is the way thing should be – thankfully, Abi’s got a lot more gigs coming up soon: On 18th April at The Haunt (supporting Sea of Bees, with fellow Brightonions Heliopause also on the bill), 27th April at The Hope (supporting Dan Mangan) and 13th June at the Prince Albert (supporting mancubbabywoman)
This week sees the release of Thomas White’s new album Yalla, and I thought I’d find out a bit more about from him via the pubs he lists in the lyrics of the closing track English Sargasso: The Dorset, the Hand in Hand, Fitzherbert’s and The Globe.
Thomas White - Yalla!
We start things off at The Dorset, or to give it it’s full title, The Dorset Street Bar. There are records of The Dorset being a pub going back to 1845, so it’s been a firm fixture in Brighton for quite some time. Continue reading →
Friday night was a big night for gigs in Brighton. Biggest of the lot was the Maccabees homecoming gig, which will no doubt get quite a few write ups in the local press. I decided to head to a couple of other gigs which might not get so much media attention, but are no less deserving.
First up was the Road To Blissfields gig at Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar. It was a bit of a battle of the bands type affair, with a winner from each of a number of towns in the South of England getting a set at the festival near Winchester at the end of June. I missed the first few bands, and turned up to a group whose lead singer had a mullet. Not the most auspicious entry. I only heard one of their songs before they left the stage to make for the act I’d come to see, Astro Physics. Astro Physics are a six piece hip hop collective, who are as much about the rest of the band as they are MC Skilf and singer Rachel Mosleh. They’ve been gigging a lot recently (and are supporting Derriere at the Blind Tiger next friday), and did a fantastic job of bringing the party to Sticky Mike’s. No idea what the results were, or if they’ve even been decided yet, but I’ll do my best to find out.
Astro Physics
After a quick pint between gigs, I then headed over to The Blind Tiger Club, where Tru Thoughts latest signing, Anchorsong, was headlining. Live, Anchorsong was much more dancey than on record, pumping out a great set of stunning, deep, bass heavy tunes. I was there for the support though – I am meant to be covering local bands, after all. Thanks to their late licence, the Blind Tiger can put bands on after the main act. I’ve known Matt Hodson, who turns into Bitbin onstage, for a few months, but as a photographer rather than a musician – tonight was his live solo debut, but he’s been putting out some lovely electronica himself through his website (you can download his recent Alias EP here). There’s a lot more to his set than watching a man prod a laptop – he was accompanied by some beautiful visuals, and for one of his songs he even played his bass with a violin bow! It was a very accomplished debut, and I’m sure it’s only going to be a matter of time before he’s headlining his own gigs.
Tic Toc Café in the lanes have just recently started on putting small quiet gigs on Friday nights, and last night the Woo!Worths played a couple of acoustic sets. I was quite surprised when I heard about it – surely you can only fit about thirty people into Tic Toc anyway, before you even think about trying to squeeze a band in too – but I think it might just be Brighton’s newest best intimate venue.
The Woo!Worths
The Woo!Worths core of Rich, Steve and Jo are normally joined by other musicians when they play live, but they kept things to a minimum to respect the space constraints and the quieter atmosphere in Tic Toc. While they played to their smallest audience for a while, the crowd tucked into the café’s simple continental menu (I can recommend the boeuf bourguignon). The band played several sets over the course of the evening, allowing time for diners to make their orders without disruption, and played most of the songs you would have heard if you’d seen them at all – according to their facebook, they’d rehearsed twenty six songs!
The night had a lovely atmosphere – the staff at Tic Toc are incredibly friendly, and there was a lovely rapport with the audience, thanks to being so close to the band. They’re putting on live music every friday night, and I’ll definitely be back for more at some point soon.
It’s the 29th of February – a day that only comes around once every four years. Hopefully it won’t be another four years until the next Tiny Dragons single, because it’s very good stuff indeed. To celebrate, they’ve put on a night at the Prince Albert.
Support came from Meatloaf at Marys, who I managed to miss, and Alice Amelia, who is a local singer songwriter. She’s got a fantastic voice and is a tremendous pianist – I was reminded of Little Boots funtimes videos she posted to youtube, or to when I saw Marina & The Diamonds live and rest of the band left the stage and Marina just played piano and sung solo for a few songs. There’s great potential there, which I reckon could be found by broadening the sound a bit more – it’s hard to keep people’s attention just with piano and voice, and even just someone else providing a bit of bass or percussion could make all the difference.
Alice Amelia
Despite only having three members, Tiny Dragons are a perfectly formed band. Unusually singer Lizzie also takes on bass duties. And they play accessible rock that’s a bit funk influenced. I need to turn this around now though, because my description so far sounds like a female fronted Level 42. Musically, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers are a better comparison, although having a female lead changes the dynamic a lot. The beating heart of the band is Lizzie’s deft bass playing and her huge, soulful voice. There’s a lot more going on with Jim’s guitar playing than you’d expect too with subtle use of delay and reverb to create a much bigger sound, while Marcus holds together the rhythm section on drums and provides backing vocals. Tiny Dragons have got a great sound, are brilliant musicians, and also played a set of really strong songs too. Definitely a band to watch out for.
After seemingly years of inactivity, Academy Music Group are in discussion with Council planning officers to kick start the process of bringing Brighton Hippodrome back to being a music venue. AMG took over the lease to the run down Grade II Listed theatre in Feb 2007 after the building was bought by Cheval Properties following forty years of it being a Mecca Bingo Hall, and it has remained empty ever since.
The venue started life as an ice rink back in 1897, but that didn’t last too long and it was converted into a theatre just after the turn of the century, playing host to the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Max Miller, Laurence Olivier, Laurel & Hardy, Gracie Fields and Harry Houdini (Thanks Wikipedia!). At it’s peak it packed in 4,500 people despite it’s official capacity of 3,000. After the second world war the theatre declined in popularity and started hosted more music concerts in an effort to widen it’s appeal. In 1964 both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones played there but the theatre closed it’s doors the following year, re-opening as a bingo hall in 1967. It was given Grade II Listed status in 1985
Academy Music Group run 24 venues across the country, and are probably best known for Brixton Academy. I’m hoping that they keep the Hippodrome name – out of the venues they run twenty are called Academy although a few have retained their original names. There won’t be any escape from heavy branding though. At the moment, all of them are plastered with O2 logos everywhere, after a few years of them all being badged as Carling venues.
The intention is to convert it to a 2,000 capacity venue – less than when it was a theatre, but that’ll probably mean more room for bars, a bigger stage area, and more fire escapes, which probably weren’t so much of a priority a hundred years ago. This is roughly the same capacity as the Dome, but the Hippodrome would be pitching for a much younger audience – a quick scan over the gigs on at the Dome in the next few months shows the likes of Joan Baez, The Chieftains, Suzanne Vega, Joan Armatrading and Don McLean coming up. The Concorde 2 only has a capacity of 600, and the Green Door Store only 250, so the Hippodrome wouldn’t really be in competition with any existing venues.
There’s a bit more info in the full story in the Argus.
Last night, Shrag kicked off the first date of their tour to promote their new album Canines (due for release in May). It’s a double headliner tour with Tunabunny and to celebrate there’s a split single with each band taking on a side of the 7″. Shrag’s track is Tendons in the Night, which you can watch the video for here:
None of the supports were from Brighton, so I’ll rattle through them quickly – Dogtooth are the new project from Shrag’s original Canadian drummer Leigh Anne Walter, who’s teamed up with singer-songwriter Kate Gerrard, and the Metatrons were like a day-glo version of Shrag. If you didn’t know that co-Headliners Tunabunny were from Athens, Georgia you could have guessed from the opening song which sounded an awful lot like one of their hometown’s most famous bands (and I’m not talking about the B52s here). Over the course of their set though they ended up sounding a lot more like the Breeders, and that was no bad thing at all.
Dogtooth, The Metatrons and Tunabunny
Shrag arrived onstage later than advertised, which is kind of inevitable with four bands on the bill, and wasted no time in treating the audience to a set which was mainly made up of tracks from the upcoming album, with only a handful of tracks from 2010s Life! Death! Prizes! Last month, Shrag posted up a new track called Chasing Consummations which hinted that the band might be maturing a little – while they might be developing on their recorded output, live they were still just as full of energy, and the banter inbetween songs was anything but mature. After forty five minutes which had me sold on the new album, the band were off, without an encore.
Shrag
The split single is being sold on the tour, but can be bought from the usual places (Well, Resident have it on their website)
If you were to trace the genealogy of the music I love, you can follow pretty much everything I listen to now back to a cassette I had in my youth back in the early nineties. It had two albums, one on each side, as was the way back when home taping rather than illegal downloading was killing the music industry. If you left the house you didn’t go with an iPod with forty or fifty albums, you went with the tape that was in your walkman. And if you didn’t get around to changing the tape that often, you ended up listening to the same albums over and over, which meant that the music left a very strong impression. On one side of the tape was Happiness by The Beloved, but this review has got nothing to do with that. On the other side was an album of alternative country-folk tinged indie, with clever lyrics, predominantly about breaking hearts and drinking. My first listen to the Sweet Sweet Lies album took me right back.
The passage of time hasn’t been especially kind to The Wonderstuff, whose album Never Loved Elvis (and consequently their other albums too) meant so much then and continues to mean a lot. Thankfully Sweet Sweet Lies have carefully skirted around some of the Wonderstuff’s biggest issues. Lead singer Dominic Von Trapp isn’t an a annoying gobshite like Miles Hunt, and since the nineties are long gone no one in their right mind would dream of dressing like a Grebo (I’ll let you google it) – the band have opted for the complete other end of the spectrum and dress in suits for their stage wear, making them a strong contender for the smartest band in town.
My second visit to The Hare, The Hound & The Tortoise gave me a completely different perspective. I’d had the album on repeat on my iPod and it started up two thirds of the way through. While openers Capital of Iceland and Overrated Girlfriend might have given a first impression of a band of upbeat fiddles and guitars, and Winter of Discontent hints at more flamenco / mariachi direction with it’s trumpet and Spanish guitar, there’s a lot to be gained by sticking around to listen to the rest of the album too, where genres – square pegs trying to fit into round holes at the best of times – drip away to reveal songwriting in the classic style. Tracks like No-one Will Love You (Like I Do) and Too Drunk To Love are more likely to recall The Divine Comedy or Gene, both in their vocal style and intelligent lyrics (in fact, Sweet Sweet Lies supported Martin Rossiter on a recent solo tour). Singing duties are split between the two songwriters Dominic Von Trapp and Michael Hayes, with Dominic’s distinctive style, more crooner than modern pop star, making you truly believe that he would readily drink you under the table then steal your girlfriend.
The high quality of the songwriting as well as the consistency, strength and dark humour in the imagery in the lyrics throughout put Sweet Sweet Lies not just head and shoulders above most other bands in Brighton, but everything else that’s on offer too. This is an incredibly accomplished debut that the band should be truly proud of.
The Hare, The Hound & The Tortoise by Sweet Sweet Lies is out now on Something Nothing Records, and the Brighton launch for the album is at the Jive Monkey on Steine Street on 24th February.
