ATP04 3.1 – Sunday, pre-LCD - "get well soon"
Sunday is I think the best day for music all weekend, but ironically it begins with the first three “misses” in a row so far. The gaps before, between and after these next few acts were spent walking on sand dunes and watching Ol’ Dirty Den verbally traumatise Young Den in Eastenders…
Do you like Godspeed? Do you like Mogwai? Congratulations, maybe you and Explosions In The Sky could get married! A few people tell me before and after that this band are “beautiful”, but those people might like Sigur Ros too, y’know. Me, I just don’t have the patience. Listen to that same chord played again and again, po-faced and plodding, each time with more "meaning". Snooze.
Two years ago at this festival Threnody Ensemble were great, and maybe it’s them or maybe it’s me, but today I don’t have the patience for them either, because when we walk into the downstairs venue we are confronted with the sight of a crowd of people standing there listening politely to static. Actual static. Radio interference noise. They all have instruments in their hand and it keeps looking like something’s going to happen and then… Nope. Okay, enough of that.
But then I start to feel a little bit guilty, see, and I start to think maybe I should be more patient with these bands, which is why I and others end up spending what seems like an eternity in a sweltering darkened room watching Jackie-O Motherfucker… tune up? Soundcheck? Play? It’s not entirely clear. People wander on and off the stage, light up, smoke, muck about with the settings on equipment and… what do we hear? A slow build-up to nothing, tantalizing snatches of something approaching melody, fading back into tape hiss, directionless drum beats… Ooooh, “Adventures In Contemporary Sound!” They may have a great name, but I’m afraid Jackie-O Motherfucker are officially borecore.
You might not expect Arab Strap to cheer you up on a tired and hungover Sunday afternoon – or maybe you’d expect them to be exactly what you need, come to think of it – but they’re the first band of the day who grab my attention and don’t let go. Bearing in mind that I stopped paying close attention to them around the time of The Red Thread (maybe I was too selfish for wanting another Philophobia, I don’t know), this concert makes me wonder whether that wasn’t a major mistake. Not that this weekend leaves me with any money to go splashing out on back catalogues, mind you, but Arab Strap are definitely back on my radar. They have a great live band these days, loads of lovely strings and brass to drown in. The almost uncomfortable intensity of Aidan Moffat’s vocal performance isn’t a surprise. What might come as a surprise is the fact that he provides the funniest onstage banter of weekend, responding to a request to play The Hit by beginning “So that was the first big weekend of the summer… Fuck off!” Even better, after another tale of alcoholism and dysfunctional relationships, he muses:
“I never realised until just this very moment this weekend how fucking miserable that song is. Jesus! I need to cheer the fuck up.”
The funny thing, as an Arab Strap fanatic tells me after they come off, is that it wasn’t even one of their more depressing songs.
Speaking of depression…
Cat Power is on form, by her standards. What this means is that the gaps between her songs are long and filled with troubling insane rambling, demented giggling, bad jokes, bad attempts at an English accent, flirting with the crowd, and the occasional ear-splitting yelp: but crucially, she doesn’t interrupt the songs themselves. Thank God for that, because I’ve seen her fuck up properly, and it’s the most frustrating live experiences you can imagine. Most of the material she plays tonight isn’t on any of her albums: she opens with a song I know very well by now but only from a couple of live shows and a Peel session. I don’t even know its title despite it being one of my favourite Cat Power tracks. So I’m going to be a little lame and transcribe some of the lyrics, just so anyone who knows what this song is called can tell me (oh, okay, and also because I really fucking like them, and they’ll always remind me of one summer party in Oxfordshire – satisfied?).
good friends comin’ in
party’s about to begin
bein’ wrestled down to the floor
throw empty bottles out the door
they will smash
we will laugh
what a gas
we have had
it’s been so long since I seen you
my good friend
this memory daydream
is good enough for me
if you were here today
we’d be getting into frisky business
maybe some other day
dream memory
But she does play ‘Good Woman’ and ‘I Don’t Blame You’, the former definitely my favourite track from You Are Free and the latter up there in second or third place (‘Maybe Not’ is the other contender). In some ways it doesn’t matter what she plays though, y’know? I mean on one level I think at a good Cat Power gig you tend to be a little amazed that she always picks such effective choices, but then maybe with THAT voice, she can sing just about anything and immediately she has your undivided attention… She dedicates one song to “love, and STAYING in love”, which might be as heartbreaking as any of her vocal performances. For her final song (only about her sixth, I think), she’s joined – to her apparent initial surprise and confusion - by a guy called Guy who plays guitar, while she stalks the stage like a proper torch singer, doing a proper torch song. It’s a thing to marvel at.
(To partially illustrate, I really have to post this photo, from nunuworldmusic - please go there and check out the other ATP photos, many of them of bands I have neglected or been rude about, to my readers' probable annoyance.)
Then she spits on the audience while they applaud. I’d say get well soon, Chan, but who would I be kidding? We can debate the ethics of enjoying the music of someone who might be combusting internally as they make it another time…
I don’t really have anything to say about Love - as soon as they start to play the upstairs room fills with people who seem really into them, dancing away, but for me and mine this is really just fairly pleasant background noise during the break before what Janina quite rightly calls the GRAND TRIUMVIRATE. But I’m going to have to come back to these three acts if I’m going to do justice to them, if I’m going to avoid rushing through writing about them, if I’m going to give them the space they deserve.
Sunday is I think the best day for music all weekend, but ironically it begins with the first three “misses” in a row so far. The gaps before, between and after these next few acts were spent walking on sand dunes and watching Ol’ Dirty Den verbally traumatise Young Den in Eastenders…
Do you like Godspeed? Do you like Mogwai? Congratulations, maybe you and Explosions In The Sky could get married! A few people tell me before and after that this band are “beautiful”, but those people might like Sigur Ros too, y’know. Me, I just don’t have the patience. Listen to that same chord played again and again, po-faced and plodding, each time with more "meaning". Snooze.
Two years ago at this festival Threnody Ensemble were great, and maybe it’s them or maybe it’s me, but today I don’t have the patience for them either, because when we walk into the downstairs venue we are confronted with the sight of a crowd of people standing there listening politely to static. Actual static. Radio interference noise. They all have instruments in their hand and it keeps looking like something’s going to happen and then… Nope. Okay, enough of that.
But then I start to feel a little bit guilty, see, and I start to think maybe I should be more patient with these bands, which is why I and others end up spending what seems like an eternity in a sweltering darkened room watching Jackie-O Motherfucker… tune up? Soundcheck? Play? It’s not entirely clear. People wander on and off the stage, light up, smoke, muck about with the settings on equipment and… what do we hear? A slow build-up to nothing, tantalizing snatches of something approaching melody, fading back into tape hiss, directionless drum beats… Ooooh, “Adventures In Contemporary Sound!” They may have a great name, but I’m afraid Jackie-O Motherfucker are officially borecore.
You might not expect Arab Strap to cheer you up on a tired and hungover Sunday afternoon – or maybe you’d expect them to be exactly what you need, come to think of it – but they’re the first band of the day who grab my attention and don’t let go. Bearing in mind that I stopped paying close attention to them around the time of The Red Thread (maybe I was too selfish for wanting another Philophobia, I don’t know), this concert makes me wonder whether that wasn’t a major mistake. Not that this weekend leaves me with any money to go splashing out on back catalogues, mind you, but Arab Strap are definitely back on my radar. They have a great live band these days, loads of lovely strings and brass to drown in. The almost uncomfortable intensity of Aidan Moffat’s vocal performance isn’t a surprise. What might come as a surprise is the fact that he provides the funniest onstage banter of weekend, responding to a request to play The Hit by beginning “So that was the first big weekend of the summer… Fuck off!” Even better, after another tale of alcoholism and dysfunctional relationships, he muses:
“I never realised until just this very moment this weekend how fucking miserable that song is. Jesus! I need to cheer the fuck up.”
The funny thing, as an Arab Strap fanatic tells me after they come off, is that it wasn’t even one of their more depressing songs.
Speaking of depression…
Cat Power is on form, by her standards. What this means is that the gaps between her songs are long and filled with troubling insane rambling, demented giggling, bad jokes, bad attempts at an English accent, flirting with the crowd, and the occasional ear-splitting yelp: but crucially, she doesn’t interrupt the songs themselves. Thank God for that, because I’ve seen her fuck up properly, and it’s the most frustrating live experiences you can imagine. Most of the material she plays tonight isn’t on any of her albums: she opens with a song I know very well by now but only from a couple of live shows and a Peel session. I don’t even know its title despite it being one of my favourite Cat Power tracks. So I’m going to be a little lame and transcribe some of the lyrics, just so anyone who knows what this song is called can tell me (oh, okay, and also because I really fucking like them, and they’ll always remind me of one summer party in Oxfordshire – satisfied?).
good friends comin’ in
party’s about to begin
bein’ wrestled down to the floor
throw empty bottles out the door
they will smash
we will laugh
what a gas
we have had
it’s been so long since I seen you
my good friend
this memory daydream
is good enough for me
if you were here today
we’d be getting into frisky business
maybe some other day
dream memory
But she does play ‘Good Woman’ and ‘I Don’t Blame You’, the former definitely my favourite track from You Are Free and the latter up there in second or third place (‘Maybe Not’ is the other contender). In some ways it doesn’t matter what she plays though, y’know? I mean on one level I think at a good Cat Power gig you tend to be a little amazed that she always picks such effective choices, but then maybe with THAT voice, she can sing just about anything and immediately she has your undivided attention… She dedicates one song to “love, and STAYING in love”, which might be as heartbreaking as any of her vocal performances. For her final song (only about her sixth, I think), she’s joined – to her apparent initial surprise and confusion - by a guy called Guy who plays guitar, while she stalks the stage like a proper torch singer, doing a proper torch song. It’s a thing to marvel at.
(To partially illustrate, I really have to post this photo, from nunuworldmusic - please go there and check out the other ATP photos, many of them of bands I have neglected or been rude about, to my readers' probable annoyance.)
Then she spits on the audience while they applaud. I’d say get well soon, Chan, but who would I be kidding? We can debate the ethics of enjoying the music of someone who might be combusting internally as they make it another time…
I don’t really have anything to say about Love - as soon as they start to play the upstairs room fills with people who seem really into them, dancing away, but for me and mine this is really just fairly pleasant background noise during the break before what Janina quite rightly calls the GRAND TRIUMVIRATE. But I’m going to have to come back to these three acts if I’m going to do justice to them, if I’m going to avoid rushing through writing about them, if I’m going to give them the space they deserve.
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