Alex de Campi: Gojira!

93 Feet East, last Wednesday night. Dark, mostly empty. I wanted to see the opening act, so we were early. Mr Watson is engaged in buying us more beer. I'm checking out the scene. A guy comes up. Thirties, medium height, dark hair. Black slacks, pale collared shirt, black zip-up jacket/windbreaker hybrid. Mobile phone on quick-draw in his paw. The sort of way software execs dress when they think they're being modern and trendy.

"Do you know who's playing tonight?" he asks. I look at him blankly. Of course I do. Why else would I be here? "I just moved here," he explains. "My friends said this was a really trendy venue, so I thought I'd come check it out. You know of any other trendy places?"

"N-no," I stammer, thinking Jesus Christ, I've just met my first looky-loo. Those of you only recently Of This Parish may not have heard me mention Dave Hickey's book Air Guitar, simply the most stone beautiful collection of writing about art and life that I've had the fortune to read. It's from him I get the expression "looky-loo", from an essay about the relationship between performer and audience:

"A month or so later, I find myself standing at the bar in CBGBs with Lester Bangs and David Johansen. We're listening to the Tuff Darts... When the noise subsides, Johansen tilts his head and nods theatrically towards the door. Lester and I turn to watch as a limousine load of uptown trendies file slowly into the back of the club, settling their coats on their shoulders and waving smoke away from their nostrils with frantic little gestures.

"Who dat?" Lester says.

"The beginning of the end," says David Jo. "Spectators."

My dad called them "looky-loos". He would come home from playing in some bar or listening to someone else play, and Mom would ask, "How was the crowd?" If those in attendance were not up to his usual standard, he would say, "looky-loos"... We all knew what he meant. [Looky-loos] were non-participants, people who did not live the life - people with no real passion for what was going on. They were just looking. They paid their dollar on the door, but they contributed nothing to the occasion - afforded no confirmation or denial that you could work with or around or against."

What's more, the Looky-Loo (in between dashing off to make important phone calls - he owns his own company) seems to have decided that tonight my status on the person/object border is firmly in the category of object. He drapes his arms over me. The proximity of Mr Watson (goth, has a good line in glowering) and Mr West (Glaswegian; 'nuff said) as my wingmen seems not to dissuade him in the slightest.

The first band starts. They're called Somebody's Mind, a early U2/My Bloody Valentine-style threesome, and they're... well, the best way I can describe how they were is to explain a little something about yacht racing. When you race a sailboat on the upwind leg of an Olympic course, it never pays to sail up the middle of the racecourse. The trick is to choose one side of the racecourse or the other and head out there. You don't have to bang the right hand corner; you just have to be more right than everyone else.

Somebody's Mind are sailing up the middle of the racecourse. There's nothing unique, no hook, nothing new there. Much as I detest U2, in the early days they had those three ringing chords, and that put them out in their own water on a winning side of the racecourse.

Next up were The Bishops, skinny tie-wearing Jam-style goodness. I want to hear more of them; I only half-listened to their set because I was too busy trying to keep the Looky-Loo from putting his hands on me again, and from pulling me over to go sit down. (Sit down! At a rock gig! Who does that, except for a looky-loo? Mind you, who when sober paws a girl he's just met?)

Headlining were Vincent Vincent and the Villains, who I've seen three times now. Or, more accurately, I've seen the singer three times, as between then and now he's ditched his old band and gotten a new one: taller, shinier, smoother with the instruments. In doing so, their edge has gone - along with the porkpie hats, the two-tone creepers, the lo-fi fun. It feels awfully like a label is grooming them to be the next Kaiser Chiefs.

Part of me wishes them well. If you've ever tried to pay your rent from creative endeavour, you get an awful lot more forgiving about this thing they call "selling out". But part of me is still recidivist indie kid, snarky and a little disappointed. They ended a rather antiseptic set without playing "B-Side Baby". I fled, without saying goodbye to the Looky-Loo.

Last night was King Biscuit Time at Cargo. Cargo's a pretty venue, but you can guarantee that half the audience will talk loudly through the gig. It's Cargo. It always happens. You get over it. I was a bit worried about this gig, truth be told. I loved the Beta Band. I don't mind their breaking up - they had four great albums and that's enough. But with the recent Lone Pigeon CD (Schoozmi) being a disappointment, I was growing concerned that nothing would rise out of the ashes of the Betas. Silly me.

"The trouble with your own thing is ...you end up on your own."

Do you ever wonder where the balance of power and creativity lies in a band? Whether everyone gives more or less equally, or it's really one manic personality driving it all? Well, I now know where my bets lie with the Betas. Steve Mason owned the audience from the moment in the first song when he grabbed a cowbell to use as a slide for his guitar. Like Bob Mould, Mason is as talented a performer as he is a musician. His two-member backing band held their own, but it really was The Steve Show.

Two new tracks from the upcoming album were corkers. The single Ciam 15 is out now, but we have to wait until January for the rest. Boo. I Walk The Earth, from the No Style EP, is still a gorgeous bit of dancey electronica. It wasn't a Betas gig, but there were a lot of similarities: loads of rambling between peculiar instruments; a similar electronic-indie sound; Mason going nuts on drums. There were even two Betas songs. Mason, alone on stage, did acoustic versions of "Dr Baker" and "Simple", and somewhat surprisingly the tunes lost none of their appeal for losing all the bells and whistles. There was also a 60-second calypso version of "Anarchy in the UK", which deserves to be immortalised.

From the live versions I've heard, the two British albums I'm most looking forward to are the new Flipron album and the new King Biscuit Time album. Through the kindness of strangers, I was sent an advance copy of the Magic Car album "Family Matters", due out on the 10th. The standout track is "Baltimore", and it's been on heavy rotation chez moi. New King Creosote just out too, backed by the Earlies. That should be good.

Been consuming films like a girl possessed. Go see Chetyre: it's like some unholy marriage between Tarkovsky and Takashi Miike, with some genuinely disturbing moments. I won't be forgetting the mask scene in a hurry. Also see A History of Violence. Great fight-scene directing, and brilliant work from Mortensen and Hurt. Avoid The London Nobody Knows/The World of Gilbert and George. There's a great documentary to be made about hidden/forgotten London, but this 1960s curio isn't it. Also, Gilbert and George should never be allowed near a videocamera again. Ever.

Up tonight is a double feature of Barry Lyndon (I always like the memory of Kubrick films more than I actually enjoy the experience of watching them, but I keep trying) and Les Enfants Terribles (A collaboration between one of my favourite writers and my favourite director. I have The Fear that it cannot possibly live up to my expectations.)

Night shift at last over; Monday was my first time in seven days going to sleep in the dark. The sense of luxury was almost pornographic.

( 12:17 PM )

1 Comments:

Barry Lyndon is AMAZING! My favorite Kubrick by far. Beautiful, funny, and groundbreaking all at the same time. Some people complain about the glacial pace, but that is my single favorite thing about the movie.

Also, remember while watching that he turned to adapting Thackeray after he realized he couldn't raise enough money to properly film his Napoleon movie. Dig up the Napoleon shooting script and read it sometime. It was to have starred a pre-caricature Jack Nicholson.

By COOP, at 12:20 AM