Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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20.11.05 I Fell On The Playing Field: The Week In Eccentric White Boy Indie Music

And it could be that it was Sunday, and the weekend washes you up on its far shore like a shipwrecked jack-tar, head muddled with strange memories of nights of splintering wood and sea monsters.

It all began on a blizzard-wrapped February morning in 1972, but I think we'll skip ahead to last Wednesday. To Devendra Banhardt and others at the Astoria. I have a new favourite band: Akron/Family. They sound like Polyphonic Spree would like to once their balls drop. Or possibly like Unledded-era Page & Plant teamed up with a Baptist revival choir to sing the Doctor Who theme music. My companion compared them to "being like the time I got to a Sparklehorse gig early, and came in halfway through a Neutral Milk Hotel set", and that was just it: that same, "oh my God, what's that? It's magnificent!" (What? You don't have In The Aeroplane Over the Sea? Go, remedy.)

Following on was The One True Warren Ellis and the Dirty Three, the instrumental trio once part of the Bad Seeds. (I know another Warren Ellis, but we suspect his real name's actually Kevin.) Ellis brandished his violin like a guitar and launched into long, Hunter Thompson-eque narratives about sniffing airplane glue and angels, which were almost better than the instrumental songs they introduced.

Then some beardy gits came on, sang smugly about love, and used the phrase "right on" without the slightest veil of irony: ah, it must be the headliners. I'm suddenly and completely over my Devendra moment. The delightful high-wire looniness of "Little Yellow Spider" seems gone and he is rapidly on the road to becoming just another folk singer. Also, whoever scheduled that gig must have had it in for Devendra. He just couldn't hold up to his opening acts.

I left the Astoria feeling rather glum; there's nothing more blue-inducing than a much-anticipated gig being A Bit Shit, Really. But Thursday was The Decemberists, a band who truly understand the concept of Best Things like pirates, F Scott Fitzerald, Bonnie & Clyde, ghosts, and frock coats. And oh my, gentle stranger. What a show! At the gig I bought Picaresque, their new album, and it is beyond fantastic. What more can I say about an album whose first song (an ode to a Velasquez Infanta) opens with the cries of peacocks? We go on to boppy Casiotone pop about catastrophic school sports-day embarrassment, more Victorian ghost stories (long a Decemberists staple) and chipper ditties about double suicides. Colin Meloy: I mean, really. He looks like Billy Liar, dresses like The Great Gatsby, and uses words like "palanquin" in pop song rhymes. I dub him A Friend Of This House.

Then on to Brighton for a weekend with the comics crowd, which is a bit like partying with the carneys at the circus. We beautiful sideshow freaks, working in our funny little half-industry, dancing on the dark margins of respectability. Bryan Talbot declaimed poetry in Italian restaurants; Andrew Wheeler and Rich Johnston sang Motown in soul food restaurants while the strangers at the table next door harmonised; Andy Diggle lectured me on the nature of magic; vile alcohols were consumed and amusing lies were told. The only thing I purchased was Daniel Goodbrey's latest minicomic, The House That Wasn't Her. It carries on his own brand of strangely emotionally resonant absurdia, and I hated it with that pure hate of a writer who knows that someone else's idea is that much better, that much fresher.

I return to find that the one internet forum I frequent, the V, has relocated. I am truly, deeply bored of the internet, and aside from the V (less a forum than an online charabanc for a weekly pub night) and a few friends' blogs, I have pretty much turned it off chez moi.

Everyone I know has a novel coming out. I feel quite inadequate. Admired quasi-stranger Tom McCarthy has just published his first novel, Remainder, from Metronome Press in Paris. I have not yet read it, but Tom's other works have been ridiculously talented works of intelligence that would be insufferable if they weren't so charming and playful. Order Remainder from the website, or try shops like Magma in Clerkenwell.

Admired friend Mike Carey is also publishing his first novel, The Devil You Know. Warning: Be very careful when ordering this, as there is a Poppy Z Shite novel of the same name that is of a direness so extreme as to make one wonder if it is deliberate. Certainly one can't commit an act of literature that bad in ignorance? One shudders. Anyway, Mike's book is a pulp novel about an exorcist based in London. No, not a huge departure from Mike's usual stomping ground, but when he does modern-gothic supernatural stories so well, why must he depart?

I am too tired to do anything tonight except pour a whisky, put Picaresque on repeat and stick my nose into The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje's utterly engrossing book with Walter Munch on the nature of creating and editing films and novels. 'Tis a shame, the rather well-spoken-of Ralfe Band is on at the Borderline tonight, but I am far too exhausted to leave the barricaded isle of Primrose Hill. Next time, I tell myself, I shall not behave so badly: and once again, hope triumphs over experience.

( 4:46 PM )

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