Feeling utterly wrecked and with about two minutes to spare, I turned up at Bar Rhumba last Friday to see Jukebox Collective's first ever gig. In the interest of full disclosure, I should declare here and now that I used to play guitar for the lead singer's previous band, Dakar Rally. The vindictive, schadenfraude-seeking side of me wouldn't have minded seeing them bore the crowd to tears and make under-prepared fools of themselves, but thankfully they were great, and I can't recall ever seeing a band do a better first gig.
At first glance, doesn't the ammo-strap look like a guitar neck and the gun a microphone?
That's not to say I won't nitpick. While Kev's vocals were much improved from some of the more dismal and lacklustre nights when we shared a stage together, he tailed off after a strong start in a way I recognised too well. I hope and expect that he'll improve as he gets used to playing regularly again and gets more comfortable with the set.
The band? They were well-rehearsed and looked good, although Zara's ice cool "I'm going to look bored and not give a fuck" approach to the keyboards definitely beat Greg's "They love me! They really love me!" style of guitar and magic-box-sampler playing. When the image-consultants come in, they'd do well to have a word and suggest he leave it for Kev to do the hard work of looking excited.
I'm really chuffed for them though, and hope they can build up some momentum over the coming months. The tunes are beepy, slightly hypnotic and catchy little numbers, and the second half of the set hinted at more interesting and varied things to come.
Anyway, below is a little sample of their first single, which although sadly not ready for the launch night, I'm told will be available on iTunes any day now. You can have a listen to the full version over on the irrepressible Myspace.
Whatever you think of the "new games journalism" concept, Kieron Gillen undoubtedly knows his stuff, and the news round up he does every Sunday on Rock Paper Shotgun nearly always contains a link to something well written and worth reading.
I bring this up not because the RPS round up is any better this week than it usually is, but because "No Target" has now officially jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. I'm hoping that by following every developer, decent newsite and interesting blog feed I can find, I'll get better at staying on top of the news and maybe one day be just like Gillen. Wouldn't that be great?
I always had high hopes for myself. I bought into the lie they tell you at school that “you can do anything if you set your mind to it”, and then sat around waiting for my mind to get set on something. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.
For a while I thought it was music that would make me “special”, or at the very least, give me an excuse to slack off at university:
“Why bother getting a good night’s sleep before tomorrow’s 9am economic anthropology class, when instead I could stay up and help write a song that defines our generation? Now pass the red wine and the reefer and play me that second verse again...”
As attractive as that lifestyle was, when I turned from my late-teens to early-twenties, doubts set in. Despite talks with promoters and producers who’d say all the right things about how “relevant” they thought our sound was, the Dakar Rally fan-base never extended much beyond friends of friends with nothing better to do. There came a point when persuading people to come to the next gig was my main reason for wanting to go out and meet people, and I found myself keeping in contact with those I otherwise found uninspired and uninteresting just to chase an elusive half-promise they once made to “come see you guys play sometime”. I had, in the words of Vincent Vincent & the Villains, “turned into someone that I didn’t like- and that’s no fun”.
So it’s against this back-drop of having tried and failed at a grand plan for the future (and allowing myself to become a self-serving, sycophant-seeker in the process) that I’m left wondering: what next? What can I do to escape the quagmire of life as a bored paper-pushing public servant, who relieves his creative frustrations by sporadically updating a seldom-read blog?
Q.Is a bland picture better than no picture at all?
These seem like the options:
a) Accept life as a fed-up, paper-pushing public servant. Keep drinking too much, never get laid, and occasionally go to karaoke bars with other grumpy paper-pushing public servants to sing Hard-Fi’s “Living for the Weekend” or ”Working for a Cash Machine” or any other song that’s horrible but helps you to connect with everyone around you who’s also boring, bored and miserable.
b) Stop writing self-indulgent rubbish like this, and write something people might actually want to read. Start a new blog with a narrower focus, which is easy to update regularly. Take up those offers to write for the Worship Street Irregulars and Savy Gamer, and build up a decent portfolio of varied writing. Learn more about proper journalism.
c) Have a go at music again. Get back into the habit of playing the guitar for at least an hour a day. Learn the interesting scales, rhythms and licks you never got around to last time, and get better at improvising. Persuade the talented but nervous musicians around you to get involved, and do something genuinely interesting with it. Maybe start a band called “the Sycophant Seekers”.
d) Work to develop a popular application for the iPhone. Use that app as a springboard for establishing a profitable business, working alongside your friends on something you’re in control of and truly believe in. Get bought out by Google for $100,000,000,000 before the age of 30 and retire into the sunset, using the money to live a life of sophisticated but modest pleasures, while anonymously but informedly donating to worthy charities.
My instinct is to answer “e) all of the above”, but is that in any way realistic? How will I be able to keep scheduling four hours a day for playing videogames and watching tv while juggling those kind of ambitions?
Penned into the stables at the Proud Gallery in Camden, boys in skinny jeans were asking girls in polka dot dresses, “why can’t we go in the main room?”
Pete Doherty was there.
For hours we waited. While making-do with Proud’s adequate but unadventurous playlist, the patience of the pretty poser girls and the anaemic indie kids was thoroughly tested. They stood about outside, restlessly chaining their umpteenth cigarette of the evening, until finally word got around: the doors had opened.
We poured through. There were some guys in skinny jeans on stage, but no-one recognised them. “Are they his backing band?” asked a too-tall man standing too-far forward.
No. They were ‘Vaults’, one of those bands who tediously refuse to put the definite article before their name even though it’s crying out for it.
Maybe ‘Vaults’ were excellent. Maybe they weren’t mediocre hitless me-too’ers. Maybe they sounded adequate and unadventurous because we hungered only for most the evocative lyrics of our generation.
Whatever. Vaults weren’t Pete Doherty.
So we trooped back outside. We smoked our umpteenth-plus-one cigarette. Some were heard cursing that they might miss their last train.
But when finally cigarettes, Vaults, and frantic phone calls to Transport For London were over, it almost took you by surprise. It began with screams, then came “PETE!” swaggering onto the stage, and before you could elbow past too-tall man standing too-far forward, a belting (but perhaps most importantly, unironic) performance of ‘What a Waster’ was over.
Doherty was on fine, crowd-pleasing form, smashing through his greatest hits while treating us to a total of six Libertines tunes. The pace was almost business-like, and he barely uttered a word between songs, save for one moment early on when he started to complain about the quality of the lighting.
“It’s so dark out there I can barely see you! Err, can anyone see a Graham Coxon in the house?”
And to the delight of all, up strolled a sheepish-looking Graham Coxon to the stage. He looked nervous, maybe from being so unusually close to the hungry mob, or maybe because of Doherty’s liberal attitude to tempo. Songs would race forward at twice their usual speed before he’d suddenly slam on the brakes and do the final chorus at a canter. Regardless, the two shared a cockle-warming chemistry, even (or especially) when things around the edges got a little rough.
Yet after a couple of songs Coxon was gone and Doherty was alone, although still amply filling the stage all by himself. And “alone” must surely be a poor word to describe a man with four hundred people screaming his songs back at him. In these intimate surroundings, with Pete at his effortlessly entertaining best, there can’t have been a soul in the room who felt alone.
That said, the soul-less were there too, watching the whole set through the viewfinder of their cheap camera-phone, fantasising no doubt about the number of hits their grainy pictures might get on Youtube. Too-tall man standing too-far forward was one of them, leaning over the row ahead of him with arms fully out-stretched, grinning smugly at the good-looking but awful-sounding footage he was recording. Where did this cult of joyless camera-phone people come from? Are they perhaps descended from the losers that read all their album sleeves nine times over in order to learn lyrics?
Was it really worth it?
Whatever. Someone please take them away and do something horrible to them.
Yet in spite of nuisance support acts, and nuisance camera phones, Doherty was great. When stripped down to just the man and his guitar, his brilliance as a song writer is indisputable. He enraptured the crowd, as they sang along loudly to the songs they knew, and listened respectfully to those they didn’t. He remains a living legend, and everyone needs to hear the web of sound he spins when he picks up a guitar.
I'm excited. There's every chance that Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe will be mind-blowingly awesome. Here's an old episode of Screenwipe to remind you why:
"It's completely open-ended. You can shoot people in the ear, but you can also shoot them in the eye." The Onion offers definitive proof that the Americans can be pretty damn good at satire.
At first glance, doesn't the ammo-strap look like a guitar neck and the gun a microphone?
