Such is my obsession with music, a trip to NYC simply would not have been even half complete or as much fun without seeking out some live underground sounds, and this I found at local promoter Todd P’s Death by Audio night in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In contrast to the kind-of-in-a-similar-vein Hoxton scene in London, there are less skinny jeans but more checked shirts and beards, the outfit that is almost tradition for the learned and serious underground music fan. This is totally DIY and a far cry from the usual mainstream venues.
Kate Picard pays a visit to Williamsburg’s Death By Audio.
Whereas contemporaries were revelling in punk angst and rebellion, Dury told stories from his life and East End/Essex life with both a gentle wit and a filthy sense of humour, all suffused by jazz and impregnated and low down dirty funk that probably meant he got away with an awful lot more than the angry young men of bands like The Clash and The Buzzcocks. In a way Ian Dury and the Blockheads were perhaps, a more true representation of Britain in the late 70s and running in sharp contrast with edgier bands of the time that were coming out of the north like Joy Division.
As tour names go, ‘Softcore’ is something of a misnomer. The styling of this twenty-seven date UK jaunt, starring four ‘hardcore singers gone soft’, breaks down under close scrutiny. I can’t comment on Joshua English or Jacob Golden, having never heard their clearly elusive ‘hardcore’ material, but Jonah Matranga was always soft even when he played post-hardcore; and as for Frank Turner, despite parting ways with the brutal British At The Drive-In, Million Dead – Frank is about as far from soft as one man with an acoustic guitar can get.
Seeing Sister live is like going back in time, not a time I was born in, for it’s part Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein, part Siouxsie and the Banshees. The lead singer Gemma dominates the stage with her unforgettable voice — high and low — and haunting presence. The rest of the band dressed in black keep it slick: they are her musical zombies and as the music starts, we are all feeling it feeding through our veins.
After a big breakfast at a Denny’s I had a little more meth, took a cab back to the station, blew the driver in some side-street, had a couple more cocks in the toilets then got on the bus for an uneventful 48 hour trip back, the boredom punctuated only by a few bouts of mutual masturbation with this guy and his son and eating the ass of a truck driver at a station somewhere in Tennessee. I belched cum and asshole all the way home.
Stripped down by comparison, Hopewell fill in the gaps with noise, energy, and the fact that the songs are strong enough to stand without the filler. Russo, brought up in his early days with Mercury Rev and polished on the New York club scene, is equal parts charm and mania, highlighted by his marked wit. Bassist Rich Meyer is delightful to watch, a fact aided by the grin painted on his face; quite plainly, when a band look like they are enjoying themselves that much, it’s difficult not to enjoy yourself while watching them.
Britpop didn’t kill off indie but it did alert the record labels to the public’s appetite for skinny nerks denouncing American culture and proclaiming their own brilliance. Of course, beyond a few European cities and the odd Japanese discos, the world remained largely untroubled by Britpop, possibly because it was a movement based on culturally recycling three decades worth of distinctly English reference points (the lyrics of Small Faces, the clunky riffs of Wire riffs, the sartorial style of Grange Hill) rather than anything approaching innovation.
Shoegazing by no means dominated what the passed for the British ‘indie’ scene — after Madchester/Baggy, other ’scenes’ managed to hold the attention of the nation’s music-buying public. The quirky efforts of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine and Kingmaker were unfathomably popular for a while in the likes of the NME and Melody Maker, only to be replaced on an almost weekly basis by other bands — Pop Will Eat Itself, The Senseless Things, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Wonderstuff and even Daisy Chainsaw (or as Carter USM described them in ‘The Only Living Boy in New Cross’: “the grebos, the crusties and the goths”).
The East London Line has proved to be a fascination to me since I arrived in London and (unintentionally) found myself living in the (then) deeply-unfashionable area of New Cross in the South London backwater borough of Lewisham. A fraction under five miles in length and with six trains running an hour at all times, the line connects the arts incubator of Goldsmiths College at New Cross with the more commissioned world of the Shoreditch gallery, running through such lovably shabby districts as Whitechapel, Wapping and Rotherhithe in the process.
Everyone sang along, slammed their bodies about with reckless abandon, and repeatedly spilled forward onto the stage. From the first chords of opener “Here’s Your Future,” the floor shook under the impact of the feet that repeatedly crashed upon them. Bodies toppled forward, back, and to the sides, feeble attempts were made to steady themselves on walls, speaker cabinets, and other people.
