GDFAF5: The Warlocks, Dead Combo

And so it was for GDFAF #5 that I returned to Bar Academy for my fifth gig in this series. It was raining hard so rather than cycling I put on my leather jacket and took the train, which was apt as it was a leather jacket sort of a gig. I seem to be going through a nice variety of genres at the moment: Sunday was J-rock, Monday was ska, tomorrow is whatever the hell Melt Banana are, Friday is anti-folk and tonight was apparently “death rock”. We’re in the world of heroin-chic, romanticised suicide, moody pouts, smoke machines and the ability to call your band The Warlocks and still be taken seriously.

I got there early thanks to the gig scene’s utter inability to deal with the concept of accurate advance information and as usual had my bag checked. Since I wasn’t cycling there wasn’t a bundle of hi-viz and bike lights in there so the bouncer saw the camera and asked for a look. I’d always assumed they were on the lookout for anything resembling professional kit for copyright reasons and my camera does look kinda pro to a novice, but it would appear they’re more concerned with concealment of illicit substances. “Digital?” he asked after turning it over a few times and let it pass, neglecting to check the 14 pockets on my person but what the hell, at least I wasn’t smuggling drugs in an SLR body.

I’ve found sitting around at gigs on my own a strangely uncomfortable experience, especially as I’m not drinking overpriced beer for this fortnight, so having seen someone reading a paper last night I brought a book and settled down in the corner. As the room filled I saw a girl reading a Diane Arbus monograph. Hmm. Highbrow crowd tonight. A couple of guys came over and asked if I wanted to be on the Warlocks’ mailing list – filling these out consists of me writing my name over and over and always feeling slightly pretentious next to all the hotmails and yahoos – and offered a badge. I ended up with six.

I heard a guitar being tuned and moved to my now usual spot on the benches to the right of the stage, but nothing seemed to be happening. Then a guy with a strange accent started talking to the audience in between setting up his gear, offering people his pints of beer which, being British, no-one accepted. This was Dead Combo, our support for this evening, a Finnish duo with guitars, a laptop serving as a drum machine (and god knows what else) along with the crustiest old Moog you’ve ever seen. They were an odd looking couple, vocalist (plus guitar and Moog) Nuutti Kataja looking like a skinny Lemmy with his clean shaven guitarist chum Harri Kupiainen beside him. Looking at their tour dates on MySpace they’re on an incredibly intensive tour across Europe and it showed.

My limited experience of Scandinavians (specifically Norwegians) has taught me that they are kind hearted, generous folk but with a mildly psychotic edge. Roll the term “Finnish Rock” around your head – it’s both exciting and slightly disturbing. I was trying to pin down exactly why the audience were so wary of this genial monster offering his bottle of poppers bought from the sex shop next door (“we don’t do designer drugs, we prefer novelty drugs”) and it struck me he was behaving like an amusing tramp. You’re entertained but you want to keep your distance.

When they actually got down and played they were quite astonishing with grinding guitars and vocals riding a steamroller of pounding drums and that fucked up Moog that reminded me of Big Black in terms of relentless power, but everyone still kept their distance despite rewarding with rapturous applause. Everyone except one young woman who stood on her own right in front of the stage. I’d like to see Dead Combo again when they have an audience that’s brave enough to interact on their level. I suspect it would be a most entertaining evening.

While they were endearingly shambolic tonight an mp3 from their site shows they can put it down on record to great effect, like My Bloody Valentine with enormous balls.

And so to our headliners, The Warlocks, consisting of two, no, three guitars, bass, keyboards, and that’s a rather large drum kit, hang on two drum kits? This band has two drum kits? Without saying hello or even acknowledging the audience they started playing what struck me as shoegazer and I liked it a lot.

This sort of thing is very easy to take the piss out of, with earnest songs about drugs and suicide with miserablist-gorgeous posturing, but when it’s done well it’s immensely enjoyable. Whether there was a knowing smile behind the mask I’m not sure (I’m reminded of a post-rock guitarist telling me that of course it’s all incredibly silly but part of how it works is not to let on how silly it is) but all the trimmings were there, from the back-lighting and smoke machine making the band darker than the audience, to the film projected behind them.

This projection was notable in this age of laptop driven shows. Behind the speaker stacks was a guy with two old-school projectors which he had to use pliers to operate. Into these he fed a number of scratchy 8mm film loops stored in notches on a strip of cardboard. As both projectors played he leant over them, alternately flipping pieces of card over the lens, mixing the images as a DJ would mix records. The images were your standard selection of psychedelia, old movies and vintage porn but to see them manually manipulated like that with such energy and for so long was quite inspiring.

I was again intrigued by the audience. I was expecting a fair amount of goth but there was none to be seen. There wasn’t even much leather in attendance – just a room full of pretty ordinary looking people in their mid-20s, early 30s. If I can stretch some comparisons to last night we again had a relatively minor band from the US from a pretty well identified genre playing to what seemed to be a random assortment of people who’d become fans via their own channels. I could of course be completely off base about this but it seems to be the unexpected theme of this fortnight, that easily identifiable tribes and subcultures don’t exist any more. People stumble upon scenes that in the past they shouldn’t do and mix them up in a manner of their own choosing. It would appear my genre-hopping gig going isn’t at all unusual – this is the norm, and I think that’s a good thing.

So I ended the night having taken a band called The Warlocks seriously. That’s no small feat.

Five gigs in and I’m starting to feel the strain. This post took forever to get out despite my detailed notes. One of the hope for this project was that it would speed up my writing, eradicating the blocks that often emerge and forcing me to just get on with it. I’m hoping that snap is going to come soon because spending five hours on a weblog post is starting to do me in.

At some point I’m going to have to address this in a separate post but I should mention that MySpace has been a revelation this last few days. I’ve previously discounted it as a social networking / blogging tool (and I still think rightly so) but for music it’s utterly invaluable giving you up to date information and streaming music right there with no mess. Of course this is compared to most band’s websites which are notoriously awful things clogged up with unnavigable Flash interfaces but I’ve been relying on MySpace not only to figure out what bands I’ve seen but to preview the ones I’m going to next. Whoda thunkit.

Melt Banana tomorrow then with Brian Duffy + The Modified Toy Orchestra plus Noise Noise Allore at my first ever gig organized by the ever intriguing Capsule collective. This is assuming I can get tickets. If I can’t then it’ll be Oversol at the Jug which will be, y’know, cheaper.

As usual, my plans, such as they are, can be found on my Upcoming.org page. If you’re enjoying this series and want to help out here’s how you can, but please don’t feel obliged or anything. I accept asking you to pay me to go to gigs is a little fucked up in some respects but some people have already (thanks!) so there must be a market for it.

And finally thanks to flatmate Andy for the curry before the gig. Helped no end.