There are many things I miss about not living in Brum and Sunday Xpress is one of 'em. Possibly the most eclectic line up of music, spoken word and occasional mayhem on offer anywhere on a Sunday afternoon/evening this month's offering includes the sublime genius that is Kate Goes. If your heart doesn't melt like butter on a BBQ at the loveliness of Heartbeat then you're quite possibly dead inside. Also on the 'bill' you'll find Canard Du Jour (bill...canard...get it...eh...eh...oh never mind), Cities Prepare for Attack and Cracked Actors plus whoever else has the balls/ovaries to get up on stage to do their thang. As ever it's all ruddy free too.
Details on the suitably DIY poster above or flip on over to The Sunday Xpress Facebook page. Be there or Big Bren'll visit you in the wee small hours...
Emerging from the twisted still smoking wreckage of
Miss Halliwell Miles Perhower’s new musical assault vehicle is The Day Ends and
this track, The Mentality Mob, is its first missive...actually make that
missile. It’s pretty fair to say that Miles’ relationship with the music ‘biz’,
national or local, has been a little ‘frosty’ from time to time but The Day
Ends ramps things up (or down) to absolute zero. Listing/slaughtering a series
of adversaries against a blistering post punk backdrop it’s the sound of man incinerating
not just burning his bridges. Like it or loath it, love him or hate him, this
track’s pretty much guaranteed to provoke a reaction and ask yourself this, how
often does that happen in music these days? Exactly. PS: The Day Ends make their live debut at March’s
Sunday Xpress (March 20th at The Edge...appropriately enough...in Digbeth)...light the blue touch paper and stand well back.
Second time at Taking the Mic and, if anything, an
even higher standard of performances than the last one. I think we ended up
with around 20 individual slots of around 5 minutes or so covering everything
from Dildos to Grandmothers (insert your own Wayne Rooney gag here). Now that’s
what I call variety. Plenty of regulars but a couple of very talented newbies too and
a wonderfully supportive and chilled out atmosphere throughout the night. Compères
Tim and Morwenna seemed genuinely knocked out by the quality on offer and quite
frankly you’d need ears of cloth and a brain made of offal to disagree.
The whole ruddy thing’s FREE too...two hours plus of top notch spoken word and
music for FREE. What’s not to love? The next one's on Wednesday March 16th, highly recommended.
PS: Preferred the upstairs venue (The Voodoo Lounge
I think it was) rather than the bar where we were last time. Much easier to
give the whole thing the attention it deserves when you haven’t got someone ordering
a white wine spritzer and a packet of pork scratchings down yer ear ‘ole...
PPS: An impressive crowd too...they’re going to need
a bigger venue at this rate.
PPPS: Someone should be recording this stuff for
posterity.
If this doesn’t get your limbs twitching like you’ve
been wired up to the mains and doused in water then you may well need to check you’re
still alive. Tricot, four young ladies from Japan, play joyously jerky math
rock with sugar sweet vocals that have a wonderful habit of suddenly exploding
into a bit of a post-punk frenzy.
Cop a listen, ruddy good stuff eh? Happily they’re
over in the UK for a tour in March and...joy of joys...they’re playing The Cavern
in Exeter. Tickets still available right here right now but this one should sell out. Tanoshimimasu!
Continuing the random eyes closed trawl through 35
years worth of record collecting today’s gem is Kirsty MacColl’s Walking Down
Madison, perhaps the rockiest and most ‘street’ she ever got in a career tragically
cut short by a complete and utter moron in a speedboat. A co-write with Johnny Marr and an
all too rare hit single (number 23 no less) incredibly it celebrates its 25th
birthday this year and, well, it doesn’t sound too shabby does it eh?
The last time I saw Mark Chadwick I was surrounded
by a couple of thousand other punters at the Birmingham Academy and he was
surrounded by the band he formed way back in 1988, The Levellers. This evening
he was flying solo and audience numbers were a more modest 200 or so, at least
one of whom had travelled all the way from Cardiff to be here. What’s the Welsh
for dedication...hold on...’ymroddiad’ apparently...hey, who says the internet’s
just a vapid pool of porn and pictures of cats that look like Hitler eh?
First up though local band The Sweet Black Angels,
indie country folksters with some instantly hummable tunes and a bit of an
Oasis twang here and there, minus the OTT Manc swagger thankfully. Well worth
catching if you get the chance.
Ambling onstage at around 8-ish Chadwick launched
into what amounted to a greatest hits set that was refreshingly relaxed and
informal, especially for an artist with six gold discs and a number one album
in his back pocket...yep, I know...you kind of forget that don’t you? It was a timely
reminder for anyone there who wasn’t a superfan (a fair portion of the crowd were
judging by the enthusiastic word perfect singalongs) though just how many great
tracks The Levellers have and it’s a real shame that, so far at least, they’re perhaps
not held in the same esteem as, say, yer Billy Bragg, one of the few other
artists for whom politics and social issues aren’t dirty words.
Despite one of the organisers encouraging him to
have mid set break so he could get his merch out he played on, noting that he
wasn’t “that mercantile” and that if anyone wanted anything his Skoda was
parked out the back with the doors open and they could just help themselves.
From anyone else this would merely sound like an amusing joke but you kind of
got the feeling that he was being genuine. Bless him.
Set highlight, the truly anthemic - and for once the word’s justified - One Way
predictably went down a storm (even if it did only reach number 51 in the
charts way back in 1991) and Mark even managed to inspire a mini moshpit, albeit
one of the gentlest moshpits in the history of moshpits.
Gently teasing the crowd throughout the set for
living in ‘Hobiton’ and having nothing to worry about apart from interior
design issues (gawd knows what he’d make of Whimple...we’ll have to get him
down here to find out) he blazed through the hits with the same kind of passion
and oomph that he brings to the band (“I don’t know what they do in February”
he mulled midset “don’t think I want to know either”) even bantering with the
crowd and taking the odd request towards the end. That’s the (One) Way to do
it.
Tickets
for The Levellers very own Beautiful Days Festival are on sale right here,
right now.
And so it goes on...2016 really does seem to be intent on wiping out some of the most talented souls around, this time it's Earth, Wind and Fire's founding father Maurice White, producer and lead vocalist on the utterly fabulous disco funk classic Boogie Wonderland. Now if that isn't a tune for a Friday afternoon dance in your pants then I don't know what is. RIP.
Another perfect piece of post pastoral folk from
Boat to Row together with a video that, now I’m living in the wilds of Devon,
sparked more than the odd pang of nostalgia for dear old Brum (even if the ‘planners’
are currently doing their level best to screw it up...RIP the ‘ziggurat’).
Over the past few years Boat to Row have been quietly
slipping out one gentle gem after another and Handsome Beats is another
‘string’ of beauty (and the beats), a melancholy masterpiece in fact, “we’re
broken beats so scattered, some end well most of us don’t” sings lead Boatman
Michael King, “so I pull open the curtain on a day when others won’t”. Coming
so soon after the passing of the legend that is Mr Paul Murphy (who I believe
was also an admirer of the band) that’s a line, for me at least, that comes loaded
with added poignancy. Beautiful stuff.
PS: You can catch Boat to Row out on tour in February and March. Dates here!
