The 1234 Festival
Bands in order of appearance:
5 Seconds Exposure
Rubicks
Advert
Rainbow Arabia
The Little Bleeders
Love Video
Electricity In Our Homes
Throwing Up
Echo Lake
Two Wounded Birds
The Chapman Family
Patent Saints
Lydia Lunch & Big Sexy Noise
The Raveonettes
Shoreditch Park, London
Saturday July 9 2011
It's a simple idea. Take one park in a slightly obscure off-the-main-drag area of east London, and fill it with bands.
But not the usual round of too-obvious festival bill-bulkers that you'll see (and see, and see, and see) elsewhere. Here at The 1234 Festival, the band selections are somewhat off the main drag, too. It's a handy one-stop showcase for much of the new stuff and cool stuff that's coming up from the underground right now.
Speaking as one who's always felt more at home in the back streets rather than the High Street, musically speaking, the riotous assembly of mavericks and tyros that makes up the 1234 bill looks like my kind of day out.
So we'll begin, more or less at lunch time, and more or less at random, by putting our heads round the blue PVC door of the Rough Trade tent where 5 Seconds Exposure are laying down some quality drone.
It's a bit like the more out-there moments of Sonic Youth laid end to end, and as a fan of the more out-there moments of Sonic Youth it's good to see a band picking up that ball and running with it. Not that 5 Seconds Exposure will be running far. The band is a Bo Ningen side-project, assembled for this performance only. If you're not exposed to them now, you'll never see 'em again. One show, then quits. Quite brave, in a way, to create something and then walk away. Perhaps more bands should adopt that strategy. I can certainly think of a few who should've done.
I hope that Rubicks will hang around a bit, though - long enough for me to catch another gig or two. Because, if their set over in the New Bands Tent is anything to go by, they've got a good thing going with their sparky electronica-infected new-wavey pop. The songs have a spiky charm, and although I wonder if the geezerish guitarist in his sixties street urchin hat harbours a secret desire to push the band in an Oasis direction, I hope the rest of the Rubicks keep a firm hold of their enticingly ragged electro edge.
Time to take a look at the main stage now. And, appearing beneath a canopy of sponsors' names, we find a very neatly turned-out Advert, who seem to have spruced themselves up quite a bit since their first appearance at the 1234 Festival in 2009. Back then, the band was all surly and taciturn and black-clad and Jesus And Mary Chain-ish (and had S.C.U.M's singer on guitar).
Today, although it's not like they've turned into Gerry And The Pacemakers or anything, they're decked out in nice-chap casualwear. Now the band looks unfeasibly normal (and, just to maintain the guest-artist record, we must note they've now acquired S.CU.M's drummer on, erm, drums).
Advert's normal-chap makeover isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course, but one of the key elements I look for in ye olde rock 'n' roll is a sense of otherness. And there's nothing very other about the guitarist's beige slacks. Forunately, the music has avoided Beige Slack Hell. The Advert racket is a fuzzy wall of guitar, like basement psychedelia filtered through garage-punk. Downbeat dronebeat without much concession given to poptastic accessibility. So that's all good, then. But I still can't get my head round the audio/visual mismatch. It's a bit like watching Velvet Underground songs being played by the Beach Boys.
I'm finding it a bit hard to get my head round Rainbow Arabia, too. They're like The Slits on a comedown, not necessarily a comparison you'd think would spring to mind given that the band's musical chores are handled by two rather bemused-looking blokes on keyboards and electro-drums. It's the singer who lends that Slits-ish identity to the band - if indeed we can call Rainbow Arabia a band: there's a certain session-muso flavour about those bemused blokes, as if they'd been recruited for the day and didn't quite know what to expect.
The singer dips and sways around the stage as if choreographed by Ari Up, and drops a squall of a vocal over the lads' loping, mid-tempo synthi-grooves. I can see how it should work, but, alas, Rainbow Arabia's attempt to bring world music back home doesn't quite do it for me.
I'd be slightly more convinced if the whole thing was a little less synthesized (I'm almost sure they had sampled bongos in there somewhere) and a little less like white muso-boffins trying to get all ethnicky.
It's as if Rainbow Arabia heard a tune or two by Transglobal Underground and thought, "Hey! We could do that!" Not quite, they can't.
The Little Bleeders have no truck with all this world music stuff. They're not trying to assimilate the beats of the myserious east. The furthest east they've been is probably Dagenham.
They kick up a righteous garage storm, lo-fi and raucous, a bunch of Laaahndon geezers bashing a Kinks-ish racket around, distilling the essence of late sixties beat groups through mid seventies Canvey Island r'n'b.
So it's a pretty sharply defined set of influences, then, and while that certainly sets a limitation on what the band do - you know every song is going to be a crash-and-rattle garagey clamour before they even start - the band play with such gung-ho conviction that their tightly-drawn musical parameters don't matter a bit. And anyway, the drummer's ever-changing range of goofball expressions are worth the price of admission by themselves.
Following The Little Bleeders onto the New Bands stage, a collection of mildly geeky indie types who trade under the name Love Video.
They make a mildly geeky indie noise, too, which isn't bad, although a little short of distinguishing features.
I commune with my inner geeky indie kid to Love Video's soundtrack for a while, but the band can't hold my attention for a full set.
Time to wander over to the main stage and see what's going on there, I think.
It seems that Electricity In Our Homes are what's going on there. This is a band I used to see all the time a year or two ago (or so it seems, in my memory) at the Hoxton Square Bar And Kitchen, and other watering holes of the twenty-first century new wave. In many ways, Electricity In Our Homes exemplify many of the key elements of the rise of post-punky indie: the wilful angularity, the disregard for anything resembling commercial appeal, the ruthless pursuit of their own odd muse, and the steady accumulation of success on their own terms in spite of - or because of - all the above.
All of which thoroughly endears the band to me, of course - but why, then, did I eventually stop seeking out Electricity In Our Homes on the gig circuit, even to the point of actively avoiding gigs where they were booked to play?
I think the answer is right here on the main stage now. Electricity In Our Homes are as quirkily angular as ever, and hooray for that, say I. But they're also relentlessly respectable, a post-punk band with all the punk taken out.
There's something neat, polite, and self-effacing to the point of meekness about the band, as if they've carefully scrubbed themselves up to meet your mum. The guitarist cradles his guitar high on his chest, a stance so un rock 'n' roll it's almost as much of a cliche as the traditional low-slung six string gunslinger pose. The songs are pin-neat exercises in sonic mathematics.
I know I'm probably being unfair here. It's not that I want Electricity In Our Homes to be The Clash, or anything - except, actually, I think I do want them to be The Clash. Just a bit. Just enough to make things messy.
Wait a minute - were we talking about punk? About making things messy? Well, here comes a band which I think might just mess things up a bit. Let's face it, with a name like Throwing Up you can bet 'respectable' and 'self-effacing' are not going to be pertinent adjectives.
There are three Throwing Ups: a drummer who looks like he's on loan from one of the more rowdy Hawkwind line-ups, and two riot grrls on guitar and bass. The guitarist used to be in Headless and X-Ray Eyes. This is a recommendation. The bassist is wearing a Babes In Toyland T-shirt. This is also a recommendation. Throwing Up haven't played a note yet, and I like them already.
Curiously, Throwing Up's three-piece guitar-bass-drums line-up is exactly the same as Electricity In Our Homes, but the resemblance stops right there. Because Throwing Up are gloriously messed up. They're loud and magnificently stroppy. Their power-trio line-up wallops each song into submission in a frenzy of chopped-out riffs and back-to-basics beats. Some of Throwing Up's songs are pissed-off punker anthems; other songs hint at an unexpected bubblegum pop sensibility. But you just know it's grubby old bubblegum that's been stuck to the bottom of a chair for a week. Throwing Up's controlled-conditions thrashorama is actually rather cool. Just don't take them home to meet your mum.
Over to the Rough Trade tent now for some shoegaze, courtesy of Echo Lake. There's a lot of shoegaze around these days - any minute now someone will officially announce there's a revival. Trouble is, most of the bands seem to follow the same formula: a female vocalist croons winsomely in the foreground, while a bunch of blokes noodle fuzzily with guitars in the backcround. Envelop the whole thing in a drifting cloud of reverb fog, and - hey presto! - one modern shoegaze band, all boxes ticked.
Now, I may be getting a little cynical here, but that formula describes Echo Lake with uncanny accuracy. As it happens, Echo Lake are pretty good - withn the bounds of the formula. But it's the 'within the bounds of the formula' bit that bothers me.
The band generate a pleasantly blurred-at-the-edges sound, but there's not a whole lot that distinguishes them from many others in the shoegaze zone. Maybe that's why - in spite of the number of 'gaze groups around - this is one genre that hasn't claimed its place in the hazy sunshine just yet. Those blurred edges need to be sharpened up a bit by a distinctive, ahead-of-the-pack band. Good as they are, that band probably isn't going to be Echo Lake.
To the new bands tent again, just in time to catch Two Wounded Birds. Now that's not exactly a name that makes you think of a wild and crazy rock 'n' roll love machine, is it? For me, it counjures up a rather sad image.
Well, Two Wounded Birds are rather more positive proposition than their name suggests. Mind you, they're not quite a wild and crazy rock 'n' roll love machine, either, although they gamely crank it up and rock out as much as a sixties-ish indie combo can reasonably be expected to.
The sixties loom large in Two Wounded Birds' music. The early sixties, to be exact. The songs sound like rough and ready surfing numbers, as if the band fell in love with the Beach Boys' ramalama anthems to the Californian good life, and transferred the concept to their home town of Margate. Well, it always was going to come out a bit rough round the edges under the circumstances, wasn't it?
Frustratingly, the band don't play up the incongruity of the collision between their influences and their reality. On the contrary, they play it very straight, keeping the influences firmly in their place, buried beneath an identikit British indie-band racket. But even so, I reckon Two Wounded Birds are worth keeping an eye on. You never know, it could get interesting if they get around to making a Pet Sounds.
You know what you're going to get with The Chapman Family: seething angst set to a barrage of pissed-off guitar. Today on the main stage the Chapmans seethe with all their usual fire and brimstone, and do their customary job of appearing thoroughly hacked off with the world in general.
Trouble is, once you've seen the band a few times and you've got a handle on what they do (seething angst, pissed-off guitar, etc, etc) the Chapman Family schtick can end up seeming a little one-dimensional. It's not like I want the band to start writing ballads, but I've heard their vexed clamour several times now. I'm familiar with the singer's pugnacious stare and his mad-as-hell stance behind the vocal mic. I think I've arrived at the point where I feel like asking the band, "So, guys. What else can you do?" Today's performance is good, but it leaves that question hanging awkwardly in the air.
A swift glance inside the New Bands tent reveals Patent Saints bestowing their benediction upon us, in the form of psychedelic sludgecore workouts. The Saints seem a curiously self-effacing bunch, but behind their hair and their hoods its possible to discern an instant supergroup featuring members of Bo Ningen and S.C.U.M. You just ain't nobody until you've formed a side project with Bo Ningen these days.
But let's head back to the main stage now, because we're getting close to the top of the bill now. That means it's time to catch Lydia Lunch and Big Sexy Noise.
Well, now things are going to get very rock 'n' roll. Because, in her present incarnation as something between the High Priestess and Great Aunt of low-slung bluezoid sleaze-rock, Lydia Lunch takes rock 'n' roll by the scruff of its neck, gives it a good tongue-lashing, and leaves it for dead in a back alley.
She is aided and abetted in this endeavour by Big Sexy Noise - her band of no-shit swamp rockers whose previous convictions included the mighty Gallon Drunk. For this gig, sax 'n' keyboard man TerryEdwards is absent. His place is taken by a bass guitarist, so it's a heavy duty bump 'n' grind all the way today. Not that Big Sexy Noise ever overdo the delicacy, you understand. That's not what this band is all about.
Lydia looms over the lip of the stage. She wears her customary expression of all-purpose disdain, but you know she's in her element. As the band sets up its grindhouse thump and roar. And then its scruff of the neck time. 'Gospel Singer' is a grinning devil of a song; 'Kill Your Sons' a fine bit of nihilism for a Saturday afternoon.
Lydia's throaty delivery demands attention, and she gets it, too - all over the field you can see people stop, turn, look, listen, suddenly aware that the steaming essence of rock 'n' roll is being hauled into the light over here.
For as long as the set lasts, this East End park becomes a back room in a grimy roadhouse. At the finish, it's almost a surprise to find the sky above, and grass still under our feet.
When it comes to the steaming essence of rock 'n' roll, The Raveonettes would no doubt lay claim to a gallon or two. In their way they're as incongruous as Two Wounded Birds, in that their music is informed by influences far away from the band's real life experiences.
Sune Wagner and Sharin Foo (who are The Raveonettes, although the duo expands to a full band for live work) come from Denmark, although to listen to the noise they make youd think they'd spent time in New York, hanging out with Suicide, in between attending high school hops and other all-American activities. The result of this collision between influence and reality is a strangely piquant bubblegum pop that sounds like a cross between the Everly Brothers - dig those vocal harmonies - and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Beware that wall of guitar!
The uncanny thing is that The Raveonettes nail it. Within half a song you've forgotten all about the incongruity of two people from Denmark who sound like they've been rifling through Alan Vega's record collection.
'Attack Of The Ghost Riders' (a very Suicide-ish title there: not, I suspect, a coincidence) is an assault of minimalist drums and maximalist guitar, yet the vocals harmonise as sweetly as if it's 1957.
'Dead Sound', which is as near to a cover of Suicide's 'Cheree' as you can get without actually doing a cover of Suicide's 'Cheree', sends its hypnotic pulse through the crowd like raw electricity.
Somehow The Raveonettes manage to be much more than the sum of their parts - no mean feat when their parts are often so obviously on display. They wear their influences on their sleeves, but you can't help but admire the cut of their jib.
There's still a band or two to go, but it's time to head back into the great grey greasy city for one of the 1234 after-parties that are taking place at strategic locations around the East End. That was a rather good rock 'n' roll day out in the park, I think. The 1234 Festival, ladies and gentlemen: it sure beats walking the dog.
The Raveonettes: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Lydia Lunch and Big Sexy Noise: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Patent Saints: (No web presence. No, really!)
The Chapman Family: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Two Wounded Birds: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Throwing Up: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Electricity In Our Homes: MySpace | Facebook
Love Video: Facebook
The Little Bleeders: MySpace | Facebook
Rainbow Arabia: Website | MySpace | Facebook
Rubicks: Website | MySpace | Facebook
5 Second Exposure: (No web presence)
1234 Festival: Website | Facebook
For more photos from the 1234 Festival, find the bands by name here.
