This was one of those decent nights when all the acts are of high quality, there was s a good mix of genres, and the atmosphere was electric.
The night opened up with industrial electro-punk outfit, THE FAR CRIES. They are a bit "Haircut", the singer looked like he'd just stepped out of a salon, but that's ok because they're probably worth it.
Their stomping, sharp-edged Blondie-esque punk was spot on. Performance-wise they're a bit green - not yet able to grab the crowd by their collective balls, but give them time. At one point Martin Bjorck (vocals) ran into the audience in the heat of the moment. You could see the dawn of realisation as he panicked slightly and then ran straight back on stage. Bless.
There were quite a bit of feedback issues with their monitors and Bjorck, annoyingly, kept sucking the microphone (don't do that mate, its effin filthy on a lot of levels, and it's hurting our ears). That aside, they gave an energised, entertaining, and uplifting performance.
They have an interesting history. The official line is that Bjorck had arrived in London from Prague, where he worked as a hotel pianist. He was kicked out of his flat and he didn't know anyone, so stayed on the sofa of a friend where he met Liz Holdforth (Keyboards, vocals), they clicked musically, and the rest is history.
In reality Liz and Martin were a couple, they "broke up after a couple of years, and two weeks later they formed a band together," Liz explained, "Sometimes it was a bit of a nightmare for the others, you know, the ex-boyfriend/girlfriend thing, but for the most part it's ok! Our history makes us more honest with each other, and musically."
Their music is focused very much around London life. As Martin told us, "Without wanting to sound pretentious, when you move to London you have to claim it as your own in order to survive."
"Over-exposure to everything can be disheartening," Liz said, "And London is a fickle, fickle place, so we want to stand out from the crowd, but not be anti-pop." So there you go, an interesting band history, and a nice philosophy as well as good tunes. Go see them for yourselves, they're alright.
The second act was, for me, definitely the highlight of the evening. The mighty, mighty MILK KAN, who have been building up a bit of a storm across London over the past couple of years.
Theirs is a wizard mix of hip hop and garage punk, filled with wry observational and sardonic wit, plus a hefty slice of good humour and plain daftness. Simon (vocals, guitar) opened the set by yelling "I know every name of every dinosaur shark", before singing an amusing song of childhood nostalgia, yelling in his gritty South London affect "Come on, I know you all don't want to die old! Sod it, I ain't ever going to grow up!"
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One of their stand out tracks, and there are loads of them, is "Wot U See Ain't Wot U Get", a classic waiting to be unleashed on the general population. It's based around a sample taken from the Dirty Dancing sound track, of all things [please note, I'm quite girly most of the time so will therefore pick up on these things]. I can see this tune propelling them into mainstream pop. Other tunes, such as "Kill All A&R Men", bubbling with vitriolic angst aimed at the music industry, probably won't.
"I'm sick of your hairdo. I'm not gonna give up nothing, and I WANT MY CD BACK!" was the scream, and I was tempted to do a stage dive at this point but I figured that I'd get shunned. Maybe next time though.
Milk Kan are currently being heralded by a couple of famous BBC Radio 1 DJs, and are getting quite a lot of prominent airplay. On one of these occasions, their single was played on the breakfast show of a national radio station first thing in the morning. On asking Jim (guitars) if he was going to celebrate by getting drunk, he informed me that he was "not drinking but cleaning a pile of leaves at work while listening to the single." Nuff respect.
Ten on ten as always for these geezers, they're well worth checking out. Go buy their new single (Bling Bling Baby), it's really very good.
Finally, MONO TAXI, gave a decent performance of their mix of their stylish blend of early 90's Pavement and Blondie-inspired indie pop.
Cosmopolitan socialites, Mono Taxi met about 3 years ago in Paris and played around the Parisian indie scene as BETTYKING, until they moved to London, met their bassist, and became Mono Taxi.
As they explained about their music, "Early 90's is the only indie we really know, they're the bands we started smoking cigarettes on," [I knew it was the Devil's own], "We think that our music will be 'refreshing' in 2015, 25 years after, just like 80s music is 'refreshing' at the moment."
Hmmm, currently 80s music is about as refreshing as a hangover in the Sahara, but we get your point. Go get 'em tigers and tigerettes.
All in all a good night, great bands, and bloody nice people. Nice one.
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