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JONNY Indie fans of a certain vintage might once have daydreamed about what a collaboration between one of Teenage Fanclub and one of their Welsh equivalents, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, might’ve sounded like. Well wonder no more, because Norman Blake and Euros Childs have got together and made an album as Jonny. Touching, melodic, jangly, daft and self-indulgent, it’s a warm hug on a cold day. Norman Blake tells all. How did Jonny come about?
‘The Fanclub asked Gorky’s to tour with us years ago and Euros and I just kept in touch. He would stay with me and we would end up mucking around with the guitars, it was pretty laid-back.’ The album sounds as if you’re having a good laugh
‘We did. Four days before we went into the studio it was still just me and Euros, and we just thought, maybe we could get a bass player and a drummer, it was that short notice. We recorded it in a couple of days, really. Played through them a few times and there it was. By the end of the week we had the album done. It was refreshing, because when I do albums with the Fanclub, we take our time, so it was great.’
Any plans for taking it on the road? ‘Yeah, it’s just the two of us heading out in my car with two acoustics and two keyboards and that’s it. The soundcheck will take five minutes, and we’ll be off to find something nice to eat.’ (Doug Johnstone) ■ Platform, Glasgow, Sat 19 Feb.
LIVE REVIEWS
GOTH ROCK ESBEN AND THE WITCH Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, Fri 4 Feb ●●●●● PUNK ROCK WIRE Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, Tue 9 Feb ●●●●●
INDIE ROCK WU LYF & ETERNAL FAGS Arches, Glasgow, Tue 1 Feb ●●●●● EUPHORIA POP THE GO! TEAM Oran Mor, Glasgow, Thu 3 Feb ●●●●●
It seems, having exhausted all the genres that were good at the time, the powers that decide whose turn it is next for a revival have alighted upon some of history’s also-rans. Here, Brighton’s Matador-signed trio Esben and the Witch go all gloom and Victorian streetlamps in the most sincerely po-faced nu-goth style. Coming soon, no doubt: the new wave of the new wave of new wave.
Hold on though, because this lot sound both captivating and wholly original without trying too hard to be either. Singer Rachel Davies (below) applies a positively spectral vocal, worthy of the melodramatic tone of ‘Marching Song’ and ‘Eumenides’. Either side of her, Daniel Copeman and Thomas Fisher create sounds from the sanity-baitingly delicate to a meaty type of shoegazing noise and the bleakest of electronic symphonies.
Occasionally the trio take to just pummelling the same standing drum; at other times their music has the kind of range and subtlety that marks them out as future film score composers. They might capture the mood of years gone by, but their sound is that of a dark and fearsome future. (David Pollock)
The young lady ID’d on the door says much about the Wire demographic. Especially as she’s escorted by her mum and dad. The original art school punks may be well into their third decade, but their influence on the last couple of generations of Brit-pop artrockers is more obvious than ever. Now reduced to a core trio of donnish guitarist Colin Newman, Glengarry sporting bassist Graham Lewis and whippet-thin drummer Robert Grey following avant-boffin Bruce Gilbert’s departure, and with live sound fleshed out by touring guitarist Matt Simms, Wire’s quintessentially English marriage of plummy opacity and jangular guitars sounds leaner, more urgent, yet somewhat appositely more conventional than ever, even if no one ever sounded like this before them. Material from the recently released Red Barked Tree album fits seamlessly with the band’s back catalogue, with a magnificent ‘Kidney Bingos’ giving way to the swearily caustic ‘Please Take.’ They may be clad in 57 varieties of arts mandarin black, but this bunch of fifty-somethings leaves the legion of whippersnapper wannabes wanting. (Neil Cooper)
It is a scenesterrific double bill at the Arches, albeit one for only a modest crowd of in-the-knowers. First up, one of Glasgow’s emerging finest, Eternal Fags. Boasting just a drummer and a guitarist they’re bound to earn an unimaginative comparison or two to The White Stripes (RIP), but with unfocused riffs piled on fuzzy beats, piled upon indiscernible hollering as they play on the floor at crowd level, they’re more like a Caledonian Lightning Bolt. In other words, the sound of indie pop gone bad, of the blues dying drunk in an alley. Next up, Wu Lyf (World Unite/Lucifer
Youth Foundation), Mancunian masters of the cryptic web presence. Google them, you’ll see. The reality is inevitably sobering: they’re just four young English lads playing guitars, but what a noise they make.
Ignore the silly title and bask in the offbeat anthemic glory of ‘Heavy Pop’ and ‘Spitting it Concrete Like the Golden Sun God’; marvel as they cover Earth as if it were a muck-about afterthought; smile at the temerity in playing before a black gravestone cross bearing the legend ‘LYF’. Career suicide, no matter how hard they try, won’t be an option. (David Pollock)
The most notable thing about The Go! Team’s sold out Glasgow date (the first in their UK tour) is the diversity. Not just in the band, but the fans – stretching from old school punks to brightly-coloured art students and families.
The Brighton sextet storm onto the stage with a typically joyous presence. If they had all been silhouetted in white, their wild dancing, matched with upbeat mash- ups wouldn’t look out of place in an iPod advert. Frontwoman Ninja leads a raucously uplifting opening, sporting workout clothes and some serious dance moves. ‘Huddle Formation’ and ‘Voice Yr Choice’ pave the way for a set of distorted genius. The rapper has such a presence, though, that their songs lack the same vigour when she leaves the stage, other than for the instrumental power piece ‘Bottle Rocket’.
Sadly, the band fail to maintain the initial perfect momentum of the first three or four songs, but still, a quality night jam-packed with innovative samples of garage indie, 90s hip hop, fuzzy acoustics and optimistic, but not at all cheesy, pop. (Hamish Gibson)
17 Feb–3 Mar 2011 THE LIST 63