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Club Night Review
Saturday 7th March at the Lexington
Bands: The Indelicates, Once A Thief, Cats In Paris
The gap was large. The winter was bleak and the time slow
going. The emptiness that remained was filled with the click of heels to the
tick of clocks. Eyes grew dull, faces lost their colour, and finally with
patience wavering and hope waning, it happened. My RSPB annual pass arrived –
renewed. One more year of bird watching action in protected wildlife reserves
baby!! Yesss!! On another note, Club COG returned after a two month break for a
re-launch at a different venue, the classy and larger Lexington, with bigger
bands providing even more bang for your buck – just a couple of days after
Jacko announced that something was ‘it’ and invited everyone to see his new
play-dough chin live. Well, they do say great things happen in threes.
Oh yes, the shiny new COG promotion hosted, as ever, top up-and-coming
indie talent from across the land, starting with the strange Mancunian
kookmongers Cats In Paris. The threesome (they were missing a female
co-keyboardist/vocalist) looked like a typical indie band on stage – their
drummer appeared to be a Napoleon Dynamite stand-in, the bass player was the
token hairy one, and the keyboard/violin/vocals front man probably made
advertising revenue for being Chris Evans’ doppelganger.
The synth-based indie they played enjoyed two layers. Once
you got past the initial impression that they’re probably self-indulgent
students who’re some indie label executive’s idea of a practical joke, they
actually have some good variation to their ridiculously twee compositions. The
constantly changing vocal, keyboard, violin and bass arrangements are tied in
nicely by well judged, deceptively progressive drumming. Their unashamed,
deliberate eccentricity takes the direction of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and the
Spinto Band, then goes further. The result is often pleasing, but sometimes a
joke gone too far. They’re high on the whimsy, high on instrumental ability,
but low on consistency. They bring the music down too often in their live
performance so Michael ‘TFI Fridays’ Watson can physically change between keys
and violin.
Some of Cats In Paris’ ideas are sharp and inspired – the
song ‘Foxes’ sounds like latter-day Muse if they took meth and went camp. ‘Terrapins’
is also a great, winding composition. But unfortunately their overall image
will remain that of a band intent on trying to sound ‘different’ as much as
possible, and are ultimately a novelty many will take to for a short time, then
discard. It was no surprise that the final and best song of their set was their
most conventional in structure - on the whole still a welcome set from a fresh
young band.
The new location was then graced with the familiar
excellence of COG stalwarts Once A Thief. Constantly improving, tightening, and
adding quality new material, OAT (they won’t mind the abbreviation) injected
the night with some much needed pure indie rock. They played favourites like
‘Slow It Down’ and ‘Here Come the Junkies’, proffering the well-established
London sound of high tempo indie tempered with two-tone and galvanised with
punk.
OAT (seriously, they won’t mind) still took a little too
long between guitar changes, but they get better each time I see them. The new
songs are uniformly excellent, and they’ve culled the weaker tracks entirely
from their set. What you now get is a band firmly set to go places and do big
things.
Of course it wouldn’t be OAT (ok, they’ll be a little pissed
off) without the tremendous ‘Satellites’ and, now cherished by COG regulars,
‘Sirens’ which thunders and screeches into life and keeps gaining momentum
until you feel, like after having two feet of irritable bowel removed in an
impromptu walk-in Mexican surgery, frazzled and optimistic about life. They
finished with the more conventional but not less impressive ‘Ice Cream
Headache’ song (that sounds like it belongs in a cheesy rom-com soundtrack, but
in the best possible way) – and got a tremendous reaction from newly-converted
devotees. As ever, honourable mention goes to the be-vested Hitman for his
unwavering command of the sticks.
The main event saw a second outing under the COG banner for
the mightily popular serial splash makers the Indelicates. They gave another
headline-making performance to complete the live section of the night – playing
their unique brand of indie-pop with pomp and grandeur. Much has been said
about the Indelicates socio-political lyrics, but what makes them one of the
most revered bands in the land is the consistently high quality and variety of
their songs.
Call it stage presence, call it arrogance (well it is); lead
singer Simon Indelicate has it in spades. Sounding like a lively, politically
active, modern take on the Beautiful South (again, in the best possible way)
they were simply commanding. The new material melded well into the set,
alongside hits like ‘America’ and the truly excellent ‘Sixteen’ – essentially a
cutesy verse repeated a perfect amount of times until it turns into an
addictive song.
Of course there are exceptions – the ‘I am’ song was
pretentious and dire instead of pretentious and good, and ‘Heroin’ is simply
one of the most dreadful things to have ever existed (and I’m including famine
and plagues) – if the Electric Six sung it, it would be hilarious, instead it
appears to be a contrived love song turned ego-trip by a floppy-haired
self-aggrandizing prat with not enough discipline in his childhood and not
enough salad in his diet.
But still, with a tremendous set on the whole (and a well
played-out encore), the Indelicates proved they were not just an exciting
prospect, but the finished article. Their lyrics are hopelessly simplistic,
misguided and not nearly as politically savvy or witty as anyone makes out, but
it doesn’t matter because they sing them in earnest, and wrap them in music
that, like Jade Goody’s face when she sucks on a pain-relieving lolly, brings a
tear to my eye.
The evening didn’t stop there, of course – for the mad yoof
of today, the superior resident DJ Papa La Bass, among others, entertained the
bulging crowd until four in the morning – completing a re-launch par excellence
for Club COG. The boys are back in town. Well, they never left really. And
London’s a city. And – ah you know what I mean. I’m off to by binoculars that
fit the rims of my glasses, so I can better stare at tits. Until next time,
Muhammad Odeh