SUNDAY
King Vulture are the perfect start to a hazy Sunday. Apparently they're normally a full band with bass and drums, but unlike some they've clearly put some effort into reworking their material for a more stripped-down format. In that you wouldn't know it wasn't written like this. Three abreast, all with acoustic guitars (having the left-hander centre stage is possibly not the best idea logistically!) initially there's an obvious Simon And Garfunkel comparison to be made, both in the bittersweet folk-fringed pop melodies and the rich three-way harmonies. Later on some mellow acoustic soul flavours start to surface, and by the end of the set it's bordering on funky. A strange one then, leaving us none the wiser as to what they sound like in full-blooded mode.
It was at this very breakfast session three years ago that Rachael Kichenside first caught our attention, and considering her set coincided with the arrival of said fry-up (this year we got the eating bit out of the way before the bands started) this was in itself an impressive achievement. A solo artist in those days she was doing soulful, folky pop that was relatively mainstream; a crowded market where even a voice as stunning as this might just miss the ears of the influential. By last year's event her band Run Toto Run were impressing us with pretty, warm electro-folk; another year and the development is amazing. Run Toto Run have found their own path and sound truly unique - and she's still got one of the most outstanding voices around.
For a start, it's a largely electronic set-up these days - two gentlemen with keyboards and samplers providing the foundations for Rachael's excellent collection of cheap and cheerful toybox instruments. Who needs guitars bass and drums when you could have glockenspiel, melodica and recorder? The results are as delightfully unclassifiable as you might expect; Micachu if she had tunes? Four Tet if they weren't so blokey and serious? Then they go and fuck up any remaining preconceptions by chucking in a sort of electro-oompah beat and fairground organs. Talent, individuality, star quality and tunes - ITC might well be an international event but sometimes you don't actually have to look past your own backyard for the stars. There's also something almost precocious about covering a contemporary song, but they do just that with a glockenspiel twinkling, sunshine sparkling version of "Sleepyhead" so perfect Passion Pit should probably just give them custody and wave it off to a happy new life.
Changeover takes a bit longer these days than when it was (entirely) Acoustic Breakfast, but there's time for one more before moving on: Neil McSweeney. More the conventional breakfast session artist, the Sheffield singer-songwriter oddly lists a load of female artists as influences - PJ Harvey, Nina Simone, Kirsty MacColl, Sarabeth Tucek... This might well be some sort of joke, but MacColl is actually a good reference point, along with other old-school punk-inspired (in spirit if not sound) pop troubadours. Passionate and powerful, he leads a full band, organ and accordian included, through a set of big-hearted gritty ballads and darker journeys into Americana.
The venue has, as ever, filled up a lot by this point as delegates and shoppers alike are drawn into what does indeed feel like night in the middle of the day - time to move on, although I'm sure I'll be back tomorrow...
3pm. It feels a bit wrong going to Same Teens session when you barely remember being a teenager, but the local underage gig specialists have again come up with a brilliant ITC line-up, this year situated in the rather strange Nexus Art Café which has a bit of a churchy youth-club vibe to it. There's a sort of floral fairy light crucifix in front of the stage everyone's trying to ignore. And MM's Sov Twins and Ged Camera have joined me so I'm only the fourth oldest person here at worst.
As the guidebook helpfully informs us, WU YLF have no Myspace or Facebook page, change their name every few weeks and generally make it quite difficult to keep track of them. A bizarre strategy, but one that worked for The Phantom Band, eventually. We at MM aren't doing too badly - at last year's ITC we surmised that "any band called Vagina Wolf has to be seen, really" and reported "echoes of Interpol, Pixies, Pavement even; pretty good anyway." By January 09 we noted that wu lf wu lf played "abrasive prog-ish alt-rock, like a kind of semi-unravelled Pixies with shades of Day For Airstrikes". They'll probably change it again now they know we're onto them. They might already have done. Anyway these days they've reined in the prog bits and turned up the punk; the Interpol-Pixies-Pavement triangle is still their basic framework with the singer's angry punk scowl sounding more like Frank Black than you'd think possible from one so young and, well, thin. At the end they kick the crucifix over, so they're probably going to Hell which is pretty rock'n'roll. I would recommend them, but all I can really say is look out for a band with a weird name probably containing the letters W, L and F.
LR Rockets make a slightly more traditional punk-post-punk racket, in fact they're so punk rock they've driven all the way from London in a one-litre Datsun. There are flickers of electropop in the keyboards, enough skittering hi-hat and bass bounce to make it danceable (in theory; in actual fact pretty much the whole crowd's sat down - young people these days eh?) but overall it's much more like the angry agit-post-punk than the haircut variety. Which is good. Unfortunately it all gets a bit samey after a while and they drag on for about two more songs than they've actually got, which isn't.
Wild Palms' rhythm section have been at the Factory back catalogue, with a Gang Of Four chaser. Singer Lou Hill meanwhile sounds like a young (as in Teardrops) Julian Cope. It's fascinating how the sounds of 1979-81 continue to have such an influence on young bands; I guess there's the parental record collection factor but I don't remember too many 80s kids getting off on The Hollies. And yes, they're very good at it, much more raw and genuine sounding than your Editors / White Lies major-label packaged angst factor - but I can't work out why loads of very cool teenagers are getting well into this; I'm a thirtysomething at an all-ages party and I expect to hear something I find virulent and incomprehensible, not retreads of what I was listening to at their age. I leave them to it.
No In The City would be complete without (a) a trip to BUSK @ The Garratt and (b) at least one performance from Nomad Jones. BUSK is, as we say every year, the complete antithesis of the shiny corporate shindigs across town, and therefore absolutely necessary. There is an actual busker onstage when we get there, a grey-haired chap called Frank who's doing a few standards, Johnny Cash tunes and a couple of bawdy ones that we find a lot funnier than we should. This is the great thing about BUSK: they celebrate live music in all its forms.
Nomad Jones is your traditional acoustic guitar-slinging singer-songwriter with a clutch of lovelorn tunes; the only thing marking him out from many others being that his songs are really good. Poignant without being mawkish, delicate without being weedy, and classically melodic. Maybe one day the world will notice - it only took Johnny Bramwell 20-odd years...
The place has filled up a bit for Air Cav who are making their second appearance of the weekend; I'm told last night's Centro gig was one of their best ever and packed out. This is a bit more low-key, but it's still the best thing I've seen all day. It's no secret that I have an involvement with the band so I am not about to pretend otherwise, but there is a good reason for this. Air Cav are (alongside Daniel Land And The Modern Painters - whom I'm told were also outstanding at Centro; and The Longcut - currently missing ITC due to their own tour, and whom I was actually watching in Oxford last night) one of the three best bands in Manchester.
They open with a new one so new it appears on the set list only as "New One" (it always amuses me when bands do this) which sees a shift sideways into a more psychedelic place, whilst retaining the trademark Air Cav balance between the dreamy guitar/violin melodies and the powerhouse rhythm section; meanwhile older single track "Picking At The Bones" is the sort of air-punching anthem that reminds us why audiences have gone absolutely mad for this band in territories such as France and The Netherlands where you don't have to be up the back passage of large media conglomerates to be considered a great band. Best of the bunch though is "Keychain" which carries the Chameleons' blueprint of heart-rending poignancy and powerful foundations. Sadly we're denied a last track by a string snapping, but it's still one of the best sets of the day.
Night & Day is rammed when I get back. Egyptian Hip Hop have already had plenty of press (this is, after all, the NME's Radar showcase), but that's a good enough reason to stop by and see what all the excitement's about. We already know they have incredibly tight jeans and great hair, and their former incarnation as splattergun electropunks Copycats was always an experience... at the ripe old age of 17 they've calmed down a bit. They are, tender years notwithstanding, in some ways a classic Manchester band: a little dour in the voal department but with a party going on elsewhere. Electrobeats and live drums (we're not sure if the drummer's face mask is some sort of statement or something to do with swine flu, but given the heat and humidity in here let's hope it's the former) underpin pealing guitars, whilst the vocals are more teenage Cure than Factory growl. Meanwhile hints of "new rave" inform both their visual and musical style, although not overpoweringly so. Classic Manchester then, but equally bang up to date. I guess (possibly in the "blind man playing darts" sense) the NME does get it right occasionally.
Not sure Wolf Gang are one of their better bets, though. They come with great recommedations and comparisons but what I'm hearing at least on the first couple of tracks is indie punk-funk by numbers. Yes, singer and mainman Max McElligott does sound uncannily like David Byrne, but what the hell is that Arcade Fire reference in the blurb all about? Oh, his voice soars a bit. Right. So it's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah then. Who were (are?) a decent enough band, but not sure we needed another one.
Down to the Bay Horse basement next, which has the same sort of underground atmosphere you usually find at FictionNonFiction, a regular fixture sadly missing from 2009's schedules. At which point we'll take another look back to In The City 2006, where somewhere in the middle of Dry Bar's pile-em-high-regardless-of-quality pic'n'mix a slightly intimidating looking duo from Salford called Deodates were mixing up raucous Northern Soul and Detroit blues. Three years and a name change later The Black Knights are on the official ITC Unsigned list and deservedly so. And the purple-suited, sparkly eyelinered, Satanic goateed Gary L Hope is still one of the scariest frontmen you'll encounter.
His vocals are best described as, well, imagine if Prince and Jack White had a child (no, bear with me) only he was born in Salford and fucking pissed off about it. This is backed by dirty great motherfucker riffs, often thrashed out on the bass strings, and drumming that sounds like a fight. They're always good live but they're absolutely on fire tonight, Gary pushing his guitar deep into the amp while Tom Pickford batters seven shades of hell out of his minimal kit. The interaction between the two is compelling; with a tight two-man set-up such as this they fix on each other constantly, with looks that fall somewhere between encouraging and threatening. The Bay Horse of course has no PA, you play through amps, and this is exactly how The Black Knights should be heard, red raw.
They come offstage at 11pm. I'm due at Ruby Lounge at 11pm. Oh good, first sprint of the weekend. Which is bordering on an obstacle course, due to the proliferation of enormous tram-related roadworks in the short stretch between the venues. Run down the stairs just as the band come onstage, adrenaline still pumping from The Black Kinghts' explosive finish. This is as much a part of ITC as the actual bands, that buzz of managing to get somewhere just in time.
This is the first ever live performance by The Switch, although their studio outings have already picked up plaudits from the BBC and XFM and comparisons to Portishead and Massive Attack. That's a hell of a lot to live up to, but amazingly these claims are not overestimated. The backdrop, provided by two large banks of electronics and a guitar, is lush and orchestral with dark undercurrents; bass frequencies so deep the floor trembles and slow, brooding beats. And in Caroline Sterling they have a star-in-the-making up front. She has this beautiful, pure voice, almost fragile sounding; untreated and relatively understated, reminiscent of Sarah from Dubstar back in the day. And she's compelling to watch, too, dressed like some Eastern princess going for a night's raving and absorbed in the sound. It's a short set, but they've done enough to get every radar in the room twitching; the last track "See The Light" is the standout, a gorgeous floating piece of electro psychedelia full of synth wash and guitar delay that sounds like the sunrise after you've stayed up all night.
It's interesting to note that despite ITC's national / international remit, the four best sets I have seen today - Run Toto Run, Air Cav, The Black Knights and The Switch - all came from Manchester. This is not some sort of misplaced civic pride: out in the wider world most of my favourite bands are actually not from round here. And neither is it any attempt to categorise a scene; the four bands have little in common musically. It's just what happened today. I'm kind of glad it's very late by this point, as I'm not sure I'd want to go and watch another indie band after that. I've been out for ten hours after three hours' sleep, and we've got it all to do again tomorrow.
MONDAY
Monday lunchtime, Night & Day, there'll be half an hour's wait for the breakfast apparently. That's OK, I'm not going anywhere. Hannah from Pull Yourself Together / Fugitive Motel has joined me in the online office (table 19, in case you were wondering) to form a sort of Manchester underground media HQ, the coffee's great, and there's wonderful music to be had... breakfast can wait.
Tim And Sam's Tim And The Sam Band With Tim And Sam are exactly how every day should begin, I'm sure the world would be a better place for it. Pump their music into the political parties' conferences and then let's see how many wars they want to start. It's music that can't fail to make you smile, yes, even a miserable sod like me, although Tim himself seems a bit down. They had a crap gig yesterday, apparently. Here, though, everyone's happy to see them. The line-up seems to have stabilised these days - Tim and another guitarist, Becca on keyboards and blowy things, and a drummer, and they're sounding better than they ever have, full of depth. The two guitars wrap around each other into shimmery cascades and the drums give it all a backbone; they've found a lovely little space between post-rock, folk and old-school jangly indie-pop and whether it's their own songs or their brilliant cover of Elbow's "One Day Like This" (with the clarinet on "lead vocals") they have an ear for a bewitching melody that stays with you long after they've left the stage.
A Genuine Freakshow describe themselves as "pop-infused post-rock" and I'm not about to disagree; with guitars, violin, cello and even a trumpet going at it full pelt they excel at those sort of towering instrument pile-ups Hope Of The States used to do so well, but there are also more indie-pop moments led by Timothy Sutcliffe's unashamedly fey - and often falsetto - vocals. In fact he's so quietly spoken between songs, so thin and bookish looking with his thick glasses, he makes the previous band's Tim look like a rock monster in comparison. To be filed somewhere near The Strange Death Of Liberal England in the grand spectrum of intelligent post-pop. I'm also intrigued by the bit on their Myspace where they mention supporting Marillion in Holland, as I'm now trying to imagine how on earth this rather Radiohead-ish and very English (and slightly Icelandic - the sound, that is, not them) leftfield pop went down with a load of sweaty denim-clad Dutch proggers. Fey they might be, but they're fucking brave.
The breakfast was wonderful as ever, too. I don't know how I'd get through ITC without it.
Next: time for a break from live music. I'm off to the pictures.
What??! During In The City weekend?
Ah, yes, but this is a film every music fan should see. It's all been a bit last minute; a week or so ago top Manchester promoter Jay Taylor was contacted by the distributors and asked if he could source a screen for the film somewhere in Manchester during this event. Cornerhouse 3 was available, but something's gone wrong with the projectors, so Jay, myself and approximately twenty other people are clustered around the middle few rows in the rather too large Cornerhouse 1; it feels strange, but as the distributor's representative tells us this might be a music documentary but it was made to be seen on the big screen - and this is one of the biggest screens you'll find in the arthouse/independent sector outsde of London. And he was right. There is a lot of music in this film but there's also a lot of landscape, landscape that sets the scene - it'll
still be a great film on DVD but you might lose something of that...
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OIL CITY CONFIDENTIAL
a film by Julien Temple, on general release February 2010
Preview screening at The Cornerhouse, Monday 19th October, In The City 2009
A question for you. Who were the first unsigned band to appear on the cover of NME? I'll give you a clue. We're not talking recently. We're talking, well, let's just say their London gigs were often attended by a youngster called John Graham Mellor, who was yet to become Joe Strummer. And, apparently (and very bizarrely) another youngster called Diana Spencer, who was yet to become Princess Di. A band whose infuence is probably somewhere in your record collection, even if you've not got anything of theirs. You've got a Clash album somewhere, right? Or the Sex Pistols, or any of the millions of bands inspired by them? Some Libertines, maybe? Julen Temple has of course already made films about The Sex Pistols ("The Filth And The Fury") and Joe Strummer ("The Future is Unwritten"), and for the final part of his loose trilogy on British music in the 1970s he turns his hand to a band who played a vital role in setting the foundations for punk and all that followed. That band was Dr. Feelgood, and there are probably two things everyone knows about Dr. Feelgood - they invented pub rock, and they came from Canvey Island.
The camera pans across mud, brick and stone, towards the cylindrical walls of an oil refinery; in front of it stands a bald man with a Telecaster and wild, staring eyes - eyes you'll never forget, but eyes with a certain sadness behind them. I visited Canvey Island once and those eyes stared directly into mine; watching British Sea Power at the Monico Hotel, the venue where Dr. Feelgood honed their craft three decades earlier, they introduced a special guest for the encore: Feelgood's legendary guitarist Wilko Johnson himself. Sixty-one years old, he picked up his guitar and slid across the stage as he blasted out the unmistakeable riffs of "She Does It Right", backed by the awestruck band who were not even born when he wrote it in a house just around the corner.
"I was born here, below sea level, and that affects the consciousness profoundly". The opening words of the film from the man with the haunted eyes.
I'll never forget that drive down that winter night. Remembrance Way leads out across the mudflats of the Thames; a strangely bleak and desolate sight at sunset with strange memorials hanging from trees, then suddenly the vista of the Thames bank spreads out ahead of you; the lights of London at one distant end and at the other, Southend and the sea. Welcome to Canvey Island. The venue address was Eastern Esplanade. That means seafront, doesn't it? Follow a sign to the seafront. Through a housing estate, round a corner again and the inky blackness of the estuary laps on the other side of the wall, you think of the people in those houses; how when we hear of severe weather warnings we think mostly of how jammed the M6 might be or the postponement of a sporting event, whilst here people shudder slightly, knowing nature may one day take its course again. Mud, brick and stone, which in 1953 was swept under water as the Thames burst its banks. People in Canvey always talk about things before the flood or after the flood the way others talk about before or after the war, says Wilko, as the screen cuts to archive newsreel footage: families crawling out of upstairs bedrooms just above the water level, dragging their treasured possessions onto rooftops; bedding down in a school hall in Southend. John Wilkinson (the name was reversed on discovering there were too many people called John in Dr. Feelgood) was six years old; his family all survived, but many school friends were less fortunate. Even at six years old those eyes had seen things most of us never will.
After a shared childhood "buggering about in the mud", the four boys who would change the course of rock music in Britain started their musical journeys playing in jug-bands, first separately and eventually together. Clips of jug bands, some footage found and some recreated. The style is classic Temple: sharp cuts between archive, drama and present day. The Monico and the Fantasy Island Amusements arcade across the way flicker between grainy black and white and the 21st century as history unfolds. They all lived just a few streets from one another; in a pub taproom somewhat less updated than most of those on the mainland the white-haired former road manager sticks pins in a map and runs a little model Transit between them. Wilko does a lot of the talking, as behind him footage of the band is projected onto the refinery walls: the Thames Delta, they called it, Oil City. It's not just a film about the band; it's a fascinating insight, at least in the early part, into this strange and unique part of England. The other "star" of the piece, for want of a better word, is the elderly mother of the late Feelgood singer Lee Brilleaux; frail but still sharp, she stands in her living room in front of the gas fire, a woman who only came to Canvey after the flood carries her own sadness: the premature death of her only son. Temple excels at conveying the poignant side of the Dr. Feelgood story alongside the rock'n'roll mayhem.
And what rock'n'roll mayhem it was. Punks before punk, the short-haired, suited Canvey boys rolled into London in a battered Transit against a musical backdrop of the times that was more concerned with the neo-classical excesses of the tail end of progressive rock; the scenes of crowds rushing the stage and jumping around in a hail of flying pint pots will be familiar to anyone who goes to gigs, but in 1974 this must have been something else. The music was primal and the performance incendiary: Wilko skittering across the stage (it was always skittering, the film's participants recall to a man, as if the word was invented for him), holding his guitar like a machine gun in a way that's been copied many times since. A young American called Clem Burke, later of Blondie, took the music home and played it to his friends in the nascent CBGBs scene; his friends The Ramones landed the support when Dr. Feelgood next visited the US. Popular myth often cites these New Yorkers as having "invented" punk rock as we know it, but Burke, looking rather younger for his age than many of the interviewees, sets that straight once and for all.
The life cycle of the band is of course one we've heard a million times, but told well here. Eventually the relentless touring, the excess and the groupies and the drugs and the drink take their toll. The growing gulf between the hard-drinking Lee and the teetotal but amphetamine-crazed Wilko. On 9th April 1977 the NME broke the story that Johnson had quit: the band carried on for a while, in one form or another, right up until Lee Brilleaux died in 1994 - and even afterwards; I recall friends of mine going watching "Dr. Feelgood" in a pub in Glossop around 1996 or 97 but exactly who was in the band at that point is unclear. Wilko Johnson still plays live on a regular basis: his Myspace page (a concept which would have been beyond the wildest imagination of a young band in the early 1970s whose audiences were generally whoever happeend to be in the pub at the time) lists seven gigs between now and the end of November. Couldn't he have retired by now if he wanted to? He's earned the right, after all.
The camera cuts back, in the closing stages, to the sixty-one-year-old man standing at the door of the Monico, the lights of Fantasy Island Amusements reflected in the glass as they did when he was young. Since his wife passed away, he says, playing live is the only thing that makes the pain stop. "I dunno if I wasted my life..." he contemplates, "but probably not".
He didn't. Not at all. After that British Sea Power gig, just a couple of years ago, I was talking to a friend about fifty years old himself who's spent the last three decades watching all manner of bands on tour all over the world, a man who still loves nothing more than the spirit and the energy you get down the front when the bodies are jumping and the beer is flying. A couple of metres away at the side of the stage Wilko Johnson wiped the sweat from his forehead and I watched as my friend cautiously approached his hero. Never usually a man lost for words or given to public displays of emotion, he could only nervously tell him "I got into music because of you; wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you; in 1974 you blew me away and made me realise what live music could feel like". This is a film that anyone who loves live music and feels that energy needs to see.
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The current plan is that when the film sees its general release in February 2010, it will be premiered simultaneously at independent cinemas across the country - and after the closing credits, the screens will switch to a live streaming of Wilko Johnson playing a twenty-minute set. It's an ambitious plan and will be amazing if it comes off, and I'm looking forward to it already.
Cheers again to Jay Taylor for organising this event at such short notice.
Continues in part two...