Aaaah Friday. Just the word itself is enough to cause a flutter in the hearts of anyone working the spiritual tranquilizer of a 9-5 pattern, so just for two days the sudden panic when you awaken thinking you’ve overslept for work can be gleefully ignored and, if you want to, you can drink in the blazing afternoon Sun without fear of disciplinary from a dick-faced little jobsworth shit or imminent redundancy from a job you despise yet on which completely rely. This also happens to be a three day weekend due to those lovely, cheeky rapscallions at the bank having some kind of holiday. Cleethorpes? Pickton-on-Sea? Rhyl? Who knows where they go! But if it results in an extra day off I will personally pay for every single donkey ride and stick of rock in the belated hope of making them bloody well stay there.

With Thursday’s other Sound City events missed due to my own band’s gigging commitments I am eager to crawl back into the clammy folds of a town erect and proud with a bubbling plethora of live music and see what’s what on this, the Best Of All Days. It’s definitely become more difficult to gauge where Sound City ends and the usual Friday night throbbing of workforce weekend debauchery begins; wristbands seem more numerous than on that rainy Wednesday but they are lost in the swathes of garish, thirsty colour brought in with the Friday binge drinking battalions.



I head into town with the simple and determined plan to simply watch bands and avoid all potential weirdoes. The Zanzibar seemed as good a place as any to begin; a medium-sized venue small enough to see young up-and-coming whips and also more established acts playing intimate shows for their fans. Noel Gallagher’s played here, apparently, as have the usual Merseyside suspects The Coral and The Zutons. Zanzibar is found on Seel Street which is also home to The Barfly, Heebie Jeebies and The Metropolitan and also within hocking up distance of Korova, all of which are hosting bands tonight so it’s looking good, and I hum a jaunty tune in my head (The Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert is always a good choice) as I make my way there.

 There is a reassuring murmur of voices spilling outside from the door of The Zanzibar and once inside, eyes adjusted to the soft jazz-club darkness, Kate Rogers and her band of merry men, and one equally merry woman, are just tuning up. Bar busy, but not full. Crowd chatty, but not lively. Kate Rogers nice, but not at all exciting. Mainly playing tracks from her Beauregard album with a few old ‘uns thrown in, after half an hour or so of her not entirely unpleasant but wistfully dull Corr-alike ending-of-an-episode-of-Scrubs acoustic pluckerry my eyelids feel slightly heavier than they should at eight in the evening.



You see, Korova, the place in Liverpool to go if your hair is asymmetrical, for some reason had a sign up indicating they’d cancelled their early gigs and so in the confusion instead of watching Pulled Apart By Horses in Priapic ecstasy in there I was in The Zanzibar wondering who would be to blame if my sleeping nose and mouth fell into my drink and I happened to drown. I certainly wouldn’t be to blame, that much was certain, and it seems unfair to blame Mr Guinness for producing an unbreathable beverage so I decide to blame Korova as Kate Rogers is undoubtedly very good at what she does - her gentle melodies waft their way around the Zanzibar like a lovely indigo mist, aided by her more than capable band who stroke out rich harmonies and intricate piano lines - but I am looking for excitement and something to fill the bucket I brought along to catch the remains of my melted face. Tonight I’m not after life-affirming yarns of heartbreak and whimsy, though complaining about the lack of adrenaline squirted into your blood at an acoustic singer/songwriter’s gig is a bit like moving next door to a farm and moaning because cow shit stinks, I suppose.

Now somewhere in a glass-plated office soaring high above the tarmac where you and I scurry around on our proletariat business sit fat men in pin-stripe suits. These men suck on expensive cigars rolled individually by slender virgins, each individually lit by a slender virgin, and earn their not inconsiderable spondooleys in the organization of musical events such as this very one. So why in all that is fetid, Hassellhoff and Holy can’t they have scheduled the bands so that it is possible to see one, then dash out to catch another in a different venue without having to miss over half the set? I’m sure they know the answer to this, and I really hope it’s nothing as cynical as venues thinking of the most irritating way of keeping punters putting money across their own bars, but do to this pragmatic idiocy I had no hope of making it to the university to see Patrick Wolf bend genders yet still had three quarters of an hour before Enter Shikari took to the stage in the Barfly. Fucking suits. They haven’t got a clue.

 

Or so I thought.



In this inter-gig purgatory, this Wolf-less no man’s land, I drifted dejectedly into the downstairs bar in the Barfly to make doubly sure none of Shikari’s set was missed. I couldn’t see the stage to begin with but could make out a small audience, only around 30 or so, all going completely pogo fucking mental. What is this? What’s going on here? Suddenly a tambourine flies over my left shoulder, followed quickly by an arm, which is in turn swiftly followed by a swirling ball of mentalist Japanese fury. Twatting his tambourine with a stick this Dennis Taylor-bespectacled fruitloop ducks and weaves his way to rejoin his band back on stage at which point he and the drummer swap places, then off he goes, using walls, tables, glasses, anything he can find as a percussive instrument. The keyboardist pulls out a flute, a fucking no-fooling flute, and makes it seem as if jazz-flute stylings (aqualung!) are what’s always been missing from the day-glo recesses of dance-rock, making me angry at Klaxons for never having used one. The guitarist hammers away like Johnny Greenwood allowing the singer to dink-donk samba rhythms away on cowbells, leaping like a horny lamb in ways pie man Ricky Wilson only dreams about on those nights requiring a tactical change of sheets, all without the music ever suffering; it sounds raw, obviously, but never less than well played and it draws you in like a moth to a magma-hot neon bulb.



In Japan it seems utter, complete, unadulterated and unapologetic lunacy is the order of the day and even though I only manage to catch the last four songs it is all absolutely fucking brilliant, ending with a bone-splintering and completely preposterous rendition of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. And then, just like that, Riddim Saunter are gone. I still see them sometimes when I blink, like when you stare at a bright light for too long then look away.

In trying to ascertain if anyone else was as equally awed by what we’d just seen there was a worrying encounter with a shirtless, tattooed, raving skinhead on speed who was, in every sense, ripped. Able to spot a twisted liability waiting to happen, Ted Chest, Bones the drummer and I felt it best to be civil to this docile giant as you don’t have to be Freud to deduce that someone with a nervous twitch in only one eye is just as likely to start flipping tables as he is to inform you precisely why he loves you . He was jovially but apprehensively tolerated by all in attendance though; mildly annoying but easily and necessarily overlookable. The same unfortunately cannot be said of a couple of students with balls bigger than their brains who mistook Grant Mitchell for Billy Mitchell and tried to make a figure of fun out of this beast. Our man, in a trance chucking out collateral shapes on his own in the middle of the dancefloor, is heckled. “Mate! Mate! Come and sit down here!” One of the students is patting the space on the bench between him and his sniggering, soon-to-be-ex, friend.

The man stops.

He lowers his beer, revealing pectorals like Teletubby hills, and pins the student to his chair with what can only be described as the Brown Note of all stares. “Do you know me?”  - Think Clint Eastwood if he played Sinbad in Brookside, doing the ‘why am I funny’ bit from Goodfellas - “I SAID, do you know ME?!” He’s loud now, and people are listening.

A pin drops. The students can do nothing but try to look away.

“No…..you DON’T, do yer! So never – EVER! - call me mate…..OKAY!” Then…silence.

I was puzzled as to why such a minor non-altercation had become such a focal point for the entire venue as the crowd, previously ignoring this man with deliberate and profound intensity, was now transfixed. The tension was viscous and palpable despite very little actually having happened. Thankfully an atmosphere-dousing din reluctantly descended, though The Stare continued for a further five minutes or so before his eye could twitch no more, the target of said stare was a smoldering husk, and a shape simply had to be hurled double-poste-haste. Later on I asked someone what all the fuss was about. “He’s ex-SAS, a total fucking nutjob, after what happened last week everyone here just leaves him well alone”. Never underestimate a bit of local knowledge in any venue, I suppose. I’m unsure whether history will prove the fact we drunkenly gave this man a big hug before he left to be a good or bad idea in the long run, should he ever be re-encountered.

With Enter Shikari however, you tend to know exactly what you’re letting yourself in for. Set your ears to stun chaps, they’re about to bleed! The crowd is bathed in ominous blue light, ambient effects build to a crescendo and the hardcore in the moshpit chant for the band and erupt as they wander to the stage.



A hectic set complete with dashes through the audience, climbing off PA stacks, much manic crowd surfing, de-tuned turbo riffage, throat-shredding screams along with a pleasant introduction to bassist Chris Batten’s mum, rockets past in around an hour during which the band plays their well known tracks like Take to The Skies favourites 'Hectic' and, errm, 'Enter Shikari', plus several tracks from upcoming album Common Dreads. Rob Rolfe’s thunderous drumming provides a rumbling, tectonic backbone to a band that sound absolutely huge and Rou Reynolds’ occasional forays to the keys add a welcome twinge of electronica. Those expecting a dramatic evolution of sound between records are best lowering a few expectations but the newer songs go down a storm with the acolytes and by the end of the gig, covered in beer, a couple of bruises and some questionable bodily fluids, everyone is completely prawn crackered. Job done, Enter Shikari.

 The band take to the decks for the aftershow party, and all eventually becomes a bit messy. Tomorrow is the last day of Sound City and it seems like everyone here knows it as they are making the most out of this opportunity to have a wee rave, if ‘rave’ is still used as a verb in the fashionable lexicons of the stylistically aware. So with relevant farewells bidded we wander off to grab a chicken madras, which turned out in hindsight to be an unbelievably bad idea, and some hours kippage before tomorrow’s gigs. No doubt we’ll all feel rougher than a sniper’s elbow anyway but, fuck it. It’s a long weekend innit?

Posted In Latest news, Jun 04 2009. Words - Luke