The Spider Hill

My gigs of the year 2011

Well, everyone else is doing it, so here’s my tiny contribution to the internet’s vast tomes of end-of-2011 lists. Looking back over my gig calendar and my music collection, it looks like 2011 is a year in which I’ve been to far fewer gigs than previously, but have bought more records than before – thus the albums of the year was a tricky list to do, but the gigs list is kinda straightforward. Here’s what I enjoyed seeing most this year. 

10. PJ Harvey, Troxy, London 27 January

The Troxy is a lovely old venue right in the middle of an absolutely horrible bit of London. The main thing I remember from this is the sense of expectation, a real buzz round the room after all the amazing reviews for the record, to see what it was like live. Not a disappointment – a really captivating, intimate performance that came across so much better than all the subsequent festival (and telly) shows I saw later in the year.

9. Truck Festival, Steventon, July

Got to have Truck in there, especially since it’s most likely going to be the last one. We played on the Friday night, but to me the highlight was seeing that that BBC Introducing stage, consisting only of local bands, was far and away the best bit of the festival. Every one of the bands I saw sounded great and raised their game to suit the surroundings. I missed the Saturday for a wedding, but on Sunday the atmosphere, weather and surroundings were more than enough to make up for the fact that I saw no decent bands for the entire day. But Truck is/was essential to Oxford’s music, and I don’t know what the summer will be like without it next year. 

8. Mogwai, The Regal, Oxford, 23 January

I’ve seen Mogwai quite a lot of times, and have alternately been blown away by them (see Brixton Academy circa 2002) and left feeling a bit ‘meh’ (as on their last Oxford visit, which didn’t really grab me). But the new record seems to have given them a real kick, and sounded really strong. And they’re the only band I’ve heard sound good in the echoey wasteland of the Regal, simply by virtue of being SO LOUD. 

7. Supernormal, Braziers Park, Oxfordshire, 19-21 August

Here’s what I wrote about it in Nightshift – in retrospect, I had a brilliant time on the Sunday at the festival (though the Saturday was dismal due to pissing rain and toss music) and would happily go back and play it again. 

‘Asking myself how I feel about Supernormal is a strange experience. On the one hand, I absolutely love the idea of it - Braziers Park taken over by musical and artistic curators, loads of obscure bands and everything from a singalong Wicker Man and a programme of experimental films to Bowie karaoke and a 36-hour improv performance clanking away with a nine-year-old on drums next to the hot dog stand. At times, it’s so pretentious it somehow manages to come full circle and become utterly straightforward.

In practice, though, the musical highlights are disappointingly few and far between: far more common are sets of haphazard nonsense shouting from people dressed as clowns or vampires (take a bow, Lonesome Cowboys and Mr Solo) or look-at-me bouts of improv which could just as easily come under the heading of ‘couldn’t be bothered to practice’.

Thankfully it’s not all dressing up and random shouting. Skullflower drill a hole in the head with their psychedelic drone noise; SJ Esau wobbles around a set of unpredictable hip hop, folk and electronica; Gum Takes Tooth are a squadron of brutal kosmische Panzers; the mighty Bong stretch two chords out into a monolithic set of Sunn0)))-mimicry. The discovery of the weekend, Fuzzy Lights, stitch together Dirty Three, Papa M and Broken Records into something rather lovely of their own.

But concerns about the consistency of music over the course of its three long days mean that this is nearly an amazing festival. The fact that it exists, run by the time and enthusiasm of artists and bands giving their time for free to create something appreciably different, is in itself to be applauded. A higher quality of music across the weekend, and a few more people knowing about this supernormal enclave tucked away in the woods and we could have a genuine treasure of a festival on our doorstep.’

6. Primavera Sound, Barcelona, May

Primavera’s always special – it’s in Barcelona, the lineup’s amazing, the sun’s out, and in your non-festival downtime you can go to the Parc Guell, stuff your face in the Boqueria or go to the beach. YES PLEASE. This year was extra special due to one day having the BEST LINEUP EVER – Einstuerzende Neubauten, PJ Harvey, DJ Shadow, Mogwai, Animal Collective and loads of other stuff. 

5. Karma To Burn, Audioscope11, Jericho, Oxford 12 November

I’d been wanting to see KTB for about 15 years, and somehow we managed to convince them to fly over here to play at Audioscope for expenses to play for Shelter. Sure, there were problems – various extra expenses and annoying things cropping up on the day, and this just meant I spent more time muttering ‘they’d better bloody well be good now’. As it turns out, they were excellent. An hour of solid-gold hardcore RIFFING and ridiculous wide-legged rock poses. The guitarist was reportedly seen disappearing afterwards into the night with a couple of Oxford’s young ladies. 

4. Seefeel, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham, 22 March

My car broke down on the way to this show. The brakes packed in, so we slid into Birmingham, phoned the breakdown people and arranged a late pickup, then went to the show and took advantage of now being able to drink. And Seefeel were so good I completely forgot my mechanical misfortunes. The new record translated perfectly live, all warm, swelling loops, spare drumming and dubby bass – really inspiring to listen to and also to try to work out how the hell they were doing everything. Yes, I am a geeky loser. 

3. Oxford Contemporary Music Open, Pegasus Theatre, Oxford 10 June

A gig in a theatre! With a bunch of Oxfordshire musicians ranging from a gobby hip hop crew to a bunch of sandal-wearing acoustic hippies! And even better, we got to play at the Pegasus, which was frankly amazing, and the best gig Listing Ships did all year. The sound was perfect, there was DRY ICE, a full audience and our only ever encore. And to cap it off, a stand-up comedian/poet acting as compere, who was supposed to talk over the entire changeover between every act. Since we’ve got three synths, a sampler and dozens of effects, this meant he had to stand and chat for about twenty minutes while we set up, reading out his own rubbish poetry about the Smiths while I plugged in pedals by his feet, all while swathed in over-eager sprays of dry ice. It was like setting up for a show in a cross between Platoon and the South Bank Show. 

2. The Antlers, Paradise Rock Club, Boston, 18 June

I’d never heard The Antlers before, so this was something of a punt, and on the night of our arrival in Boston after an early flight. So by the time they came on stage, we’d been awake for about 24 hours and I was practically hallucinating. But they were captivating from start to finish – they manage to write songs that are emotionally involving but also musically fascinating, from structure to their vast array of envy-inducing flashing boxes. And closing with an eight-minute crescendo of ‘Putting The Dog To Sleep’ sealed the deal. I came home with two albums and a T-shirt. 

1. Ethometric Museum, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford 9 April

This takes the number one spot because I’ve never seen anything like it before, and it was just extraordinary. Here’s what I wrote at the time: 

‘You could argue that a live demonstration of noise-making equipment in a museum scarcely constitutes live music, and therefore falls outside the remit of this publication. Yet this is a performance so extraordinary that it helps us remember and celebrate the diversity of musical experience on offer here, uniting Oxford’s scholarly and cultural sides in a beautiful suspension of disbelief.

The Ethometric Museum falls into the hitherto-unexplored space between live music, the stage and exhibition space – a one-man sound-art vaudeville masquerading as a scientific demonstration. Right down to the curator’s warning of potential radiation leaks and proud descriptions of the collection’s vaunted, and entirely fictional, centrepieces, this is pure theatre.

We’re led into a room full of glass cabinets, filled with arcane devices labelled with specious names like ‘Hypnocillatron Mk. I’, all spinning tentacles, wood panelling, whirring discs and ornamental lights. They’re the kind of devices you couldn’t keep your hands off for a minute even if there was a hundred quid in it for you.

Ray Lee, as the sole boffinish performer, leads us like the Pied Piper of his own sound world, striding from one device to the next surrounded by craning onlookers, allowing himself a gratified half-smile as each makes its ascribed click or buzz. Within thirty minutes, we’re alone in a dark museum, while swishing hums envelop us, red spinning LEDs the only light source. At its heart it’s little more than thirty minutes of warm-sounding analogue drones (more than enough for some of us as it is), but packaged with such attention to detail and showmanship that it becomes something much greater.

One of the highlights of the 2011 calendar – both in terms of exhibitions and of gigs – this feels like a true original that could only really work right here. A load of droning boxes really have never sounded so good.’

Posted on: 23rd December 2011 - 5 notesReblog