Saturday, April 22, 2017

Spaceheads, Rucksack Cinema and Howie Last Night

I'm so glad I peeled my lazy butt off the sofa last night. I was going to stay in and be disappointed by the TV schedule again, but instead I went to a forested area in deepest Lambeth to Club Integral, and enjoyed an evening of music and visuals that was unexpectedly invigorating.
I left with my head buzzing with inspiration, feeling that I'd been let in on a great secret.
Howie Reeve plays an acoustic bass and sings. There is no band, apart from a plastic pig-player whose pigs sounded more like frogs:they said ribbit, not oink (I know pigs don't say oink but they definitely don't ribbit).
Bass and vocal is a great combo- Gail Ann Dorsey does it, but Howie couldn't have been more different. He sings wry lyrics, setting his life to music and alternately thrashing and plucking the bass, sounding sometimes medieval and at others, plain evil or rather, dark, as he would prefer. The songs were evocative of urban life, trees struggling to breathe in traffic fumes, litter, living above all the noise and confusion. I thought about the Spanish guitar videos that I've been making and felt that I needed to up my game.
Spaceheads were altogether different. The former pig-player, Richard Harrison, morphed into an ace drummer who skidded and skedaddled across the kit, blending timbale sounds with maracas and all sorts of other drummer stuff. Andy Diagram built textures, spiky, creamy, sometimes howling into the trumpet microphone, bending the sounds with electronics and playing with sounds of space and claustrophobia, all the time accompanied by the shifting images of Jaime Rory Lucy's projections. Such beautiful colours, and very Russian, very Metropolis and very 2017 at the same time.
I will see this again and it will be completely different next time, but just as enjoyable.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

"I will see this again and it will be completely different next time, but just as enjoyable."

As I've seen Spaceheads quite a lot over the last few years I can guarantee you'll never get the same gig twice.
Glad you enjoyed the experience...