Labels: Gringo
Review by: Captain Fidanza
On Sunday 1st April 2007, I saw The Fall play the last ever show at The Hammersmith Palais. To this day it remains the most raucous public gathering I have ever witnessed and I include in that, the evening last summer when I walked back from Wood Green in the midst of a full scale riot.
The evening was memorable for so many reasons which are too long winded to relate here, but whenever I convene with the people with whom I was in attendance that night, the conversational starting point is frequently the same.
The second of the two support acts was a band called Nought and for the first ninety seconds of their set, everyone thought they were brilliant. Admittedly, they all had shiny, Top Man shirts on and £200 asymmetrical haircuts, but those boys could play. And play they did. And play. And play. And play. And play. And play. And play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play and play.
Indeed, they played for so long that legendary comedian Ted Chippington appeared as if from nowhere, like the shopkeeper in Mr. Benn and politely asked them if they wouldn’t mind stopping. When this didn’t work, a man in a suit appeared and started to turn all their amps off in the vague hope of relaying the message that the time for them to leave the stage had now arrived. When the members of Nought skilfully managed to turn their amps back on whilst still playing, minor scuffles started to break out on stage between the two guitarists and some high-visibility jacket wearing members of security. By this point, certain members of the audience were so angry they were jumping up and down and shaking their fists like Dennis the Menace’s dad does when his son’s dog steals the sausages from his dinner plate.
To be fair to Nought, I didn’t think they quite deserved the kind of abuse they received that night, but unfortunately I was too busy experiencing that unique strain of naked terror one gets when in the company of drunken, ageing punks to voice my opinions. I’m sure Nought probably just chalked everything up to experience and wrote a strongly worded letter to their booking agent in which they emphasised the necessity of solid market research prior to the arrangement of any further live performances.
Instead of playing the last night of the Hammersmith Palais, Nought should be playing the first night of that new Harvester which is opening down the road from you tonight. There’s a good crowd in there apparently. There’s probably a few teenagers hanging about in there holding half pints of Fosters, drinking down their first pub experience as though it were ambrosia falling from Olympus; they don’t really give a shit about the music being played, they’re just happy to be socialising with the grown-ups, having a few cold ones and watching some cool dudes rocking out.
The parents of the members of Nought are in there too. The mums are all sitting on a table together sharing a bottle of white wine and pretending to be interested whilst three of the dads are standing quite close to the stage and nodding their heads arrhythmically whilst wearing denim. The coolest of the dads is wearing a t-shirt which says “Iron Maiden” on it. The fourth dad is standing at the bar ordering four pints of mild for himself and the other dads and after looking at the barmaid’s arse for a bit is ordering himself a measure of Jack Daniels which he’s just about to down in one in a vague attempt at impressing her. It won’t work though, she’s been seeing Danny Kett since late last year and anyway he’s probably old enough to be her grandfather.
There are a few local music lovers in there tonight too, the kind of people who are keen to support the scene whatever form it takes. They’ll probably go home later and write a review of the Nought show on their blog. Maybe tomorrow morning, one of the members of Nought will hesitantly perform a Google search which will lead him to the review of the Harvester show and he’ll be quite disheartened by some snide comments made by someone who’s never had the courage to get up onto a stage and perform to people. The member of Nought will pause for a moment as his entire body friezes and he contemplates whether the last ten years of his life have been a complete waste of time and maybe might have been better spent trying a little harder to achieve that promotion which has always eluded him. He probably won’t forward the review to any of the other band members as there’ll be a small part of him which is genuinely worried that if any of them read it, they might start talking about leaving the band and before he knows what’s happening, the one thing into which he has poured his truest efforts and his most honest emotions will be finished.
Being a member of Nought is like living your whole life in a hot air balloon. When the weather’s fine and the propane tanks are full, you can soar above the earth and regard creation as something infinitely manageable. Who cares if the adulation only lasts ninety seconds, for that minute and a half you’re living higher than anyone has ever lived before.
But when it’s raining, when the propane has all been burned off and you’re just sitting in a basket in the middle of a field in Hampshire in late February, you experience the kind of lows with which only people who work the Boxing Day shift in Ladbrokes can empathise with.
Souvaris remind me a little bit of Nought.