Live Review

CCTips #4 – The Bull And Gate, London

• 3rd Feb 2011

And the countdown to the Camden Crawl has arrived with the eagerly awaited tips shows. Hundreds of bands descend on a tiny, hipster nook in North London waiting to please a crowd of Red Stripe wielding trendies. The tips shows are intended to showcase those bands you wouldn’t know about unless you were either in the band, related or friends with them, or haphazardly stumbled upon them by typing in incongruous terms into the search engine. The Bull and Gate provided the setting, a nice big pub near Kentish Town station with a sneaky gig venue through a side door and a pretty well poured pint of Guinness.

The first band one where Lighthouses, a band from Kidderminster who specialise in laptop wielding synthy indie. They lacked a real stage presence from the start, with lead vocals sang towards the front of a glaring Apple Mac. The vocals themselves were tame, lacked any real excitement and novelty, and tended not really provide any escape from the barely full, sedentary room. The dance-synth seemed to be a bit misjudged, over complicated and unintelligible. With a set seemingly driven by the same songs repeated again and again a vocal refrain in one of the songs explained all: This is going nowhere.

Bring forth the semi-crazed musical stylings of Mat Motte! A distinct change from the Converse gazing Lighthouses, a somewhat incomprehensible lead singer arrived on stage dressed in a suit with a jumper tucked under his shirt holding a briefcase. An encore of the Cyndi Lauper anthem ‘Investment Bankers Just Want To Have Fun’ didn’t happen, but a vocally confident, yet merciless acoustic attack on Talking Head’s ‘Psychokiller’ left a bitter taste in the mouth. Their set was full of good quality drumming, a decent bassist and even a voice with a great vocal range, but the songs seemed similarly samey and average. A mix of pumped in vinyl scratching and samples often was the beginning of the song, and with a lack of a guitarist, this had to be brought in on cassette as well. Occasional rapping followed, which toed a difficult line between being pure parody and sheer misguidedness. The style of the songs sticks in the mind, with the lead booming technically impressive but lacklustre tunes, with a funky-hip-hop bass. The single, ‘Business is War’, offered a measly analysis of the global arms traders and their connection to private capital, but was at least memorable and got the crowd on their feet.

Anoraak, a French indie-dance contingent seemed to have a bit of a following, but the reasoning seems to evade me. The songs were barely there, and you got the feeling you were forgetting the song as it was being tiresomely played to you. It was Lighthouses with a better production and knowledge of what they were doing, but still one with generic Ibiza 1996 dance interludes and the overwhelming feeling that the audience were collectively clock watching. ‘Nightdrive With You’, their biggest single, felt unimaginative and poor imitation of bands who can do this sort of stuff better.

My friend and I got the vague feeling that all was lost and an early visit to Club 65 (an affectionate term for getting a 6 for 5 on beers from the offy on the way back) felt fast approaching. But wait! The final band on an evening that was the perfect exposition of Einstein’s theory of the relativity of time was finished with Dave E Sugar who were really quite good. The lead singer had stage presence and a dash of charisma, something missing from the evening so far. The songs felt inspired by the Mystery Jets’ 21 album, and had the old foot tapping. ‘Party Killer’ was a song with a good nice rhythmic bass and a bit of a eighties inspired overlay, and felt like something ideal to use football-chant like at a lights up on a Friday evening. Synth did abound, but did so in a less serious manner than the rest of the bands, the frontman singing through an old fashioned novelty phone over the top of the music with a good deal of indie irony.

Tips: I’d go and see Dave E Sugar again, but crawling away from the rest would be my advice for the rest.