Phoning it in

Dispatches from the back of the venue

Genre: R&B

  • Still House Plants

    Still House Plants

    This month the band are the cover stars of The Wire magazine – that extraordinarily resilient and outré music publication which, at the time of writing is still readily available in WHSmiths – if you go past the overpriced confectionery, magazines are now relegated to the back of the shop – there I see Still House Plants on a shelf, in a Railway Station branch of WHSmiths – looking very cool but strangely out of time and very much of it.

    Cut to the White Hotel, in darkest Salford – I guess the closest the North West gets to a venue like London’s Cafe Oto – where in between decadent all-nighters that start at midnight, they do put on lots of artists such as you might read about in The Wire at more sociable hours. There are 3 musicians gathering on the stage and as they start to play I’m immediately struck by telepathic interplay between them. This is very much a group. One brilliantly innovative, minimalist guitarist (cut from the same cloth as Wire’s Bruce Gilbert, John McGeoch or David Pajo perhaps), a fantastic freewheeling drummer who has a very stripped-down kit -(Robert Wyatt or Wire’s Robert Gotobed springs to mind -yeah that good) -and a singer who spends the set hunched over a mic stand facing the band but has this remarkable, husky soulful voice that rises up from nowhere and adds an unexpected emotional heft that absolutely lifts this music into somewhere stratospheric.  

    The songs aren’t conventionally structured and they veer between danceable beats and sounding like the drums are falling down stairs but it never gets tedious or overly chin-stroking – this is deeply experimental music you can dance to, or just stand back and take it all in.

    It’s an exhilarating, and hugely energising experience watching them lock in and out of each other doing their thing. It turns out I haven’t seen it all before, there is still music out that there can surprise and delight that is completely otherworldly.  I pick up a beautifully packaged CD, make my feelings known to the disarmingly charming musicians at the merch stand and walk back into the darkness of Salford. Still House Plants moved me. Let them move you.

  • High Llamas

    High Llamas

    1 July 1995 I was in London for the weekend with some pals and, with no definite plans for the Saturday evening, we looked in Time Out magazine that day and saw that Mercury Rev were playing the Astoria – so that was the entertainment sorted for the evening – (pre internet, we just rang the venue and booked tickets…imagine that)

    I was absolutely blown away by the headliners who were plugging the under-rated ‘See You On the Other Side’ to a modest crowd (a few years before they headed for the Catskills and made their canonical ‘Deserters Songs’) but what really stuck with me was the support band High Llamas – they played what I now know is a mix of 50s and 60s Exotica, Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, Steely Dan and experimental European electronica. It was a really formative gig for me, and particularly their habit of hitting on a beautiful chord progression and repeating it on an endless, dreamy loop. I was hooked, and there is such a thing as a High Llamas completist because, dear reader, I am one. If you’ve not ventured beyond their earlier works you’re missing out. Try their latter-period masterpiece ‘Beet, Maize and Corn’ for instance:

    So it’s a delight to be back in Hebden Bridge at one of the best gig venues on the planet to see a very rare appearance from the High Llamas and they blew me away all over again. Sean is joined by his daughter on backing vocals, longtime Llama Marcus Holdaway and a brilliant rhythm section. We get a bunch of songs from extraordinary new album which reflects Sean’s fascination with contemporary Pop/Hip Hop and R&B (he was sampled by Tyler y’know!)

    …which somehow works perfectly with the older material of which we get an unexpectedly generous serving. Sean doubles up on acoustic guitar and vocals and occasionally firing off samples from his Roland 404 (yesss!) which adds those unexpected contemporary pop moments into the songs. He really is steeped in the contemporary Pop landscape in a way that puts me (and probably most of us gathered here) to shame but listen to him here on the Rocks Back Pages podcast talking with infectious enthusiasm about this new inspiration

    As a massive fan I’d have struggled to predict the very varied setlist seemingly picked from a tombola of the wonderful records they’ve quietly slipped out over the past 20 years but it worked brilliantly. There is a reverence and hush but a lot of appreciation from the crowd even if a lot of the material may be unfamiliar to many (who may be expecting cuts from ‘Hawaii’ – which is perhaps their ‘Deserters Songs’) – and there’s the unmistakable sense that something special is happening tonight. While a lot of the songs were really carefully rehearsed (there are a lot of chord changes and unusual time signatures involved here so you can’t just wing it) they very kindly played a request – the song Steely Dan could have written ‘Checking In Checking Out’ which they hadn’t rehearsed and I don’t recall them playing since 1995, the bass player didn’t know it (and nobody could remember the middle eight) but bless ’em they played it anyway. So this isn’t a night of nostalgia – playing all the old tunes, but what it does do is make me feel as inspired and delighted as I was 20 years ago – better than nostalgia.