In live music terms, July in the UK is the silly season. Music goes outdoors, festival bills and outdoor enormogigs hoover up a lot of the touring bands and fans cash and there tends to be less going on in basements and back rooms for those who prefer their music up close and personal. Bucking the trend tonight are 471 who have been putting on experimental and innovative events on Merseyside for some time now and have something very interesting for us tonight; daGoogie and Cara Tivey. The former is best known as Debbie Googe the formidable bassist thundering away behind My Bloody Valentine (as well as Primal Scream, Thurston Moore and more) and the latter for her work with Billy Bragg, Au Pairs, Everything but the Girl and as live keyboard player with Blur. ‘The Golden Thread’ is their LP collaboration – a curious and wonderfully hard to categorise mix of of guitar fx drones, classical piano, slightly warped folk and psychedelic themes (think Syd Barrett rather than yer Oh Sees “modern psych”).

Tonight takes place in a subterranean venue that I thought was new to me but upon entering looks very familiar…

Liverpool’s legendary Magnet bar and venue closed down some years ago, but happily the basement venue underneath has been reopened as Quarry, a community grass roots venue. Very fine it is too with a nice, welcoming bar area leading to the gig space – much as it was but with an upgraded sound system and as with the old space, different levels to stand on so everyone can see. Crucially with the temperature in the 30s it also has air con. Perfect

Debbie has swapped bass for a regular guitar but what she plays is far from regular – using an e-bow or scraping the strings – and occasionally conjuring deep, tremulous drones – the night starts affably enough with Deb introducing the show and apologising for not knowing any good jokes – before striking up an ominous throbbing drone and straight into the weirdly twisted ‘Bad Habit’ – opening track from the album. They mean business now. As the set progresses Cara adds vocals and gentle but pointed piano flourishes. It’s intense and hypnotic stuff and the venue has filled up behind me as people make good use of the space and stand on the platforms and balconies and there’s a sense of everyone being engaged – no chatterboxes – which is good as this requires close attention – switching between delicacy, harmony and dissonance, and swelling ominous clouds. I don’t think anyone was expecting a dreamy evening of shoegazey escapism – instead we get two brilliant musicians with an extraordinary history taking us on a bit of journey into stranger possibilities – under the pavement while the rest of Liverpool is getting sozzled in the balmy night.

The set ends with ‘November New’ – with a striking synth line and echoey guitars, piano lead and a non-more gothic chord part – utterly majestic and ringing in my ears as I traverse Liverpool, pausing to salute Brian Epstein’s statue, through Matthew Street thundering to a different beat (several covers bands and someone – quite brilliantly and timely – belting out the recently passed Bonnie Tyler ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’) – in a music city driven by tourism and stag/hen nights hats off to 471 for making sure all that can coexist with stranger things.