Wednesday 30 September 2009

Some folks like water, some folks like wine, I like the sound of The Incredible Staggers and The Vinyl Stitches


Tucked away somewhere off Kingsland Road is a pub called The Stag's Head. It's an authentic East End boozer smattered with the usual trappings of hipsterfication including an eighties jukebox, taxidermy stags and a threadbare barf design carpet. There's also a very small stage which last night played host to The Incredible Staggers and The Vinyl Stitches.

It was the Vinyl Stitches who lured me to the gig because I have a penchant for all things retrospective and I love their authentic sixties style. The lead singer, John-Claws, is a young Pete Townshend who has perfected the scream of Gerry Roslie from The Sonics. On bass there's Vinn-Sinister who has taken an Addams Family slant on The Monkees and on drums, the awesome Sam Bam, a lady drummer with a blonde beehive and enough eyeliner to put Dusty to shame.

One thing The Vinyl Stitches have succeeded in doing is perfecting the art of emulation. They've copied the masters and they've done a brilliant job of it but it would be great to hear them evolve their own sound. Throughout their set I kept getting the niggling feeling that I’d heard their songs somewhere before even though they were playing their own material. They started with a surf number which was a perfect homage to Link Wray. Later, the lead singer sang the line 'you're the best girl I've ever had' and it bugged the hell out of me until I realised it was a line lifted straight out of Psychotic Reaction. There were riffs lifted from Brand New Cadillac, Jean Genie and All Day and All of The Night to name but a few. It's hard to sound unique when you're also trying to recreate a sound that's been around for over forty years but I think that The Vinyl Stitches could be the toast of the garage scene if they managed to put their own stamp on garage rock sound that they're so good at recreating. They look great and they sure can play their instruments but they need to inject a healthy dose of originality in order to take their band to the next level. Having said that they put on a rocking show and are well worth the price of a gig ticket.



It is possible to stay true to the garage sound while putting your own stamp on things, as was deftly demonstrated by headline act The Staggers. The Staggers started their show playing from behind a worn out velvet curtain and from the minute they started playing it was obvious that the tiny stage The Stag's Head was not going to big enough to contain them. The curtains opened to reveal a small Austrian frontman with thick black rimmed glasses who strode confidently into the crowd shaking his tush like Lux Interior's schnitzel eating cousin. Initially I thought the Austrian thing was just a brilliant gimmick but I soon realised that they were the real deal. They played a blistering garage and surf set complete with dancing from a voluptuous Canadian go-go girl. The evening culminated in a brilliant cover of Screaming Lord Sutch's Jack The Ripper and some amp climbing and more tush shaking from frontman Wild Evel.

Check out The Vinyl Stitches here:

http://www.myspace.com/thevinylstitches


Check out The Incredible Staggers here:

http://www.myspace.com/staggers


Check out the original Jack The Ripper here:



And The Sonics who inspired The Vinyl Stitches here:

Tuesday 29 September 2009

Good Golly Mr Bolly! - King Khan and The Shrines at Cargo


King Khan and The Shrines is what would happen if you stuck Captain Beefheart, James Brown and Little Richard in blender with a shaman, a seventies Bollywood heartthrob and a splash of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. King Khan strides on stage wearing a cream flared suit, a native American headdress and a shark tooth necklace. Judging by his rip-roaring performance he has also summoned the voodoo gods of funk, soul, garage, punk and kitsch.

King Khan is blessed with boundless energy and the rare ability to whip a crowd into a frenzy. The music is a heady mixture of all the best stuff with a splash of Khan's own personal panache. He's backed by the mighty Shrines, an 11-piece band including a blinding horns section, a drummer who has played with Curtis Mayfield, Ike and Tina and Stevie Wonder and a French maverick on the organ who has been known to climb on top of his instrument and teeter precariously above the crowd.

The set list includes a 'psychedelic erotic gospel' song about swimming inside a vagina, a rousing homage to transsexuals entitled I Want to be a Girl and as an encore, a belting cover of Suicide's Ghostrider.






Last night King Khan and the Shrines made Cargo shake with sheer magnitude of their performance. It's a unique and unmissiable show (albeit one not recommended for those easily offended or people of a nervous disposition). All hail King Khan and the Shrines!

You're The Only Ten I See - Slightly more than ten songs mentioning Tennessee





















































Tuesday 22 September 2009

Raw Power




The Stooges have announced that they will be performing Raw Power at The Hammersmith Apollo in May. I don't need an excuse to wax lyrical about the album but this does seem like the perfect opportunity. Virtually ignored on its release in 1973, Raw Power's perfect encapsulation of anger, disillusion and self-destruction went on to become the template for a generation of punk albums to come.

Never has an album been more aptly titled than Raw Power. Iggy's searing vocals combined with James Williamson's lead guitar, Ron Asheton's distorted bass riffs and Scott Asheton's drums make for one of the most explosive albums of all time. Raw Power begins with the track Search and Destroy and from the very first line 'I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm' Iggy and the boys begin to drop aural bombs.



The second track on the album is Gimme Danger and true to their word, The Stooges deliver danger by the bucket load. Themes of sexual involvement are laced with self-destruction in Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell, Penetration and I Need Somebody where Iggy explains, 'I'm losing a lot of my feelings and I'm running out of friends'

In Shake Appeal Iggy hollers 'baby with your fists so tight...realize you gotta fight' and in the eponymous Raw Power he delivers the line 'Everybody's always tryin' to tell me what to do... Don't you try to tell me what to do' which is a simple defiant precursor to all punk.

Exploring themes of passion and violence, this is the kind of music that strikes terror into the heart of repressed middle class suburbanites. This is Iggy, at the height of his heroin addiction, sublimating his volatile state in order to create a powerful, exciting and provocative new sound.

Like all things avant-garde it took the rest of the world a while to catch on and that's why thirty-six years on this album still sounds so original. I for one can't wait to see them at The Hammersith Apollo in May.

http://www.wegottickets.com/event/59937




Iggy in his own words:

Friday 18 September 2009

Eagerly Awaiting the New Yeasayer Album

I remember a time when all I wanted to listen to was thrashy guitars and shouty vocals. Harmonies were for wimps and The Beach Boys were for Mini Babybel adverts but somewhere along the line something changed. Maybe I mellowed, maybe I got bored, maybe I jumped on the bandwagon but suddenly I found myself rediscovering my love for a good vocal performance.

There is an array of top notch harmonizers out there at the moment; Fleet Foxes, Panda Bear and Dirty Projectors to name but a few, but the band that's really getting my knickers in a twist at the moment is Yeasayer. Yeasayer audaciously describe their music as 'Middle Eastern-psych-snap-gospel'. Surprisingly this ostentatious labelling pretty much hits the mark. Mixing synths, cymbals and tribal drums with flawless vocal arrangements Yeasayer's music is some of the most uplifting and life affirming music that I've heard in a very long time. The first album All Hour Cymbals was released over a year ago and the new album is due out within the next few months. They recently contributed the epic 'Tightrope' to the Dark Was the Night compilation. If the rest of their new material is up to this standard then the new album is bound to be a mindblower.

Check out Tightrope here:



Sunrise:



And listen to their Daytrotter Studio session here:
http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com/dt/yeasayer-concert/20030157-110837.html

Tuesday 15 September 2009

William Elliott Whitmore

I had the pleasure of seeing William Elliott Whitmore perform twice this week. Once at The End of the Road festival and once at The Relentless Garage in London. Both times he blew the audience away with his remarkable voice, his stripped down blues guitar and banjo and his Iowa farm boy charm. Like Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Mississippi John Hurt before him, Whitmore makes the best kind of blues. The powerful, simple and heartfelt kind. It's rare and exciting to find this brand of authentic folk blues music being made today.

Whitmore, who began his career supporting hardcore punk bands, is a contemporary blues voice for our times. He has the demeanour of a man who thinks and feels deeply and he obviously has the gift of being able to distil these feelings into his music. With his tattooed arms and his anti-establishment lyrics he creates a bridge between traditional blues folk and modern punk and alternative music culture.

For those of you who missed it check out his Daytrotter Studio recording here: http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com/arr/william-elliott-whitmore/110354.html

and his mighty Jools Holland appearance here: