Evening

Alphabet Backwards have been making a few waves of late, with radio airplay from the likes of Steve Lamaq and Tom Robinson, and tonight’s solo show from frontman James is therefore confident and engaging. The five-piece band is one half singer-songwriter acoustic perkiness and one half boffinish synth pop, and seems to be going down a treat on the local scene and beyond. As a songwriter he can overdo the kitsch: lines about loving someone enough to give them your last Rolo and suggesting to people that throwing ice cubes into the sea in order to save polar bears are just too cheesy for my taste- best stick to the melodies, which are thoroughly pleasant.

I’ve tried to compose a paragraph on The Gullivers without using the word ‘angular’, but it just starts getting daft: ‘trigonometric’ or ‘dodecahedral’ just doesn’t cut the mud. As a good musical conservative, my definition of angular is playing all the wrong chords and so making a very strange noise, which is mostly what The Gullivers do. To leaven the difficulty, they’ve added an uber-foxy keyboard player to their standard bass-drums-guitar combination, and she provides both nervous piano and confident lead vocals, rather in the style of Regine Butler. The rest of the group are a study in easy awkwardness. Male vocalist Mark has an alarming counter-tenor yelp, which a friend compared to the guy from The Semifinalists, though I don’t see it myself. There are no big tunes or memorable songs but they are comfortable in their own skins and provide weird but occasionally beautiful dark indie moments. Record review to follow in a week or two.

There’s nothing dark or difficult about Sketchbeat. With songs entitled ‘Soup of the Day’ and ‘Eddie the Eagle’ we’re not expecting a lot of existential angst and indeed we get a superb party band in the line of Madness, The Electric Six or The Darkness. It’s a two guitars, bass and drums set up, but augmented by fabulous trumpet playing from one of the guitarists. When he is blowing up a storm, the music begins to sound like Cake minus the studied world-weariness. Throw in Dennis the Menace guitar straps, singing drummers and extremely stupid hair and you have half an hour of cultured silliness, perfect for a dreich December evening.

I made friends with a troop of Johnny-come-lately music lovers who had made the usual assumptions about festivals running late. Unfortunately, due to the earlier Night Portraits hissy-fit everything was running like a Swiss railway. So the newbies, who had come for Sketchbeat, were confronted with the frankly bizarre spectacle that is Mephisto Grande. The expressions of horror, contempt, rage and perplexity on their faces was almost as interesting as what was going on onstage, which was indeed baffling.

Okay, so have a feller dressed entirely in gold, playing what looked like tenor sax and clarinet speed-jazz solos simultaneously. We have Liam Ings-Reeves freaking everyone out with his demonic, guttural vocals (he makes Tom Waits sound like Neil Tennant). We have some deeply esoteric sub-phylum of death metal grinding away in the background. Oh and a cover of ‘Will the Circle be Unbroken?’, the ancient gospel song made famous by The Staple Singers. As Moss from ‘The IT Crowd’ might say, ‘What the Flip’? Personally speaking, I was enjoying it as provocative performance art, but every time I smiled at some new absurdity, my new friends looked like they wanted to stick one on me, so I held my peace.

They stuck around for The Black Hats, a much less terrifying proposition. Nick Breakspear’s tribute act to nineties Britrock is low on originality but makes for solid festival entertainment and is thoroughly well done. Highlights include the two piece part-singing between Breakspear and drummer Mark Franklin (the harmonies are as fat and satisfying as a Waitrose organic goose) and the urgent, hit-the-streets rhetoric of excellent tunes such as ‘Daybreak’. They didn’t play ‘Don’t Make a Sound’ which is my favourite of theirs, and without it the set seemed a little one-paced, but they nevertheless brought the opening day of the festival to a pleasing end. And saved my new buddies from immediate referral to the Warneford.