Brainlove Festival – Brixton Windmill, 24/05/08

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Gay Against You

This Saturday I travelled down to distant London to attend the second annual Brainlove all-dayer at the Brixton Windmill, a sort of almost-birthday party for John Brainlove, head of the very good Brainlove Records (Keyboard Choir, Friends Of The Bride, Napoleon IIIrd, Pagan Wanderer Lu) and a former member of experimental types Junkplanet (and Tracy Is Hot & The Clap!) as well as a writer for (amongst other publications) THIS VERY SAME WEBSITE- The Line Of Best Fit (conflict of interest duly awaits). At six a.m. I wake up. By just past 7:30 I am sitting, accidentally a bit too early, in Manchester Piccadilly train station, waiting for my friend Steve Jam On Bread (set to play the acoustic stage) so that we can catch the 8:17 train to Sheffield (and then onwards to London from there, West Coast mainline having been maddeningly closed). Steve’s bus gets delayed, so 8:17 becomes 8:33. Steve has left his debit card back at his flat- 8:33 becomes “catch the 8:44 train to Chesterfield, change to Derby, from Derby go to London, get the underground to meet my girlfriend in Waterloo, I’ll see you there.” A short call from his equally confused girlfriend later and a text arrives on my phone giving me the option of waiting for the 9:20 train to Sheffield which he can get on at Stockport and meet me there. Largely ignorant of London and its ways, I decide to exercise this option.

So that’s the first part of my Brainlove all-dayer experience, sat in Manchester Piccadilly train station reading The Economist and listening to Distophia on my mp3 player, blinkingly shaking off the organisational hassle around me. This, I suppose, is what you get for choosing to attend an all-dayer in London when you live in Manchester. That said the bands are good. Cats In Paris, Keyboard Choir, Gay Against You, Jam On Bread, Pagan Wanderer Lu, Team Brick, Napoleon IIIrd… all acts I would pay to go and see individually if they were in the same geographic vicinity as me, and so I guess if they’re all clustered together then despite the distance… well. By this point I’m writing from the perspective of a man who has spent a truly ridiculous amount on train fares over the past two days so in a fiduciary sense it was not worth it at all but in theory, this line-up is gold, particularly the main stage but also round the back near the barbecue where they have the acoustic one (also where dear old Steve Jam On Bread is scheduled to be playing).

By the time we get there (me, Steve, and Steve’s girlfriend who since she didn’t perform or anything I won’t impose on her privacy by naming), La Couteau Jaune are meant to have started but no one is there (numbers will pick up dramatically later on), so they get booted back until later in the evening (just before headliners Gay Against You). As it turns out, I do not get to see them. In addition to this, Keyboard Choir have cancelled. I am apparently bound never to get to see them, ever. No matter where I travel to. Damn universe. The Brixton Windmill is, for the uninitiated, a small venue which seems to be some sort of converted house (?)- well, it has a yard anyway, where there is (as has previously been sort of mentioned) a barbecue (maybe, on balance, a church hall), and is so named because it is near a park in Brixton which has, bizarrely (as if it has been planted there by an alien race, pretty much) an actual, real-life windmill. A lovely day, we go and sit on the grass outside it for a while, before heading back inside to get some drinks and sit on the floor to catch The Bobby McGees, who are possibly the most ridiculously twee thing ever to hit our darling planet. They have two ukuleles- yeah. One of theirs broke, or something, so they borrow Jam On Bread’s with the fresh new Times New Viking sticker on it. Their male singer is pretty much what you would draw if you had to draw a Scottish CND campaigner circa 1985. Their girl singer is pretty much what you would draw if you had to draw a cute indie girl circa 1991. At one point, they even throw sweets into the audience. The Bobby McGees, in essence, either totally rule or totally suck depending on what your perspective on the twee ideology is. Hence, I think they totally rule. Well done, The Bobby McGees!

Napoleon III’rd

End up speaking to said male singer outside for a bit afterwards, mostly about Indietracks which they am playing (hey everyone! Lets buy tickets to Indietracks! I actually do in fact totally want to get tickets to Indietracks, it sounds pretty amazing)- very nice man- before seeing Dead Singer play inside, whose trombone-led metal initially impresses greatly because you’re all like: “OH WOW TROMBONE-LED METAL!” only then you realize: “yeah, that’s pretty much what this is all the way through… trombone-led metal…” so um… yeah they were pretty cool though.

Team Brick has already been milling around the venue for most of the day, instantly recognisable in all his squat, scruffy, Geoff Barrows-collaborating glory. Later on we go get Chinese food with him and he ends up talking to a dog (which actually I think the owner later says is some sort of rare African breed and which Team Brick was quite fascinated by) outside in the same strange (made-up?) language (sounds like Latin or Sumerian or something) that he sings in, a sort of raw, ancient, operatic bellow. A venue and an environment like this is maybe not the 100% best place for Team Brick’s undeniably powerful experimental music but he puts on a very good set here. So many ‘noise’ musicians are really just very bland (no matter how abrasive they might be trying to be), but Team Brick (noisy, not really a noise musician) is schizophrenic, playful, and legitimately unsettling. Like the sort of nightmare you want to tell people about excitedly afterwards.

The last time I saw Team Brick I just went home afterwards and wanted to cry and cry. This time I end up chatting with him for a bit outside before going back in to watch Applicants, the first properly Brainlove Records band on. Earlier in the day I’d been trying to wrangle a free copy of the somewhat exclusively-new (but available on the merch stand) Applicants album in exchange for how since I’d already paid for a ticket Mr John Brainlove wasn’t giving me guestlist for reviewing this (apparently Rich Thane demanded he buy me a drink though! haha- well according to Brainlove’s girlfriend but either way I never chased him up on that…)- an album I do not, in the end, receive, but oh well. In many ways, Applicants are less a band than a sort of collective mad glint in a big musical eye. Usually they are frivolously entertaining (though somewhat opinion-splitting), but here, well… maybe its just that I’m stuck at the back and can’t quite make out Jeffrey bobbing around in her nurse’s outfit, maybe its just I’m not 100% sure her mic was turned on (Sara Cats In Paris later complaining about problems with the exact same mic and managing to get them fixed), but on Saturday they were pretty much the Applicants equivalent of flat coke. A shame.

Lets forget all about all things sadly lukewarm though and concentrate on the one big, massive, overwhelming positive of the event (that I saw, sorry Gay Against You if you were really really amazing and all?)- Cats In Paris, Manchester’s current very-finest and truly, intensely brilliant advisors for this fair (adopted) city of mine. Pulled up in a car outside either just before or somewhere infringing on the start of Applicants’ set (with their label boss Charlie having been wandering around the venue in his usual enthusiastic manner for the most the day already before then) to a running hug to their drummer from Christopher Alcxxk (ex-Junkplanet, etc), they then proceed to deliver what is actually possibly the best set I have ever seen them do (maybe they just get better and better every time?)- their new songs and slightly re-jigged version of ‘Foxes’ not the work of mere humans, but of cartoon-like music gods. As it turns out I fail to see Gay Against You, so this set turns out to be the (unanticipated) one time I actually break a sweat all day (I would have TOTES to Lachlan and Joe though), but dancing about at the front in my (oh-so-trendy) HEALTH t-shirt and even managing to avoid getting hit when light fittings plummet from the sky right near my head… yeah. All the sweat-breaking I need.

After this the actual act of actually managing to see bands begins to desert me. Jam On Bread’s girlfriend feels sick, and we head outside only to discover a bonanza of extremely comfortable couches in a dark and previously unopened shed-like room by the side of the venue. The downside of this? I somehow manage to miss both Winston Echo (I keep on going to gigs where Winston Echo is playing and missing him completely unintentionally recently- shame too because Winston Echo is actually really good, but no idea how he did here of course), and Keyboard Choir replacements Real Feal. (who, again, having checked them out a bit since then, I am quite curious to have seen, if only because of their extreme newness) The upside though? Comfortable couches and an indoor non-acoustic stage gig from Jam On Bread- yes a personal friend of mine but also perhaps the single finest one-man ukulele-based acoustic indie-pop singer-songwriter working in Britain today. Its stuff like this where he refuses to play at the proper ‘acoustic stage’ (really just a chair and a microphone, but anyway) and do a gig inside round some couches as people gather in the doorway to listen instead that makes him that little bit more magical than most other musicians of his ilk. Plus, ‘I Wish I Was A Manatee’ is a modern classic anyway, so…

Applicants

Next up on the acoustic stage (following Tim Ten Yen on the main who I was mostly at the back for, but he was good anyway) is Niall Spooner Harvey, this time actually at the proper acoustic stage, headlining this secondary part of the festival with a series of poems. As we settle down to watch him I catch sight of a shovel and make mock hitting-him-over-the-head gestures towards Jam On Bread, which causes Chris Alcxxk to ask if I am high on drugs. This seems an appropriate enough way to set the tone for Spooner Harvey, a slightly dishevelled and nervous-looking man in an obnoxiously un-ironed shirt whose stage presence is nevertheless one of (if not the) best of the all-dayer. It takes a lot to be able to bellow even the most amusing poetry (this is not deeply moving, evocative verse here) at audiences solo but either way Spooner Harvey has it. Admittedly the humour and observations are all just a bit typical liberal-left middle-class England perspective type stuff but even with the odd clunky line (“so I joined the BNP…”) Spooner Harvey is still raucously funny whether he’s relating anecdotes about seeing a man masturbate in an internet café or screaming “I’m more important than you- all my conservatories have won awards!” till he’s red in the face. Its just a shame there isn’t more of an obvious market for this sort of thing.

If Gay Against You are the act I most regret missing, then Pagan Wanderer Lu is the act I most regret not seeing all of. He has a band now, you know, though I’ve never seen him with his band, and today he was only performing acoustically, with part of it, turning his bouncily maximalist headache-pop songs into pretty little things with violin and such. Worked quite well, particularly for ‘The Gentleman’s Game’ at the start. He’s got a proper album all readied up now too. I’m looking forward to it. Sadly, the nature of an all-day music event is that at some point you might get hungry or tired, and as such we duck out to find a takeaway, where we get Chinese food (as has already been mentioned earlier) with Team Brick.

Walking back I am left with a big bag of prawn crackers that I simply cannot work my way through which I deposit with Cats In Paris outside before heading in to see Napoleon IIIrd, performing with his band, the last band as it turns out I will see all day. Midway through I crash into a sudden and urgent need for sleep, as soon as possible, at all costs, and find myself agreeing to go back to Portsmouth with Jam On Bread and his girlfriend just to make use of their spare bed (a decision that ends up costing me somewhere in the region of £75 on train fares). Is Napoleon IIIrd perhaps better off *without* his band? There’s something so… pub rock about his oi-oi ridiculously pink skinhead bassist and Animal-haired drummer. Something a bit pub rock about the renditions of his songs here too, even if the new ones are actually really really good. Hell, its easy to be fussy about something like this though, and old Napoleon does play through a perfectly entertaining set which I just wish I could have enjoyed more without all the tiredness and such. But I guess that’s a problem specific to me though. At the end he even gets celebrity guest Christopher Alcxxk up to play a bit of trombone on set closer ‘Hit Schmooze For Me’. Aceness.

John Brainlove- you put on a top all-dayer. Well done. And happy birthday!

Thanks to Alice Kelly for the photographs.