The Phantom Band – The Railway Inn, Winchester 24/02/09

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For a city with as much character, and uncharted nooks and niches as Winchester, there is an odd lack of live music venues. There is the Tower Arts Center on the road out of town, which, despite having some good bands on, is as stiff and pompous as it sounds; and other than that I’m pushed to think of anywhere else at all. Other than, of course, The Railway Inn – a quietly desolate place bunged out the back of town by the station – a square tower with a shed of a music room tacked on the back: an Andersen shelter, a bunker. In the bar area, two TVs rotate ads of forthcoming shows: Gary Numan peering at his feet, cadaverous; Neville Staple, once of The Specials, looking like a man trying to enjoy himself. Despite the venue being mere metres away, the loudest thing is the strangled beeping of the quiz machine. Around which, hunched and bearded, The Phantom Band gather like refugees…

At some indefinable moment I think I should wander down to see the support. I open one of the interconnecting red doors and step into a strip-lit corridor off of which the toilets lurk. From here I can hear a sub-Jam mess – The Jam without the wire, the poise. I hear the singer break off from a song saying, “sorry, I’ve only played half of that for some reason. If you buy the album later in the year you’ll be able to hear the whole thing. I hope you don’t feel short changed.” Christ. I turn back and leave it for later.

Around 10 o’clock, and after an extended toilet break, the band finally makes it on stage. In the flesh they are slight and wiry. Rick Anthony, the singer, has a backwoodsman look – taut, hirsute. As the weird keyboard scrapes that herald ‘Burial Sounds’ begin, Anthony is bashing together two blocks of wood whilst Duncan, the guitarist to his right, is playing some esoteric percussive tool. There is an odd mix of camaraderie and quiet menace.

‘Throwing Bones’ follows and is driven on by the insistent thrum of the bass line as the band take off, the three guitars entwining like meshed flex. The doo-wop section that closes the track is revelatory – the groove built on Andrew T. Oxford’s impossible baritone. This gives way to ‘Folk Song Oblivion’, which is fast becoming their signature song, if only for the magnitude of the chorus.

But it’s on ‘Crocodile’ where everything comes together. The most explicitly Can-like track from Checkmate Savage, the track is all rhythm, a filthy thing. During this track the band sound in their element. This isn’t the graceful ancient water lizard of the title though; this is the crocodile on land – a primeval, lumpen thing full of stocky intensity. Anthony moves from playing what looks like two aluminium shelf brackets to a guiro, a wooden block, grooved and chucked, eventually picking up a keyboard with a mouth attachment that makes it look like a homemade bong – a wheezing miniature toy chest sounding like an emphysematic lung.

‘Island’ is a quietly beautiful interlude. Greg Yale picking out deft lines on his banjo, Anthony channelling Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy…I wondered in my review of Checkmate Savage if this was a band who might split apart, but on stage they’re so tight and together this is rendered meaningless. By ‘Halfhound’ they’re murderously good – Anthony back on his shelf brackets, looking for all the world as if he’s beating someone to death below the stage apron. Then with a rush of blood they’re gone, back, back to the withered bosom of Glasgow and the next push for domination.

As a post script to this, I bought a vinyl copy of the album after the gig. Chatting to the bassist, over the hum and damp delirium of the venue, I picked out this story, which I’m already thinking has the sheen of the apocryphal. No matter. He, or possibly a friend, in their youth were naturally regularly driven about by both parents. His mother, allegedly used to play the boy The Beautiful South, his father, clearly a more brutish discerning chap, used to play Captain Beefheart, at volume. This, I thought on reflection, probably explains a good deal…

The Phantom Band on MySpace