Monday, 16 May 2011

Dead Meadow: Going Like The Clappers

Having missed a Dead Meadow gig last month (sidetracked by The Scot/a public house/booze), this month's appearance by Washington D.C.'s finest was attended by me and the fragrant Lou W. Thanks go to Howard and Lucy Local for bringing the sexy/heavy back to Islington. Crammed into a heaving Buffalo bar, we were only mildly annoyed when an unfeasibly tall arsehole and his very loud and annoying American girlfriend shoved their way in front of Miss W and I, only to proceed to turn into a wall of snogging and sweet-nothing-whispers. Lou asked "are you planning to snog throughout the entire gig?" and I reacted like this:

Take that, sir

DM played a blinding set - closed my eyes and drifted off on a sea of heavy psych (was rather disappointed to see that Stephen McCarty is no longer on skins - a truly amazing drummer with the finest facial hair a man can sport got married and a little bird tells me he's been obliged to do some proper settling down...). At one point, I think I re-enacted how Steve on bass gets when he's pissed on stage (he wears specs and can't see very well without them) by jigging up and down to the amusement of Lou W. All very funny until I banged my shin on a bar stool creating a bruise and egg-shaped bump on my leg of mammoth proportion. That'll teach me to tit around. Ouch.

Bit of hanging about after brought some nice Irish Whisky (ta, Howard) and a chat with Steve-Bass, discussing spectacles (naturally) and The League Of Gentlemen, of which he's a huge fan. He even managed to get in the Crème Brûlée "it's a shit business" quote, which made me love him more than ever. Apparently, I told him it is confirmed that DM make the best make-out music on the planet, voted by parties on two hemispheres. At some point, I may have used the phrase "going like the clappers" but I'm not sure if this translates well across the Atlantic.

(Postscript: last Thursday was one of the freakiest gigs I've ever attended. The Lexington on Pentonville Road hosted the album launch of Koolaid Electric Company's first ever release. Bernie, Scooter Steve and I witnessed Circulus (70s medieval oddboddery - head honcho Michael Tyack is moving to Glastonbury to set up a mind-bending church - are you getting this? Scooter Steve said he expected to see an 18" tiny Stonehenge descend from the rafters at any minute) and We Are Animal (perfectly ordinary bunch of lads doing loud things with their instruments - the only sane part of the night). Next, completely unannounced, two youngsters, who looked like they should be hanging around outside newsagents persuading adults to buy them 10 Benson & Hedges, picked up the mics and started doing something which I believe to be MCing. Shit MCing. I thought it was a joke. I believe the mot du jour for this is 'random'. After a brief interlude of peace from that racket, KEC took the stage and played their blissed-out, shoegazey psych for a bit, which was all well and good. Bizarrely, they then invited the yoof back up on stage to do fast-rap-MC-shite over the top of their swirlings. Stunned silence followed and I'm not entirely sure how I got home. I think I got a piggy-back from a dwarf straddling a unicorn, because I felt like I must certainly be off my tits on acid and had a sneaky suspicion David Lynch was filming me from the shadows.)