London gig stories

Yo Dudes,

We played a concert in London last weekend and I thought it’d be nice to tell you the story of our weekend of adventure in the crazy world of the indie music scene in London.

We took the Eurostar to go there, an expensive but very convenient form of transport because the bar is within walking distance of the pub, The Cross Kings. The venue looked excellent – nice stage, nice sound system, perfectly sized room. It was an all day concert with about 6 or 7 bands scheduled to play and we were headlining the event.

We ate a pure cholesterol breakfast in a greasy spoon café and then soundchecked. With us, was our friend Frank, the drummer from King of Conspiracy, who was playing guitar for us for just that one night. (He learnt all our songs in two hours flat and he fucking rocked!) We then went to do a little tourism. We visited Hampstead Heath up in the north of London. We drank beer (old speckled hen) and spoke about crazy stuff whilst people flew kites above our heads. We had an awesome view of London. We then rushed back to the venue to hang out with our friend JB from the fabulous group, Underground Railroad. Underground Railroad are a French band that do really well in England and are signed to One Little Indian Records.

London bands are a mixed lot really representing the best and worst mankind has to offer. We met some really nice people which we hope to meet again. Parking Offence were a great bunch and a pretty weird avant-funk band. Dinjindi from Zimbabwe were lovely people and had a really cute sound going on. Way better than those fake Vampire Weekend guys.

Our favourite band was Oh No It’s POK from Italy. They were just the best Devo influenced techno speed punk nutballs ever. They just fucking rocked the place and had the biggest crowd of the night. We love them and want to play with them in their home town, Turin, Italy.

The other bands really were the most detestable scum. They turned up 5 minutes before their set, didn’t talk to anybody, threw their stuff on stage, played derivative shit for 45 minutes, didn’t acknowledge the audience’s existence, piled of stage, refused to lend any equipment then fucked off home. Awful waste of space. They made the night almost feel like a production line. They wore slim jeans and represented pretty much everything there is to hate about British music. Elitist, generic, cold-hearted bullshit.

We played last, and I’ve got to say that I’m pretty proud of our band. It was a tough crowd (cold, passive, blasé) but with a combination perseverance and stagecraft we gradually cracked them and we had people dancing and shouting bizarre things in French by about the 6th or 7th song. We really showed ourselves that the years of concerts in stinking piss-stained dives have paid off and we can really hold our own and start riots in even the most difficult concerts. Frank did great adding some “heys!” in some great places I hadn’t thought of before. Not sure if we made any anarchists that night but we certainly converted some fans. We played, Chomsky Changed My Life as an encore. Frank had never played the song before but caught on damn quick. Some German punks danced and went mental and are going to invite us to play in Germany. Yes! Berlin, here we come!

The owner of the bar thanked us and said she had grown cynical about music, watching 6 indie bands a night, and she said that we were the best band she had seen for ages and that we could have free drinks. (Free drinks in London is a big deal and really rare!) The only problem was that the barman didn’t believe Frank was 18, demanded ID and then he couldn’t understand the French passport!

Of course, London is still London. The promoters, Semi-conductor Archives (remember their names kids!), ran off with all the money without saying anything to anyone and left us to clean up the mess and pack up their drumkit. Thanks guys! I was mildly surprised because they seemed like nice guys. The owner of the pub seemed to think that they had just forgotten because they were “very nice guys”. London really is the ultimate test for a band, I’m super proud that we proved to ourselves that we could hold our own on foreign territory but be careful kids, it’s wild out there!

The Italians, Oh No It’s POK, were pretty annoyed as they had had a pretty big crowd… at 5 pounds a head, this is no joke! Ah well, JB from Underground Railroad, surely has many stories of dodgy London promoters so we shouldn’t grumble too much. He looked after us and took us home on the crazy London night bus. Thanks JB! You Rule!

We also met up with Ian from our record label, Damaged Goods, to receive some test pressings of our new vinyl EP. How cool is that?! He was really cool and we chatted about bands for a bit. I cannot overstate the importance of this man’s record labels all through my adolescence. It’s great meeting your heroes. I highly recommend it! We also narrowly missed meeting the legendary indie radio god, Steve Lamacq, but Ian gave him our record so I suppose that’ll have to do for now! Hope he likes it…

The next day, Clem Phlegm, Marion “Pam” Underground Railroad and I went to visit the legendary Bricklane market. Fashion kids selling strange clothes and stuff on blankets in the street. I bought an Elastica vinyl for 3 quid and Clem bought some 5 quid plimsoles. It was cool to see all these ultracool Shoreditch fashion and media types walking around in the flesh. I felt like I was in an episode of Nathan Barely or even The Mighty Boosh. (Maybe it was lack of sleep!)

Playing London is something I’ve always wanted to do. We won’t make a habit of it (I think Germany is where we’re heading next) but I’m glad we did it. I think we’ve proved an important point to ourselves.

Thanks to Underground Railroad for putting us up and thanks to King of Conspiracy for lending us their mental drummer to fill in on guitar for us.