Over on the freelance blog, you can find gig reviews of Tinchy Stryder (from Friday night), and Fuck Buttons/Zun Zun Egui (from last night).
Enjoyable as it was, Tinchy Stryder’s gig was marred by one of those awful DJs (assuming that any actual DJ-ing took place on stage, which I rather doubt) who think that cutting out the sound on each and every hook line constitutes a smart move. (And I do mean every hook line, on all three of the hits.) As those of us of a certain age will remember only too well, mobile DJs used to do this with Jeff Beck’s “Hi Ho Silver Lining” in the Seventies. It was annoying then, and it’s annoying now.
As for last night’s gig, I was tickled by an overheard comment from one of the many earnest young men in the audience, just after support act Zun Zun Egui had finished their set. “They transcend leftfield boundaries!” Oh darling, I wouldn’t go quite that far. While during the shall-we-say “challenging” main set from Fuck Buttons, I spent significant amounts of time trying to dispel the memory of an old Biff cartoon from the early 1980s, where two similarly earnest men in long overcoats talked of “juddering, wired monoliths of sound”. (In the end, I opted for the non-actionable “thick, monolithic, slow-moving slabs of sound”. Well, it was awfully late.)
My next gig’s a payer: the fantastic Ungdomskulen at the Royal in Derby on Thursday night (last seen blowing the Young Knives off stage at the Rescue Rooms), in the company of Sarah, SwissToni and our Very Special Guest… GORDON!
troubled diva 