Saturday night was the launch night for Volume 1 of the Gypsy Hotel on cd and is only right and proper the house band of the club Urban Voodoo Machine are headlining the show as a warm up for their forthcoming UK Tour to promote the new album due out in a few weeks time.
The CD looks cool, containing songs from some of the bands that the club has put on including UVM, Jim Jones Revue, Deptford Beach Babes, The Fabulous Penetrators etc and I look forward to hearing it.
Nigel Burch and the Flea Pit Orchestra were on first and I started to smile when I realised that I was finally seeing Nigel onstage instead of either busking on the underground or in the crowd at Kevin Coyne gigs, heckling the now sadly-late Kevin and getting namechecked in the replies as he is the legendary Nigel in Napoli who was dreaming of philatelly Latterly on Kevin's album Legless in Manilla many years ago!
His 'orchestra' for this show featured just one other musician and I'd like to hear them play a proper gig to give them the chance they deserve because the venues acoustics were such and the audience were such that I could hardly hear the band for all the idiots talking over them which proved to be a problem all night long.
From what I could hear Nigel has a good line in bittersweet songs about love and drinking that at times recalled the slower end of the Levellers career. But as I said, I want to give Nigel a proper chance and to heckle him properly too.
Next was the act that suffered most from the crowd noise, the comedian Anil Desai. He realised he was corpsing before his act really started when he tried and failed to get the crowd's attention at the start of his act. Whatever he did, the noise from the crowd drowned out most of it, the fact that what we heard wasn't that good or his impressions didn't sound that accurate didn't matter. Even if he had been a true comedy god he would have suffered with this crowd.
Next on were tonight's headliners Urban Voodoo Machine who at times swamped the audience noise with enough noise of their own, but in the quiet parts all you could hear was chitter chatter drowning out the music! Frying pan to the fire. The band's opening theme song sounded great and really tight for the start of the touring year, and as ever they are all in Black and red and starting out as a 9 piece. They then did a great version of Getting Hot Going Down that was just the right side of Rembetika meets Klezmer with a good trumpet solo from Lloyd and as ever J Ronnie Moe doing some great voodoo drumming and performing.
|
We then got treated to a preview of several songs from the new album that sound like typical UVM tunes with lots of disparate styles being pulled together and a couple allowed Slim to switch from accordian to piano where he was trying to bring back the spirit of Sunnyland Slim circa House Rent Blues. The new songs certainly sounded good even if the audience chatter drowned out any chances of subtelty that might have been going on.
Plenty More Room from the new comp sounded really good as did the Down by the river and an instrumental where they were joined by Lady Ane Angel. She did some fine Fire Breathing stuff and DJ Scratchy joined on guitar. When they finished a reasonably short set, a large part of the crowd just kept on chatting and had to be cajoled into clapping the headliners and hosts of the evening. They finally came back out and finished off with The Orphans Lament a great stonking tune that went down well with those of us listening.
After another break on came Dames On The Moon for their first ever live show. They are 6 girls done up like Pierrot dolls who between them played 4 Ukeleles/Kazoos, a double bass, a tuba and various maracas etc and attempted against the noise to play some quiet old time Blues with nice dancing and a stage covered in cotton wool half moons and assorted props. The highlight of the set was a great version of Don't You Feel My Leg: the old Blu Lu Barker tune that was every bit as suggestive as it ought to be. Now to get to see them again somewhere that the audience are paying attention to them would be very nice indeed.
Because of the noise problems we left before anyone else came on as I was frustrated at not hearing the music properly. Still I only have to wait till Norwegian independance day to see The Urban Voodoo Machine at Dingwalls. Now that's a proper music venue.
|
