Well this was my first visit to the not exactly easy to find Whirled Cinema Club, being situated as it is in a railway arch up an alley in Hardess Street: a street so small my map book doesn't actually show it, just tells you where it is approximately. So this venue is unlikely to be getting much in the way of walk up trade, just those of us who have either been invited or seen a flier and decided to search the place out.
Still, the effort is well worth putting in as it is a great railway arch space, only instead of standard cinema seats they have comfy vinyl covered settees and a well-stocked bar. Result.
I got in and decided to sit in the front row and get out my notebook ready to review and watch what's on offer at Viola Nights at the Whirled Cinema club. Before the bands came on they were showing some rather sad Swedish (or maybe Danish) film with no sound or subtitles. The plot followed a young boy who is sent to stay in the country living above a glass blowing factory while his mother is ill at home. He does a lot of boxing with only one glove against another kid who turns out to be a girl but looks and acts like a boy. While the woman he is staying with starts to help a local artist out as a life model. Something about it was very sad and I'd like to know what the film was so I can see it with subtitles and find out what was actually going on..
The first act on was WOODPECKER WOOLIAMS who turned out to be Gemma from Totnes in Devon, wearing a low cut green dress and a red flowery apron withBBrown shoes to begin with. She sat down to play her harpsichord and after apologising for the fact that she had a rotten hangover and might puke up over herself during the show she began to pluck away and sing in a little girl lost kind of far away voice somewhere between Bjork and Stina Nordenstam. Only what starts out seeming to be a love song about Red Kites flying overhead takes a dark dark turn when she suddenly sings of still loving him after he smashes her in the face for the first time and suddenly we are in the middle of an unfolding psychodrama.
She then turns on a walkman that makes hissing and static type noises and kicks off one shoe while badly applying black make-up to represent a moustache and beard, while donning a white shirt and hat and then while playing her harpsichord again along wth keyboards with one of her toes!! while singing the reply to the first song (only now the bloke is singing about how his love is gone for good) and the set is developing into a reworking of Kevin Coyne & Dagmar Krause's Babble only played solo. It's really interesting and very affecting.
She then switches to keyboards played the normal way and an effects thingy that looks like it's made of bakelite and from the 70's. From there, sje applies some more make-up to sing about a little sparrow and more of the despair of the abusive relationship.
Following on from that, she changes cassettes on the walkman and gives us some tones on the keyboard while singing of waking. It is odd and intriguing, but we have little time to take it in before she returns to the harpsichord to sing about talking to herself on an empty street. Actually, you can imagine people crossing the road to avoid this now rather disturbing looking woman talking to herself.
Then, as this is an Xmas show she finishes her set with a version of Last Christmas played on a sort of knuckleduster of the bells you get on a tambourine and the effects thing. It is a great reworking of an awful tune and she gets everyone to sing along while joking to us. It's a great close to a very unusual and I have to say brilliant act. I want to see Woodpecker Wooliams again just to see what she can come up with. She would also have been the perfect act to be signed to Recommended records or to be on the bill at a LMC (London Musicians Collective) show. Her album Diving Down can be found at www.autumnfermentrecords.com.
Next on is BIRDENGINE who is one annoying bloke with an incredibly mawkish voice and a habit of maundering his way through his set. Some of his lyrics do stand out such as telling us he will spend his days cutting the heads off of dogs and then stitching them back on again, but his vocals grate and while I really liked the tone of his guitar playing he needed another vocalist to take the burden off of him. Having a song that seemed to be called I'm With Stupid Always didn't help much either but then he did say the last time he played in London someone told him afterwards that he sounded like an unicorn being sick, which is fairly accurate as far as I'm concerned.
But then at least I was still awake! As a few of the audience had found the sofas too comfy and had actually fallen asleep!! Maybe they were dreaming of Ghost clubbing while he was singing about it? Either way the longer he went on the more torturous it got although I could see him working with Her Name Is Calla or someone similar who could slowly build a wall of noise around his schtick.
After the break its time for DAMON & NAOMI who are over for a short tour of this one lone date in London and a week in Italy with Richard Young where Damon will also play drums for Richard. For this show, however, it is just the duo who are promoting the new album False Beats and True Hearts (www.20-20-20.com) and the book Afterimage by Damon with pictures by Naomi (www.uglyducklingpresse.org).
They open with How Do I Say Goodbye off of the new album and in their world that's a perfect opening song! It does sound great though even if I'm not sure if Damon has enough volume on his vocals although they do sound pretty much as you'd expect them to sound even if Damon is playing an acoustic Taylor guitar and Naomi is using a Nord keyboard.
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As they normally do, they have a very easy between song rapport with less psychoanalysis than last time I saw them at the Luminaire a couple of years back. When Within These Walls came out, Damon had spent the afternoon in the Freud Museum before that gig! A Kind of Love That's New To You is a very Damon and Naomi type of sentiment and sounded beautiful and almost sepia toned. When singing of a Second Life I had images of their other lives in Magic Hour or Galaxie 500 or writing books and putting on Photo exhibitons while I'm sure they were singing about something else entirely.
Ueno Station is about that station in Tokyo and the homeless men that inhabit it's environs. It evokes images of the despair of the Northerners drawn towards the magnet of the big city and the despair that sets in while trying to make those dreams a reality and the very real failure that comes while living in the station. Nettles And Ivy, byt contrast, is a quite pretty song off the new album that has Naomi doing most of the vocals.
Helsinki did a good job of conjuring up the almost deserted city feel that central Helsinki seemed to have when I went there and you could be right in the centre of town but still see no one around. As they sang of a light shining down I was thinking of the light shining down from the cocktail bar at the top of the Hotel Torni towards Kalevankatu. As a light had been Shining down I ought to have known we would be going down The Well soon enough and the Keyboard washes almost sounding like splashes of water in the well.
They took us all the way back to a time when writing a song called Turn Of the Century was the right thing to do and that old hit still sounds great. They then gave us a real treat by playing Alex Chilton's Take Care. That was the duo's attempt at playing a Christmssy type song but as they are a Jewish/Buddhist something else mutt types (Naomi was saying they were Mutts?) they don't really do Xmas. Anyway it was a really nice version of a song they had never performed live before and of course apart from asking us all to Take Care the lyrics aren't all that christmassy!! It was a perfect finish to a nice but far too short set.
They came back for an apparently unplanned encore and at Naomi's suggestion (it was written on a post it note on the keyboards) they played Lilac Land. It was really nice and subtle close to a very cool show in a really nice new venue which I hope can persuade enough people to make the effort to find.
Whirled Cinema Club website
**As I liked it so much as a book I'm adding a reprint of an old review of Damon Krukowski's book The Memory Theatre Burned (Turtle Point Press)
I bought this book when I saw Damon play at the Luminaire (2010) as one half of Damon and Naomi and I'm glad that I did.
Although I might take slight issue with it's claims to be a collection of Damon's poetry as for me most of the pieces in the book would be better described as short prose pieces as Damon
doesn't go in for much in the way of form or stanzas or rhyming schemes.
But putting that aside what he does go in for is some very well observed pieces about people who spend their entire lives singing one song, or who lose the ability to sing.
Then there is a guy who is the prompter in a theatre and has forgotten who he is as he can only speak in quotes from the plays he has memorised. Then there are a few flights of fancy where he waxes philosophical in a style reminiscent of Krishnamurti of all people.
He also talks about a guitar that gains weight so he has to play it while it lays on the floor of the stage as he can no longer pick it up!!
There is a nice surreal edge to many of the stories and pieces and if you like any of his bands such as Galaxie 500 or Magic Hour then chances are this book will have more than enough to make you think and smile even if he didn't put the book out via the publishing house he runs when he isn't touring with Damon & Naomi etc.
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