With eight advertised music gigs on this one Tuesday night in Leeds, there are still as many uncharted others, eking out mysterious and life-changing music in underground and unlisted places. The Bar Phono, a basement bar in the bowels of a shopping mall has pulled in a non-uniform art and design student crowd, as big as any in town, with no advertising and not even a sign on the door.
UV lighting makes the fluorescent glasses and Apple Mac stage gear gleam like Dr Who or Blake Seven. Brushed metallic tables and a circular room add to the feeling that we might go spaceside at any moment. Just don’t start counting downwards …
DJ HOWIE D is pumping out and mashing up the Steve Miller Space Cowboy and the Glam Rock power chords against unimaginably weird theme tunes and excitable air punchy anthems. The place buzzes.
First up on the Leeds Art Underground is DAVE BROUGHTON. Tonight he’s on sonic shore leave from his accustomed but quirky songsmithery. Alternately strumming, singing and kneeling he commands switches and strings to pile up, multiply and resonate in layers of digital delay and industrialised beats. His big gospel/blues echoing voice is authentic enough for Moby to steal it if he knew it was here. There’s a neat balancing act between letting it rip apart and holding it up and together. BROUGHTON keeps it together and sets up the crowd to cheer like crazy when it’s done. It’s like an impossible conjuring trick that really works. “Hey, how did he do that?” You reviewer’s guess is hat he was paying close attention to the accumulating sound storms, part improvising, part recording on the fly and part performing. A great start.
The lexically challenged mutant engineers ISAMBARD KINGSTON BRUNEL (sic) are up next. Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Shakeeb Abu Hamdan are the guilty men. They hit some buttons, hurl their arms aloft and set loose a gut-churning howl with white sonic backwash. This is the military industrial ice cream van, flattening children and microwaving their icepops, en route to the parents’ dark secrets. These are resonances to terrorise. It’s the Dance of the Killer Machines turned a thousand times bigger than you imagined, an ordeal of hideous grace and (I have to admit) awful thundering beauty. It’s much, much scarier than a simple racket or bin n’ lid hammering din – it’s organised, deliberate and it hits you where it damages. Ululating shock and awe on an inhuman scale.
Tonight’s single IKB piece moderates the onslaught briefly enough to breathe, then moves into a second phase, more textured and more purposefully stabbed with a sense of rising panic. It dawns on me that this is what rock and roll must have sounded like to that first generation of appalled 1950s citizens. “Turn it Off!” “It’s Not Music!” Precisely. My ageing brain feels good about surviving and decides to appropriate and like it – always the safest thing to do with alien forms. Later I notice the perpetrators dancing happily to pop tunes and rock guitar. They’re probably quite respectful to their parents too.
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Top live billing goes to TROPICAL VIBRATIONS, whose only performance ever in the world this will be. Many of the crowd seem to be here to see and hear them, as if they knew something the rest of the world didn’t. The VIBRATIONS come in like genetically destabilised White Stripes, with parody costumes and twitching non-choreography.
Two straight guys, one totally wired. Their mission is to spread a fabulous dementia and as VIBRATION number 3 hurls himself stage-wards in red and white striped long johns the whole roomful surge around, scrabbling to see what the hell is going on. The music has an underlying reggae pulse with indeterminate swirls of Power Mac contributions from the Far Side. VIBRATIONS 1 and 2 rasp and rant in angry vocal bursts while they chunk guitar and bass in thick patois tempo. VIBRATION 3 is being thrown over the audience’s heads, he’s climbing up and down the DJ box, clutching at the ceiling and gyrating like Elvis impersonating a bucket of electric eels in a power surge. Here and there he types something scrutable into the Power Mac and unleashes more sonic torrents.
He plays a flute. His skinny striped legs wave in the air and the crowd are thrashing about in unison sympathy. Someone (VIBRATIONS 1?) starts a chant of “There’s a whole lotta Ragga goin’ down, in this town” and the entire audience take it up, repeating it enthusiastically at random moments through the rest of the set and full-throatedly reprising it to compensate for the non-arriving encore. As it fades to exhaustion, Howie D winds up a recording of Black Betty to herald the hours of abandoned dancing and drinking that follow. At some point all go home in confused and happy moods. Your reviewer passed on that section, limping off home for cocoa and some Moira Anderson tapes.
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