The Fox & Firkin should twin itself with Carpe Diem in Leeds. It’s very much our ‘sister pub in the north’ and very much a venue after our own hearts. They fed and watered us for very little money (Thank you!) while various of us took a break from the rock n roll at the Constellations gig in Leeds this weekend.
Constellations is a massive all day festival held in the main building at Leeds Uni. Now the main building is vast; 3 gig rooms, lots of bars, a pub, a supermarket and a pie shop. We started our day (far too early) in the middle room to watch south London’s Breton. You can find Breton more often than not mixing tracks for the likes of The Temper Trap and Chapel (or doing film work for Nike and Tricky) than touring their recent and critically acclaimed Counter balance EP. Breton have become an experimental electro rock 4 piece with some pretty impressive visual talents to add to an interesting minimal noise. It’s a pleasure to see Roman behind a guitar again and I anticipate lots of ‘concept’ projects from them in the near future.
Breton Breton Breton Nottingham’s Dog Is Dead
I had planned to catch ‘I Like Trains’ next but stumbled into the wrong room. Serendipity as it turns out because it introduced us to Nottingham indie pop outfit ‘Dog Is Dead’ and their danceable (almost disco beat) indie pop hits that, unusually, have room for a bit of jazz sax. Sounds incongruous but trust me its good stuff. I’ll do my best to drag them to our place next year.
Dog Is Dead set me up nicely for (and reminded me a little of) L.A’s Local Natives who’s single ‘Airplanes’ is currently in my Top Ten of 2010. They were lovely in their faintly world-music-influenced acoust- rock kinda way and I recommend em if you like vampire Weekend or Fleet Foxes. Much passing around of floor toms is a feature of the Natives’ live show, but in a cavernous hall like the refectory (Think Ally Pally or to a lesser extent The Electric Ballroom) the booming bass thumps career up and down drowning out the delicate melodies. I’m fairly certain, however, that the room’s acoustics were not to blame for my ambivalence towards Broken Social Scene later that evening. I wasn’t sure when I saw them at ATP a couple of years back, but I’m certain now. I don’t get it. I know they are a talented supergroup made up of lesser or more members of the highly respected Toronto indie scene and that their fans are legion (their T Shirts designs are flippin awesome too) but I’ve given it time and I think its indie for fans of U2 and not for me.
Danny Parr gets about on this blog from time to time. He’s a big fan of New York artrockers Les Savy Fav. He’d stressed to me at length that they were the best live band he’d ever seen. As much as I was taking that comment with a pinch of salt there was no way I was going to miss them.
I remember a Mansun performance in the 90s that was sublime in its musical wizardry, a polished-within-an-inch-of-its-life masterclass performance of one of my favourite albums of that year. Yet it rates as one of the dullest gigs of my life. Not one word was uttered from the stage, not even a “good evening Kilburn!” You need showmanship and spectacle to make a truly great show, a dialogue between band and audience. That’s where a good frontman comes in. Les Savy Fav’s Tim Harrington is probably the very best there is and much of that is because he is totally weird, completely fearless and utterly sacrificial. He’s like that errant uncle or granddad that revels in annoying the [C]conservative members of the family at Christmas much to the delight of everyone else. Only he’s actually insane, and drunk.
Actually he might not be drunk yet but he’s upending a bottle of white wine in great gulps. He’s talking unintelligible babble that is faintly amusing while wearing a graduates cap and gown. And then he’s screaming rock n roll at us. Then he’s tearing through the pit of the audience to the back of the arena and climbing up the walls of the pit. The cap and gown discarded in (or more likely torn off by) the audience below he’s now sporting a white ‘scene of crime’ all in one jumpsuit. Next he’s backflipping the ten feet drop to the floor knowing the loving arms of his audience will break his fall, which they do. He has 100 ft of mic cable and the crowd are dutifully holding it aloft so he can sing while careering through and playing with the audience he’s among screaming artrock vocals all the while. He mimes butt fucking some delighted fan and snogs many others. Security are onstage chests puffed, arms pumped, desperately looking for a way to reassert the rules of gigdom, but they have no fucking idea what to do and its hilarious. Tim is now lounging precariously on a barrier between the raised bar area and the pit announcing that the audience are brilliant and should be in the band. The band themselves continue rocking as if nothing untoward is going on. “This” he announces to the pit “is a pool of human flesh”, “you” he demands of a guy at the barrier “jump in!”
The rock n roll continues punctuated by these strange interludes that the band interrupts when they feel like it. The band barely smiles or lifts their gaze from their guitars as if nothing untoward is occuring. Meanwhile our man has decided he needs a beer glass to make an echoey effect with his mic, so he forces a pint down its owner’s throat and helps himself to the empty cup. His next foray into the pit results in the crowd tearing off his jumpsuit to reveal brightly hooped socks , a lurid pair of red shorts and a t shirt that looks like it’s been painted by a 4 year old. The fact is there’s a constant exchange between big bad Uncle Tim and his audience. A stage diver he rescues from the clutches of a bemused security guard has his shoes removed and is given a very attentive foot massage. Another gets a piggy back. He removes another stage divers shoe and, surreally, makes a phone call on it. All of them kiss Tim on his giant shiny domed head. The bottle of wine is shared among the crowd by means of gulps sprayed onto the front 6 rows of pilled up lunatics one of whom wrests the bottle from his hand and finishes it off. This is a dialogue between audience and band like none I have ever seen and it is brilliant. Much like The Flaming Lips you need never have heard a single song by the band in order to have a blast at their live show. If you get a chance to see Les Savy Fav, for God’s sake grab it. They are, as Danny said, one of the greatest live bands out there right now.
Now a word to the guy who stole the aforementioned T-shirt: It was indeed painted by a 4 year old; Tim Harrington’s son. It was put in the kick drum when he took it off because it was the one thing he wasn’t prepared to share with the crowd. You didn’t spoil the gig when you stole it (and you must have heard the moans of a couple thousand music fans begging for you to give it back when he asked) but you did take a little of the shine off the highlight of our day. Do the decent thing and post it back to him.
No act stood an earthly chance after that show. Four Tet did his thing in his usual accomplished understated abstract jazz disco way. I wasn’t in the mood and neither were many others, the room was much depleted. Brooklyn noise pop duo Sleigh Bells are making a smash their punk pop hit ‘Infinity Guitars’ I liked what I heard and I do love that single, but I might have enjoyed them more were it not for the LSF show and my impending road trip back to London. I also thought eight 4×12 Marshall cabs was purely showing off in a room that could barely hold 200 people and frankly Sleigh Bells are ‘The Ting Tings’ that it’s ok for cool kids to like. Plus I was sober, my comrade drinkers at the fox kept their end up though. I understand the party went on well into Monday.
Well done Constellations and well done Leeds. One forgets just how friendly it is up north. We’ll be back to relieve you of your Jagermeister very soon.
Unless otherwise stated, all live images by