Monday 21 February 2009, the Vinyl Villain, review of Queens Park Bowling Club show by JC
This wasn't the posting I was planning for today... I had intended to put out a TVV appeal, but the launch of that will need to wait 24 hours as I just have to share my views and thoughts on a quite extraordinary gig a couple of days back.
I wrote about Butcher Boy last November and not only did someone from the record company leave behind a nice comment, but at least one reader rushed out and ordered the album I was raving about. Well if you're reading this David, I hope you'll be persuaded to shell out some more of your hard-earned cash in a few minutes time...
The thing is, the band don't play live all that often, so when I heard about a gig in the clubhouse of a bowling club some 25 minutes walk from Villain Towers, I made sure I'd be there. It was a show quite like no other...
First of all, you had to get your name on a list beforehand (which I did thanks to Comrade Colin) and on arrival you paid as much or as little as you liked as an entry fee. I threw £5 into the Tupperware Box.
There was no warm-up act. Instead an incredibly eclectic mix of music was played through the speakers at a volume that was just enough for you to enjoy yet still hold conversations with the folk you were sitting at your table with. Then at just after 9.30, we got to see a old edition of Top Of The Pops in its entirety... one introduced by David Jensen and John Peel.
Sad man that I am, I've since checked which particular edition it was (I could find out from the fact that the #1 single - Is There Something I Should Know by Duran Duran - was a new entry) and it turned out was the one that featured the chart for the week ending 26 March 1983. The reason this particular edition being shown pre-gig was this:-
Orange Juice performed Rip It Up (#9 in the chart that week up from #10)
Big Country performed Fields Of Fire (#31 up from #34)
And... oh, be still my beating heart...
Altered Images performed Don't Talk To Me About Love (#12 up from #36)
Clare rarely looked more gorgeous than she did that night.
But back to what I really want to write about...
When Butcher Boy took to the stage (well... stood in a space in front of us with just the drummer on a very small stage), the first thing I noticed was just many of them there are. Eight performers in total, including a cellist and someone on viola as well as the drums/lead guitar/rhythm guitar/bass/keyboards (oh and during the night other instruments such as a mellotron would be utilised). I thought it was going to be an unholy racket.
I couldnt have been more wrong.
Over the next 45 minutes or so, these eight supremely talented musicians had my total attention as they delivered an outstanding and very distinctive 14-song set.
Much of my love for the band centres around the vocal delivery of John Blain Hunt - there's hints of Bryan Ferry, Lloyd Cole, Stuart Staples and even the great Paul Quinn in his singing. He didn't disappoint, but it was the way that the others performed that brought out just how good a voice he actually has.
Everyone played at the perfect volume so that the instruments you were supposed to hear at a particular point in time were the ones that your ears picked up. Nobody ever indulged in any solos, preferring instead to create a blend of melodies and harmonies that left this particular listener in awe of being in the presence of such aural beauty.
I didn't know more than half of the songs as they were taken from forthcoming LP React Or Die which hits the shops in April, but that didn't stop me deciding on first listen that they were instant classics. Of the songs that I did know from debut LP Profit In Your Poetry, I was left astonished that they sounded better live than they did on record... something I thought would have been a near impossibility.
It was all over just too soon. No encores, but as John himself told me afterwards (yup, I couldn't help but make a beeline for him right at the end to say thank you), it was a show that was going so well that the two songs they had in reserve were incorporated into the main set. I also learned that the rehearsal for the show was the first time Butcher Boy had played outside of a studio environment in 16 months, and I thought to myself just how mind-blowing their shows would be if they were full-time musicians doing this for a living... and then I realised it was probably the fact that they do perform so rarely together that makes the performances so special... and fresh-sounding.
It was a night when the folk performing seemed to have as much fun, pleasure and enjoyment as the 120 or so folk lucky enough to have been in the audience.
Afterwards, a DJ played a great set of tunes - mostly indie, but not exclusively, and mostly drawn from the 80s, but again not exclusively. Myself and Comrade Colin and many others danced and danced and danced and danced again, only pausing to take in liquid to stem the sweat and only stopping when the house lights came on at 12.15am.
Than I walked home happy in the knowledge that I had again been so lucky to have been part of something so special and also realising that if I had never taking up this blogging lark, I'd have missed out on it.
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