venta

Sometime last year, ChrisC bought a copy of England Keep My Bones. Gosh, I thought, this new Frank Turner chap is quite interesting, I wonder if perchance he may be playing a small gig nearby?

Unfortunately, it seems my musical radar has been broken for some time, and Frank Turner has been operating well beneath it. For about a decade. Playing the pubs and street corners of London, and here am I catching onto the game shortly before he advertises a headlining show. At Wembley Arena.

Wembley Arena? One vaguely folky acoustic-y bloke with a guitar? Nonsense! Also, I hate arena gigs. Also, it is sold out.

ChrisC is made of much more determined stuff, and he trawled around on eBay and found someone selling some standing tickets at more-or-less face value, and organised me into attending. Frank Turner, Billy Bragg and Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip all on one bill!

So on Friday night last week, I sneaked out of work early, did the complicated cycle->train->tube->walk combo necessary to get to Wembley Arena and slid myself in just as the first act, Beans on Toast, slid himself off. By which I mean "crowd surfed out of the arena". I barely heard his last two songs, but he seemed entertaining - lo-fi, solo guitar and singer, constantly interrupting himself and meandering off during songs. He closed with a song he'd written for the occasion about wondering how to say "Hello, Wembley". Basically, he's an English Jeffrey Lewis :)

In an evening of basically songwriters-with-guitars, it wasn't obvious how Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip (a duo of electronic DJ and performance poet) would go down. Scroobius Pip's fast-talking higly erudite style clearly shouldn't fit with the sort of clubland racket Dan Le Sac makes. If you read the words to, for example, Get Better you'll notice that it's not an obvious floor-filler. It isn't the most floor-fillery thing they do, but if you listen to it I'd hope it'd make a bit more sense. I love the way their lyrics manage to be political, and interesting, without being overly anything-wing in particular.

Their set went down well, and they finished with the banging electro wig-out version of Letter From God To Man.

Billy Bragg... well, you know what you're getting, don't you? A guitar and a flat nasal delivery, as the man himself once said. And in this case a rather snazzy shirt, and a set with all his big tunes in. I can't say Billy Bragg's ever really struck me as an arena performer either, but the whole of Wembley singing along to A New England was pretty much indistinguishable from any festival performance (except it wasn't raining).

Incidentally, can I just take this opportunity to say that Wembley Arena serves dreadful beer? The best option seemed to be Becks Vier, so I decided that actually the best option was not to bother. Unfortunately, lots of Frank Turner fans seem not to have mastered the idea of dancing while holding a glass, so I ended up wearing quite a lot of the damned stuff.

Frank Turner (and his band, the Sleeping Souls) turned out to be fabulous. His songs clearly aren't folk songs, but they have definite tendencies in that direction. Occasional mandolins, choruses you can pick up on the second hearing. And a very, very strong sense of being English in a most un-UKIP sort of a way. He's Winchester-born and Eton-educated (although I think the latter has caused him a lot of grief because apparently it prevents him from having any indie cred at all) and a lot of his songs reflect that: friends, family, home town ... but I was raised in middle England, not in Memphis, Tennessee... He even managed to bring his mum on stage for a spontaneous harmonica solo (she doesn't play the harmonica) without becoming overly twee or nauseating.

So twelve and a half thousand people jumped up and down and sang along to I Still Believe, and then Frank Turner tested out the line not everyone can be Freddy Mercury from his own opening song by belting out a cover of Somebody To Love. And then he went off stage... and the stageside screens showed the backstage area where the man who's been playing to three people and half a dog for a decade got the date of his first Wembley show tattoo'd on his arm. Then he came back for an encore.

And, in fact, he sang The Times They Are A-Changin' with Billy Bragg and bloody 'ell it was dreadful. Something about their two voices just didn't work together and the result was really rather nasty. But apart from that, it was really quite an evening.

As we wandered home, ChrisC proposed it as an early contender for gig of the year. And we considered the opposition. And, er, we realised that in a very literal sense it is indeed the gig of the year for us so far. What the blithering Margaret are we playing at? Must see more bands.