I met a girl in a tropical London

[venta]

So, as mentioned in among all the gingerbreading...

Apparently HMV have sold off all their venues, so The Forum is no longer The HMV Forum. Just as well I never bothered learning to call it that, then. I think it's now legally The London Forum.

Anyway, on Saturday night The Name-du-jour Forum had a double-headliner night (one of three) of Rancid and Cock Sparrer. Now, we have here...

Exhibit A: Rancid. A twenty-year-old punk band from California, whom I'm willing to shell out considerable money to go and see.
Exhibit B: Cock Sparrer. A forty(!)-year-old punk band from London, the city I live in, that I've never even heard of.

Double headliner? Really? I figured that it was probably a notional concept and that Rancid would be the final band of the night - an assumption backed up by tweets from the Forum on Friday.

So on Saturday we wombled in around 8ish, and I stood about while ChrisC went to battle with the rather epic bar queue. Cock Sparrer came on stage, and kicked off into their first song. Weird, I thought, my last-minute online investigation suggested that Cock Sparrer's singer was way more cockney than that. And I don't remember them sounding this good in general. And wow, I didn't realise they also had a fabulous bassist.

Wait a minute, you really don't get many bassists that fabulous.

In fact... this is Rancid, isn't it? Coming on first, and looking rather different from how I remember, and unsportingly opening with a song I don't know. In true double-headliner fashion, they'd swapped the running order from the previous day.

And they played for around an hour, and even when most of the songs clock in at under three minutes it still felt woefully short. Rancid's current line up is four blokes (guitar/guitar/bass/drums); they all sing, and three of them share lead vocals. Well, really two of them share lead vocals, but they let the bassist in on the act occasionally.

And... yeah. The bassist. I can honestly say I've never heard anyone play like him. Check out the playful bassline in the chorus of Roots Radical or the fifteen-fingered implausible solo in Axiom. The thing that stuns me, though, each time is that he doesn't seem to be putting any effort in. I'm used to guitar gods posturing all over the place, I'm not used to people knocking out that kind of solo without apparently moving at all. Towards the end of the gig he was occasionally flicking out the fingers of his left hand between riffs as if they were a little tired... but, really. The man is a god.

Their set was skewed towards the more punky end, playing only one song from the much more laidback Indesctructible. Also, given that I'm very familiar with five of their seven albums, they did a good job of playing a lot of songs I didn't know. Still, even unfamiliar stuff I loved listening to and happily bounced around. Special mentions to the bloke next to me in the Ministry t-shirt who had perfected an amazingly large-scale, punchy style of dancing, in a crowded space, without ever hitting anyone. Rancid encored with Time Bomb and Ruby Soho... and the Forum emptied. Like, literally, emptied. Not so many Cock Sparrer fans, then?

"Nah," said a passing aging punk. "They're shite."

Well, we figured that we'd stay and give them a listen. By the time they came on stage, the venue had filled up again to plausible levels (where did everyone go!? The toilets aren't that big, and I don't think you're allowed out for a fag...).

A lot of punk songs are like hymns. No, wait, bear with me on this one. By the time you've heard the chorus once, you can join in. You can guess where the tune will go, and quite often where the words will go. Cock Sparrer are a great example of that. They're solid, predictable punk pub-rock. I was happy to stay and listen and do improvised singing along. They lack the ska-y swagger of Rancid, and I doubt I'll be running out to buy any albums any time soon. But they were a decent warm-down act, and they did seem to have quite a big and enthusiastic following of their own.

And now I just have to worry about how the spat I had with a Kentish Town cashpoint is going to be resolved. It debited the money from my account, but didn't actually give me any cash. Ringing my bank on Sunday, they took some details and said the money would be credited back to my account in 24-48 hours. Which is nearly up, and it's not back yet :(

Comments

[zenithed.livejournal.com]

it's now legally The London Forum.

Oh dear. Suspect I'll continue to call it the Kentish Town Forum regardless of who they get to sponsor it.