venta

So, one of the things I shall be doing in 2015 is keeping on top of my LJ-ing, and remembering to write up gigs and so on. Doubtless you have noticed the deluge of reviews and other entries in the past fortnight.

From a week-and-a-bit ago:

Having met at Kings Cross and had our traditional pre-Lexington hot meat sarnies, ChrisC and I arrived just in time to hear the last song from hastily-drafted-in-at-the-last-minute second support band, The Drink. On the basis of one song they had interesting basslines and interesting guitar, but the guitarist's vocals didn't seem to quite sit well with everything else. Which is a shame, because the instrumental parts all sounded quite interesting.

By the time Mammoth Penguins came on stage, we'd caught up with

zenithed who was thus able to remind us why the singer looked familiar. Emma Kupa, formerly of indiepop stalwarts Standard Fare, subsequently went on to form Mammoth Penguins. They don't sound (to me) like a band with a name like that ought to sound.

However, they do sound like a perfectly decent indiepop three-piece, with some catchy choruses and an occasional nice bassline. (At one point, the singer fluffed her words, and blamed it on the bassist unexpectly inserting an Allo Darlin' bassline into a song.) If you like that kind of thing, give 'em a listen.

This was the only day of Fortuna Pop's four-night mini-festival at the Lexington that I was able to make, but possibly also the one I was most interested in. I've never seen Darren Hayman live before, but I've been a fan since he fronted Hefner in the 90s. (I did watch a whole gig at the Scala standing directly behind Mr Hayman a couple of months back, but I am terrible at actually spotting actual celebrities, and thus had no idea it was him until Zenithed's-friend-John told me after the fact.)

Anyway. He came on stage, all affectations and trailing scarf. And I thought: hmm. Is he going to turn out (rather disappointingly) to be a complete tit? And he launched into his opening song (which I didn't know) and followed it up with an excellent cover of Prince's Raspberry Beret.

"I know what you're thinking," he said. "How're you're going to follow that, Hayman? Well, we can't. We peaked."

OK. Not completely up his own arse, then :)

In fact, he proved to be very entertaining. When signalled by his keyboard player to fill while she reset her box o'twiddly knobs for the next song, he did something so weird and unexpected that she ended up laughing too much to operate the twiddly knobs at all. Oh, and he can play a guitar quite well, too, and writes decent songs. He did ask the sound man to put less reverb on his voice, saying that adding reverb to a voice like that was a bit like putting a dogshit on a velvet cushion.

His band are worth mentioning: twiddly knobs lady also sings, and plays a weird bellows-operated keyboard-thing that I've only ever seen once before. (She also dramatically turned the Lexington's glitterball on in one song, despite an apparently legendary lack of facility with electrics - she'd turned the leccy to the entire building off practising the glitterball in the sound check). A gentleman who looked rather like Will Oldham played violin, the fluffy outline of his bow showing that he paid for his attacking style of play in broken bowstrings. Somewhere in the gloom, at the back, was a woolly-jumpered and bearded drummer, and bounding around the front with a mass of floppity hair was the bassist from Tigercats. Apparently they'd been doing a residency elsewhere in London, and they were very together as a band.

The set pretty much flew by, despite me not knowing all that many of the songs.

If you don't know Darren Hayman, I'd recommend Calling Out Your Name Again from the recentish Darren Hayman and the Secondary Modern album Essex Arms.