Do you still drink down the local? And is the local still the local?

[venta]

Years and years ago I remember to chatting to timeplease here (I've never met him in person), and him recommending I visit the Pembury Tavern in Hackney (which I believe he ran/runs/owns/invented). It's very much the wrong side of London, and I never have, until last weekend when we were braving the perils of the East End to go to the Oddbox Weekender in Dalston.

Having failed to really consider what time pubs might open, we arrived at the Pembury just as its shutters were going up. I can now report it has a large array of handpumps selling excellent beer (and some cider, quality untested by me), serves good food from an interesting menu, has lovely graffiti on the walls and has a bar billiards table in quite unusually excellent nick. We drank, ate, and played bar billiards before scampering off to see bands. The posters on the wall advertise that it has a chess club, and zenithed tells me it's also board game-friendly. If anyone is in touch with TimePlease, tell him he was right, and it's a bloomin' excellent pub.

The Shacklewell Arms is slightly less excellent, but does have a moderately sized, muralled and only faintly damp "Dance Hall" at the back. And in it, we saw a number of bands which I will memorialise with mild brevity...

Oddbox helpfully produce a one-track-per-band compilation just before their Weekender (she says, making it sound like Oddbox is a slick media operation rather than one overworked bloke called Trev). I started to listen to it several times at work the previous week, but work kept rather annoyingly getting in the way. So I was quite uneducated about what I was going to see.

ChrisC had like the sound of The Wednesday Club, though, so we got there in time for the start (only to find, inevitably, that the start was late - a twenty minute delay that could have been another bar billiards game).

The Wednesday Club are three blokes - two fairly ordinary geeky-looking ones who play guitar and bass, and a random barefooted, skinny-jeans-wearing mustachioed hipster who clearly belongs in a different band. He plays a Violent Femmes-style front-of-stage mini-drum kit. They all sing, and they're fun enough but rather failed to grab me.

I knew even less about Nervous Twitch, but was won over quite quckly. They're a four-piece, with their drummer conventionally tucked away behind the weird archway things the Shacklewell Arms puts on its stage. Despite the main vocalist's impressively pink (and acryllic) 60s beehive 'do, they actually sounded rather Pixies-influenced to me. And then they launched into a cover of Head On, so I felt I could claim a moral victory. I haven't gone a-listening online, but live they were pretty good.

Charla Fantasma brought us back down to three people onstage; all-female in this case. I usually like two-vocalist bands, but these people had the rather screamy vocals thing going on which I find a bit much after a couple of songs (they probably did it well, I just don't like it).

Cosines are a band I go to see because the guitarist is a friend; I was mildly disappointed the first time because they were just a bit... meh. On Sunday, despite (apparently) 60% of them being badly hungover they were sounding much better. They're indie-ish, with two keyboardists, guitar, bass and drums with female main vocals. Pop along to bandcamp and have a listen (or just pop along and look at their jolly lovely 20's-ish cover art).

Once upon a time there was a fabulous band called the Broken Family Band. Then they stopped being a thing, and now their main singer tours solo as Steven James Adams. After a bunch of blaringly loud bands, one man and an acoustic guitar looked a little lonely on the stage. However, the Adams has that indefinable quality that when he sings, people stop talking and listen. When he tells a roomful of people to do something, they do it unquestioningly. When he unplugs his guitar and proceeds to play completely acoustic from the middle of the floor, people observe pin-drop silence.

He writes good songs, too.

Apparently A Witness are an 80s leftover, and were beloved of the late, great John Peel. They are now reformed with a new line up and are... fine. Some bands seem perfectly competent but... yeah. Complete failure of grabbage.

In the interests of squeezing some food in somewhere, we skipped out of A Witness early to order burgers before the "mini-break" in the bands. Sadly, the convenient eating break, conveniently at tea time, was the time the pub kitchen closed. So we ordered food rather later, and missed The Ethical Debating Society. The burger I had was... OK. Nowt special. However, the time was usefully and enjoyably filled chatting to John and, when they arrived, to Zenithed and Sara. I'm sure they were better than the Ethical Debating Society :) (whom I think I will get to see at Indietracks later in the year anyway).

Fishboy are a band, but were represented last Sunday by only their lead singer, Eric. He was, again, a compelling one-man-with-guitar performance (and also eventually unplugged and prowled about the room) although he did a lot more jumping about than the Adams. Fishboy's latest album tells the story of the quest for revenge of the elephant who was killed by Edison in his isn't-AC-dangerous experiments (no, really. Apparently there is a supporting graphic novel). He did a lot of songs from that. It's... odd. But in a good way.

The minimalist The Middle Ones was just two girls, one playing guitar, both singing. They were interesting, and had some quite cool contrapuntal vocals going on, but had a terrible tendency to keep making each other laugh. As slick, professional outfits go they really weren't one. I enjoyed them, though.

Somehow - I'm really not very sure how - we managed to miss a good chunk of The Manhattan Love Suicides. And when we did catch up with them I was distracted by trying to work out whether their bassist was in fact the same hipster drummer from the first band. Presumably not.

Anyway, they're the sort of feedbacky guitar pop you'd expect from a band who cite the Jesus and Mary Chain as an influence. I felt like I'd barely started to listen when they stopped playing.

The headliners were Scots indie-pop stalwarts The Just Joans, who are like no one but themselves. Four blokes and one extremely glamorous girl, they sing incredibly Scots tales of life in modern Scotland. They are gritty without being dismal, and are saved from drear by their own irrepressible humour. Songs about sick on your shoes have never been so much fun.

They came offstage, and we shot out of the pub like scalded cats, scurried up to a bus stop, caught a bus, caught another bus, and got home a bare two hours later. This is why I don't go to gigs in East London much ;-)

Comments

[damerell.livejournal.com]

We used to drink in the Pembury a lot, especially before the smoking ban - since it had never permitted smoking (after the reconstruction) it was especially nice. However, in recent years it's been more often rammed, it is really quite inconvenient to get to, being non-smoking is not unusual, and timeplease now has three pubs in Cambridge...

I do also still drink in my local, the Carlton, but mostly because it's my local and I'm used to it, sory of thing.