A Rough Guide

London Fields # 21
First published Inpress, Melbourne on 14 December 2005
NB: Each column has a name, but these do not appear in print; printed versions may differ slightly to those displayed here

"Does Camden Town really exist?" she asked me. It’s just after Faker have finished their final gig of their UK Tour [bottom of a bill of three acts on a quiet Wednesday night], and I’m talking to a 19 year old who’s only been in London a few weeks. "Well, I think I was there the other night", she continues, "but I can’t be sure if it was real or if I dreamed it…"

Camden used to be fabulous, a weird hybrid of Fitzroy and St Kilda. But no more - now you can’t get five paces without the ubiquitous offers of "skunkweed". It’s a journey to a destination, not a place to hang out in. Hoxton’s a much better bet, if you can cope with the coolsie factor.

Then she asked, "Are the Carling Venues the places to go?" The Melbourne equivalent would be "Can I catch upcoming acts cheap at The Metro and The Palace?" Some Aussies come to London and choose to live in SANZA share houses, get their news from TNT (a magazine for Antipodean travellers), and the Metro (a freebie morning tabloid, produced by Express Newspapers), go to Aussie pubs, and listen to JJJ on the internet. (By the way, SANZA is a horrible TNT-created acronym – lumping together all English conversant Southern Hemisphere travellers into the one basket – South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Eek!). And of course, this lot go and see Aussie bands. In fact, now that you get pints in Melbourne pubs, some of them may as well have never left Australia at all.

But in deference to those seeking more, and as a Yuletide special, here are some handy hints which you may not find in your Lonely Planet or Let’s Go, especially for those who are making travel plans for a UK trip in 2006.

Gig Tickets. Beware of the sting of booking fees and postage costs – even though normal ticketing agents, a £12 ticket can easily jump to a £20 outlay. The trick is to buy in person, where possible. You can get tickets at face value for all Mean Fiddler venues from the Camden Ticket Office or Astoria box office, and the same applies at the Academy box offices for their venues. Of the agents, Stargreen are the best by far – reasonable fees, and friendly people. For some venues [Barfly, Scala] there is no place to buy without fees, so it’s a case of shopping around for the best deal. But don’t take too long as gigs are selling out in minutes, snatched by those hoping to turn a quick profit on eBay. To stand a hope, sign up for ticket alerts [Get Live, Ticketmaster, and Ticketweb] as these often offer gig presales.

Mailing lists are a great way to save money and find out what’s happening. Sign up to those from The Barfly, Plum Promotions [for The Marquee, Water Rats and Betsey Trotwood] and The Social. Check the websites for Bugbear Bookings [for Dublin Castle and The Hope and Anchor] and Up All Night Music for bands further down the pecking order. To save money, check the HMV and Virgin Megastore websites for free instore appearances. Join Artrocker – if you want Aussie bands, you could have seen Wolf & Cub, Love of Diagrams, Sinking Citizenship, Die! Die! Die! and The Grates, all for free in the last year alone. To find out what’s new, listen to BBC 6Music, or try XFM in the evenings. Also keep an eye on the websites Drowned In Sound, Sounds XP and Club AC30.

For a comprehensive 'What’s On', there’s nothing to beat Time Out. NME is no longer worth buying, but is worth flicking through for the live ads. Get The Guardian on a Saturday for The Guide. Try reading The Independent to get an overview of where you are, and what’s happening in the world. Eat at a caff and read their copy of The Sun – with three million copies sold a day it’s a window onto aspects of British life. As for music shopping, HMV is huge, and tempting, but Fopp is cheaper. There are some great second-hand shops, but you can find them for yourself…

Finally, don’t spend all your time in the capital; London is not the British Isles, or even England. Try living in Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow or even Dublin. They all have enough to offer that’s unique and interesting, and are large enough to get many of the acts that people stay in London to see.

I know a few people who have gone back to Melbourne because this place just really got to them after a while. It’s like surfing with really big waves – when things are going well, the rush is incredible, but when you get dumped it’s ten times worse than anything you’ve experienced before. The overriding thing is not to let London drain you of your creativity and spark. When you feel it’s time to move on, just do it.

Good luck and happy travels!


© James McGalliard 2007

An Oldie But A Goodie

London Fields # 19
First published Inpress, Melbourne on 19 October 2005
NB: Each column has a name, but these do not appear in print; printed versions may differ slightly to those displayed here

As an inveterate gig-goer, I was recently asked, "Is there any band that you wanted to see, but never did?" With reformations, and changes in taste, I was stumped for a moment. Well, there was the Velvet Underground reunion in 1993, but the venue [the soul-destroying black hole of Wembley] put me off the idea, both then and now. Which really only left the impossible dream of Joy Division.

I think I’ve raved enough in the past about the joy of seeing the reformed The Psychedelic Furs back in June. But the worrying trend of 2005 is that the old guard seems so much better live than the young guns.

A few weeks back I caught the original line-up of Gang Of Four playing at the Barbican. Even in such sterile environs, these older men summoned up more bite and bile than virtually any band coming up through the ranks now. Hugo Burnham may have filled out, but he still provides a powerhouse backbeat. From a distance Andy Gill and Dave Allen seem little changed - fairly bristling with energy as they stalk, duck and dive. As a near-Marxist collective, they attempt to undercut the role of frontman, but there’s one member who positively demands your attention. Regardless of which microphone he’s using, Jon King remains the central focus. Whether he’s slowly demolishing a microwave with a baseball bat like a human metronome, or crawling on all fours like a giant spider crab, or even running wildly backwards and forwards across the apron of the stage, arms waving up and down like the last space invader overrunning the base, it’s a magnetic performance. And their sound now is what the old recordings only hinted at – within thirty seconds you know that no one can touch these originals.

You could form a new line-up of a band with sixteen original members, but without one cantankerous grizzly old bastard, it wouldn’t be The Fall. Now in line-up number two thousand, the only thing that unites them is the irascible Mark E Smith. He still looks like a geography teacher and he’s still up to his old tricks. Possibly as an antidote to boredom, he sets about trying to distract the other members of the band. At a recent appearance he turned off a guitar amp, drowned out backing vocals by putting his vocal mike up to the amps, fiddled with drum mikes, and played odd notes on the keyboard. Yet this is all part of the charm, and they still create a great racket - utterly unique, yet completely recognisable.

If anyone else had done what John Cale did for his recent Black Acetate shows, the audience would have walked out. After opening with Venus In Furs, he played a two-hour set imbruing old and new material alike with a Sturm und Drang approach of repeated grinding guitar riffs. This was the Cale of the hockey mask, having fun. Ever since the 5 Tracks EP, every one of his tours has been stylistically different and intriguing. But as he carried it all out with such aplomb, he gets away with it.

This year Simple Minds are the trimmest they’ve been for over twenty years, both musically and physically. They’ve lost all their stadium rock flab, and have heavily trimmed the pomp. Their renewed energy and vigour allows the new material to shine [as does the pre-Live Aid material], and Eddie Duffy’s basswork recreates the steel structures that made us love them in 1981. Charlie still mouths the lyrics, Jim still dances, and they can still send shivers up your spine with the opening of Waterfront…

There may be some interesting developments in music here at the moment, but none of them are in London. Sheffield is at the forefront of an explosion of new acts [surf for Thee SPC or Sandman Magazine for more], and a new wave of pop is threatening to erupt [The Chalets, The Pipettes, El Pres!dente]. But instead of these bright hopes, we’re being told about Battle, who are about as shite as a live experience can be. So instead we’ll continue to look back to the originators, and sometimes find that the imitators become completely redundant.

At a concert to commemorate the life of John Peel last week, New Order did a set drawn entirely from the JD days. While four of these tracks have been a staple of their live sets for a few years now, playing a set with no New Order material, and including Shadowplay and Warsaw, was something special. This was the closest I will ever get to seeing Joy Division [barring a time machine], and dammit, didn’t it make me miss Peelie all over again. In honour of the occasion, you could forgive Barney’s excruciating dancing [now with added pirouettes], and technical hitches. The only thing that let them down was the vocals – the one thing they could never really replace.

But if Mark Burnett is looking for a follow-up to RockStar: INXS, I may have an idea for him…

© James McGalliard 2005

The Battle Of Britain

London Fields # 18

First published Inpress, Melbourne on 21 September 2005

NB: Each column has a name, but these do not appear in print; printed versions may differ slightly to those displayed here

“Covering up the agony with mindless entertainment…”
ABC - United Kingdom

Over the past seven years, so-called reality shows have completely changed the landscape of modern television. Along with makeover projects, these are reasonably cheap to make, and have all but replaced the documentary. If their prevalence has made us all slightly more media savvy, just what has it done to those who participate?

In 1998, The Truman Show depicted the ultimate development is reality television. In the same year came the documentary 42 Up, looking at how a cross-section of British children, first interviewed at the age of 7 in 1964, were coping aged 42. This week ITV, as part of their 50th anniversary series of programmes, are halfway through showing the latest of the seven-year updates, 49 Up. The lives of the dozen or so participants have now probably outgrown pure documentary to evolve into the first reality TV stars. Yet in the time elapsed since the last instalment, the world of Big Brother and similar shows has not been without affect. A snowball that means that the director finds himself questioned about his motives in continuing to chase his subjects every seven years. Initially I thought filmmaker Michael Apted had lost his way when putting this together. It felt disconnected, as though he’d merely tacked an appendix onto his earlier work. But as time’s passed, I’ve realised there’s another reason for this change. The nation that he started to document some forty years ago no longer exists.

If starting a similar project now, would virtually all the children be white, and mostly male? There are different schisms now than class, which was seen as the major cultural divide back then. What’s worth noting is [in the first half at least] everyone has moved out of London. The reasons vary, but the most telling comes from Tony, the cabbie. He no longer feels that there are communities as there were when he was growing up, due to the influx of other cultures into Britain. His answer is to head to Spain, and set up his own Little Britain there. To go to another country and create an English enclave there – in other words to do exactly what he doesn’t like about the UK in the twenty-first century himself.

Reality television and documentary can meet and create something other than low brow fodder, as The Monastery showed. The concept for this was remarkably simple – take five men and put them in a Benedictine monastery for forty days and nights, living as the monks do, spending much time in silent thought, and to observe what happens. The resulting three one-hour episodes followed the challenges and revelations the men made as they come face-to-face with their inner selves. Made by the BBC religious unit, it was a compelling, and genuinely moving experience, and easily ranks as one of the television highlights of the year so far.

Last week there was a moment of national pride here, as the English enjoyed the feel-good factor, brought about by their victory in the Ashes series. This was a little odd. Cricket is not a grassroots game at all here – you don’t see kids playing it in the streets or the parks. The strongest following comes from the public schools, and the Asian communities [in the UK that means India, Pakistan and Bangladesh]. Football is the only real national sport here, but English successes there are even rarer than in the cricket. Sadly it seems unlikely that this fervour will have oxygen to fan the flames, as the draw at The Oval which gave the series victory to England was the last test match that you’ll be able to see on British TV without paying a subscription.

Having lost all three of its principal leads during the last series, the producers of Spooks had to find a pretty big bang to keep it all rolling. They came up with a two-parter about a series of bombs aimed at civilians in the capital. Yes, of course it was plotted, written and probably filmed before the events of July. Yet watching the scenes of dialogue-free devastation, you felt that someone had capitulated and rushed back to re-edit the original footage. The next episode concerned the election campaign of an ‘England for the English’ politician. A series that started as an enjoyable romp has descended into a dangerous mirror-reality, almost begging for copycat actions, so they can show how astute their observations are. If only leading light Rupert Penry-Jones had been given a second series of the sadly cancelled North Square instead.

Coincidentally, last weekend Trevor Phillips, the head of The Commission for Racial Equality, spoke of fears that Britain was in danger of becoming a ghetto nation. Yet all of this could be seen as the efforts of a new, changing nation struggling to find its own identity. If Apted decides to continue with his project, it’ll be interesting to see just what the Britain of 56 Up will be. And Gillian Armstrong – isn’t it about time that you showed us how the Australian women of Bingo, Bridesmaids & Braces are coping with their forties?

© James McGalliard 2005