Sunday 13 September 2015

Four shows this week! Richard Dawson, Dope Body, Rat Columns and Martin Newell in London!


Hello again!
I trust you’re having a brilliant weekend, in comes I with news of our busy week to come. Tomorrow we’re extremely lucky to have RICHARD DAWSON and ASIQ NARGILE comparing and contrasting their unique styles of narrative songwriting. This rare head to head of English and Georgian folk traditions will take place at Tufnell Park Dome tomorrow, tickets will be available on the door from 7.30pm, with live music beginning an hour later. Wednesday sees us head to the Old Blue Last for a night of gravity defying rawk music from DOPE BODY and OLD FOREST. Whilst, RAT COLUMNS are top of the menu for Thursday night at the Montague Arms, joined by H. GRIMACE and ATHENS

If that wasn’t already too much, we’re really pushing the boat out on Saturday afternoon by welcoming the marvelous MARTIN NEWELL, known for his immaculate solo career alongside his lo-fi escapades with CLEANERS FROM VENUS, to London for the first time in decades. Taking place at St Giles In The Fields, at the end of Denmark Street where Martin used to live, the ‘Golden Afternoon’ will involve a variety of performances on guitar and piano, accompanied by tales, poetry, cakes and tea (white chocolate and pistachio cupcake anyone? Have you tried the liquorice brew? Well I never knew that about Queen Matilda!). Now that’s what we call (a week of) music! Read on for everything and more…


\\\\\    MONDAY    /////



RICHARD DAWSON
ASIQ NARGILE
Monday 14 September
Tufnell Park Dome, 2A Dartmouth Park Hill, Tufnell Park, NW5 1HL
7.30pm | £15 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/322823

A very special union of two bold and visionary performers from very different walks of song: Richard Dawson (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK) and Asiq Nargile (Georgia) are bound together by the distinctive ways in which they channel the ancients to transcend the everyday. Dawson and Nargile met at last October's TUSK Festival in Newcastle, and the seeds were sown for a tour pairing these questing musical spirits for a select run of double-bill occasions across the UK.

RICHARD DAWSON is a skewed troubadour at once charming and abrasive, rising up from the bed of the River Tyne, his voice crumbles and soars being steeped in age-old balladry and finely-chiseled observations of the mundane. His shambolically virtuosic guitar playing stumbles from music-hall tune-smithery to spidery swatches of noise-colour, swathed in amp static and teetering on the edge of feedback. His songs are both chucklesome and tragic, rooted in a febrile imagination that references worlds held dear and worlds unknown. Latest album Nothing Important, out now on Weird World/Domino, has seen Dawson's song visions seep, uncompromised and irrepressible, into wider consciousness, confirming him as an unparalleled voice in today’s over-preened and manufactured music world.
http://www.richarddawson.net/

ASIQ NARGILE aka Nargile Mehtiyeva was born in Tbilisi and is now based in the Borcali region of Southern Georgia, she has been playing saz (long-neck lute) and singing since the age of 15. Fluent in Azerbaijani, Georgian, and Russian, Nargile represents the cosmopolitan heritage of old Tbilisi, a city once known as a meeting point for multilingual aşıq bards who would travel through the region serving as conduits for news, ideas, music and culture. A powerful solo performer, her vocal recital of epic folk poetry is by turns ecstatic and deeply expressive, and is interspersed with bursts of virtuosic, highly ornamented saz. Equally comfortable performing moving laments or upbeat folk dances, Nargile is currently the only female aşıq living and performing in the ethnic Azeri region of Georgia, and has been teaching the art to new generations. Thanks to the efforts of The Sayat Nova Project, a non-profit group aiming to help preserve and promote the diverse musical dialects of the Caucasus, European audiences can now experience the elusive, hypnotic beauty of Nargile's music for themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgAb87RFgpk




\\\\\    WEDNESDAY    /////



DOPE BODY
OLD FOREST
Wednesday 16 September
Old Blue Last, 38 Great Eastern St, Shoreditch, EC2A 3ES
8pm | £8 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/318804

DOPE BODY are a primordial, psych-addled noise rock beast from Baltimore! Born in 2008 out of the dance-friendly confines of the city’s Wham City scene, this unclassifiable, heavy group ventured out into the night to find more like-minds, and came back boasting a spasm of styles and directions. Evolving from blasting three-piece to blistering four-piece, Dope Body enjoy writing their own songs, touring endlessly and pummelling basement parties with a gleeful, wide-eyed fanaticism that the more reasonable among us might mistake for insanity (it ain’t entirely so). Dope Body writhe under their own experiments, swinging from gutterish sludge-punk to snake charmer-on-fire within the confines of a single tune. Rather than comparing their ferocity to other contender, just know that Dope Body is punk spelled upside-down and standing on its hands. 2012 saw their stunning album 'Natural History' come out on Drag City. Last year, the Baltimore quartet returned with ‘Lifer’, which saw Dope Body taking on some full-frontal riffing that dynamically ebbs and flows. From the trigger beats and scraping loops of ‘Casual’ to the Bowie-aping ‘Goon Line’ (think Fame re-tooled by Fugazi); from the psyche sway of ‘Doom’ to the epic, closing ‘Void’, brand new album ‘Kunk’ posits Dope Body's unflinching world view into a set of agit observationals. An essential companion piece to its excellent predecessor.
http://dopebody.tumblr.com/
  
OLD FOREST are purveyors of sludge rock and massive Sebadoh and Dinosaur Junior fans. Writing steep and steady with a sound you’d expect from three thirty somethings, Old Forest have a release out on Italian Beach Babes.
https://oldforest.bandcamp.com/




\\\\\    THURSDAY    /////



RAT COLUMNS
H. GRIMACE
ATHENS
Thursday 17 September
Montague Arms, 289 Queen's Rd, New Cross Gate, SE14 2PA

RAT COLUMNS is the project of Perth native David West, who is also the man behind chic electronic project Lace Curtain. Over the years he’s also played in Total Control and Rank/Xerox too. Rat Columns make beautifully sad, subdued jangle punk, packed with kinetic riffs, woozy synths and rhythms that sound like the landscape rushing by in a rush of haze. West is a nimble extractor of momentary melodies, an ambient-pop balladeer, a lover of unashamed shoegaze bliss-outs. After two LPs on Smart Guy Records and R.I.P. Society Records, this year has seen West release a pair of sublime 12” EPs on ADAGIO830 and Blackest Ever Black.
http://ratcolumns.tumblr.com/ 

H. GRIMACE are a dream punk trio from Homerton, London. Last year they released their debut 10”through their own 7 Eye imprint. Opening track ‘Lands of Gold and Green’ is a carefully constructed atmospheric track, typical of the bands mature approach to songwriting. Frontwoman Hannah Gledhill’s voice is showcased on this track her dusky vocals building to an unusual vocal harmony which soars above the subtly interlaced melodies developed during the tracks’ chorus.
https://h-grimace.bandcamp.com/

ATHENS play sparse, sometimes dissonant post-punk. Spiky, tightly wound interlocking guitar parts weave around acerbic vocals, thudding basslines and pounding drums.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xp3f-9HZpc




\\\\\    SATURDAY AFTERNOON    /////



MARTIN NEWELL - ‘THE GOLDEN AFTERNOON’
Three sets of music, poetry and yarns!
Saturday 19 September
St Giles In The Fields, 60 St Giles High Street, Covent Garden, WC2H 8LG

MARTIN NEWELL is a purveyor of ingenious pop music. His music is refracted from late 60s rock only shot through with invention from the rough-and-ready explosion of DIY tape releases in 80s Britain. As a songwriter, he’s right up there with Syd Barrett and Ray Davies, capturing a peculiar Englishness that’s very much his own. It is argued that he has never got the commercial success he deserved, but while this may or may not be true he continues to make and sell good records with a degree of international acclaim.

‘The Golden Afternoon’ promises a glorious spell of autumnal dazzle spent in the company of the inestimable Martin Newell (of Cleaners From Venus, Brotherhood Of Lizards, Stray Trolleys, Plod), featuring two sets of music on guitar and piano, poetry, tales about Denmark Street (where Martin lived for some time in the 80s when working in Tin Pan Alley), as well as ample tea vs cake provisions. This is an extremely rare occurrence as ‘The Golden Afternoon’ has never visited London before and Martin’s musical performances in London over the last few decades can be counted on one hand.

Martin started his career in music aged 19 when he joined an Essex glam-rock band called The Mighty Plod as a singer and gigged in rough clubs, pubs and colleges for the next two years. In his early twenties he joined a hard rock/prog band from Ispwich called Gypp and gigged in the UK as well as touring northern Germany several times. In 1979, he won his first record contract and shortly afterwards his first single ‘Young Jobless / Sylvie In Toytown’ was released, first on an indie label and then with Liberty Records. In the 1980s he formed the anarchic and wonderfully offbeat Cleaners From Venus, who after much defiance of music biz convention, signed to a London record company and began making proper records which were well reviewed and well-received. He began co-writing songs with Captain Sensible in 1986, a relationship which endures to some extent to this day. In 1989 he and his friend Nelson, now of New Model Army formed The Brotherhood of Lizards, were signed to make an album and proceeded to promote it, touring the record by bicycle. This led to many TV appearances and some notoriety and amusement in the media. In 1993, with XTC's Andy Partridge in the producer's chair Martin made what was to become his most successful album ‘The Greatest Living Englishman’.

Now in his mid-50s, with an abiding suspicion of commercial convention and arts authorities he remains in north Essex, where he continues to write poems, songs and books at a rate which sometimes surprises even the people who know him. His Selected Poems which came out in 2008 was given an enthusiastic and detailed foreword by Professor Germaine Greer. ‘This Little Ziggy’ his rock memoir is due to be re-published at time of writing. As poet-in-residence for The Sunday Express he writes a weekly pop-poem for the newspaper as well as occasional features for them. He is also a columnist for The East Anglian Daily Times for whom he writes a page The Joy of Essex each week.

After a thorough retrospective of Martin’s work with Cleaners From Venus, Captured Tracks have recently released a ‘best of’ his more recent work entitled ‘Teatime Assortment’. Martin has also re-recorded his classic song ‘Denmark Street’ in honour of this one -off show, holding a very central place in Martin’s heart, being where most of the Cleaners albums were breathed into life. Come see the ‘Wild Man of Wivenhoe’ wade through his waking memories of the West End, this will prove very special indeed!
http://www.martinnewell.co.uk/



Thanks for reading, and to all of you who came to see Stephen Steinbrink this week, see you soon and most likely frequently!
UPSET THE RHYTHM
x




\\\\\  UPSET THE RHYTHM   /////
/////  UPCOMING    SHOWS   \\\\\

RICHARD DAWSON
ASIQ NARGILE
Monday 14 September
Tufnell Park Dome, 2A Dartmouth Park Hill, Tufnell Park, NW5 1HL
7.30pm | £15 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/322823

DOPE BODY
OLD FOREST
Wednesday 16 September
Old Blue Last, 38 Great Eastern St, Shoreditch, EC2A 3ES
8pm | £8 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/318804

RAT COLUMNS
H. GRIMACE
ATHENS
Thursday 17 September
Montague Arms, 289 Queen's Rd, New Cross Gate, SE14 2PA

MARTIN NEWELL - ‘THE GOLDEN AFTERNOON’
Three sets of music, poetry and yarns!
Saturday 19 September
St Giles In The Fields, 60 St Giles High Street, Covent Garden, WC2H 8LG

PC WORSHIP
HOUSEWIVES
TAR POOLING
Thursday 24 September
DIY Space For London, Unit 1, 96-101 Ormside St, South Bermondsey, SE15 1TF
8pm | £5 Members & Guests | Tickets on the door, become a member of DIYSFL here: http://diyspaceforlondon.org/

TROPICAL TRASH
PERSPEX FLESH
APOSTILLE
Friday 25 September
DIY Space For London, Unit 1, 96-101 Ormside St, South Bermondsey, SE15 1TF
8pm | £5 Members & Guests | Tickets on the door, become a member of DIYSFL here: http://diyspaceforlondon.org/

TO LIVE AND SHAVE IN LA
CASUAL SECT
CLAIRE
Sunday 27 September
In collaboration with Café OTO, 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, E8 3DL
8pm | £10 | http://tinyurl.com/q26dany

MATANA ROBERTS
Coin Coin Chapter Three
ERIC CHENAUX
Tuesday 6 October
OSLO, 1a Amhurst Road, Hackney Central, E8 1LL

AARON DILLOWAY
SISSY SPACEK

Tuesday 13 October

Café OTO, 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, E8 3DL

8pm | £10 | http://tinyurl.com/nuz7eot

THE SPACE LADY
MELTING HEARTS
Wednesday 14 October
The Old Baths, 80 Eastway, Hackney Wick, London, E9 5JH

NORMIL HAWAIIANS
Saturday 24 October
The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, N1 9JB

PROTOMARTYR
WITCHING WAVES
TENSE MEN

Monday 2 November
The Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Rd, Dalston, E8 3AS
7.30pm | £8 |
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/331014 

SHANNON AND THE CLAMS
THE CREEPING IVIES
Wednesday 11 November
OSLO, 1a Amhurst Road, Hackney Central, E8 1LL

MIKAL CRONIN
Tuesday 17 November
Scala, 275 Pentonville Road, King´s Cross, London, N1 9NL

CALVIN JOHNSON
Wednesday 18 November
The Tin Tabernacle, 12-16 Cambridge Avenue, Kilburn, NW6 5BA
7pm | £10 | http://www.wegottickets.com/event/330306

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