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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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FESTIVAL SPECIAL: THE RHYTHM FESTIVAL
- Part Two |
| Twinwood
Arena, Bedford, August 29th, 20th & 31st,
2008. |
The
Saw Doctors
|
| There’s
nothing quite like being woken up by the gentle
“psssssst” of a ring-pull being lovingly
teased from the first can of the day, is there?
It’s Sunday, it’s been raining most
of the night, and Scrumpy Jack and Scrumpy Pete
are getting fuelled up for the day ahead while reviewing
the previous evening. |
| Actually
it’s just Pete – Jack’s inside
their van cooking up a mess of breakfast. “I
said, those Saw
Doctors were shite. Irish folk music bollocks.
I mean, what you need is a real rock band with attitude
to get the crowd going. Like the Levellers. They’re
good. No, two eggs, three sausages. Black pudding.
Where are the other cans? By the way, did you ever
figure out why your Shirley left you? I’ve
never got why Maureen walked out on me. Any fried
bread?” |
| It
has to be said that the Doctors (the self-styled
“Irish super group”) can polarise opinions,
although what was masquerading for a mosh seemed
lively enough. |
| I’d
been dragged there on pain of not enjoying myself
otherwise by the Photographer, who as it happens
had spent much of the afternoon seeking Doctors
guitarist and singer Leo Moran. Down there, it was
Gaelic Football shirts, waving arms, “to be
sures”, and tuneless singing along. The set
was the usual stuff, to be sure: all safe, no surprises,
included the truly awful ‘Chips’ (“vinegar
tears, salt in my wounds and the ketchup like my
poor bleeding heart …”) and a brief
tribute to Glen Miller (I did mention that he made
his last, and of course fateful, flight from here,
didn’t I?). |
Leo
Moran and fan |
| But
the crowd, to be sure, were loving all of it –
all of it except the thoroughly inconsiderate video
cameraman that is, clearly some third-rate amateur
who’d never worked at a gig before. Who the
jerk was I don’t know, but most of us spent
more time looking at his arse than at the band (not
by choice), until the Doctors’ management
managed to get him off the stage. It was almost
enough to ask for a rebate on the price of our tickets,
to be sure. Of course, Jozzer, who’d just
turned up for the day with Trizza, had a characteristically
contrary, yet sober and thoughtfully-crafted opinion. |
 |
| He
wrote as follows: “ …the Saw Doctors
catalogue is riddled with small-town jingoism at
its worst. Mundane, one-paced and shallow pap. Singing
about the stars in the night skies over some nothing
town in Eire doesn't work for me…the lead
singer would be OK busking - ideally in a small
town in Eire. The drummer made Animal from the Muppets
seem like a sensitive, talented percussionist. The
preening lead guitarist had no idea how talented
he was. If you're around my age, you'll remember
The Barron Knights, an 'hilarious' group of buffoons
who used to parody current hits - with about 3%
of the wit and charm of Weird Al Jankovic. |
| When
the Saws all swapped instruments during a number,
I yearned for the comedic genius that was The Barron
Knights. The culmination of the Saws' act was, of
course, a medley of their hit. When it came I wasn't
sure it had, until the stargazers around me went
even more delirious. I could Google it now. But
I really can't be bothered. And by the time I came
to write it up I'd have forgotten it. It's that
sort of song. If only the Saws had come from Skibbereen,
it would have been moderately more amusing and hopefully
more difficult to write songs about.” Ouch,
to be sure! |
|
A
sun drenched Saturday... |
| We
were agreed upon Saturday afternoon’s sun-drenched
set by an unusually garrulous Jah
Wobble (who pointedly refuses to have any ‘friends’
on his Myspace page), who performed a crowd-pleasing
set drawn from his extensive dub-drenched oeuvre,
and in a very unassuming way provided the musical
highlight of the day, if not the weekend. |
| With
Neville Murray on percussion, Clive Bell on pipes
and all sorts of stuff, Chris Cookson on mesmerising
guitar, vocalist Liz Carter (?), they featured some
of Wobble’s English Folk song material, and
tunes such as ‘Visions of you’. Towards
the end he reintroduced Mrs Wobble who’d been
on the stage for the first two pieces: “Oi
oi, here’s the missus, so we’ll do some
more of that Chinese dub stuff.” Mrs W was
playing, with some dexterity, the Guxheng, or Chinese
zither, the instrument at the heart of Wobble’s
latest venture, named imaginatively ‘Chinese
Dub’. He’s been touring this during
the summer with a Chinese orchestra, singers and
face-changing dancers, to rave reviews. And despite
an occasional studied indifference to the audience,
Wobble’s playing, like the band’s, was
of the very highest order, not least on his encore
(“Would you like some English folk music played
in a curiously good way, or a 7-4 groove thing?”
he asked the audience). We got the groove thing,
complex, hypnotic, and something that even Robert
Fripp would have been proud of. One point to
note – for all his maverick sensibilities,
Mr Wobble left the festival ground driving a battered
grey Ford Mondeo. I might have hoped for something
more. |
 |
| We’d
also witnessed on Saturday a less-than-impressive
set from a moody Delroy
Williams, former backing singer and agent to
Desmond Dekker, with a set of fairly well-played
but badly-sung (“he’s so flat he should
be making pancakes” said Jozzer) reggae standards,
ranging from Dekker’s ‘007’ to
‘The tide is high’. |
| And
following Jah Wobble the rowdy Mike
Sanchez Band who worked the audience pretty
well with some tight boogie-woogie playing. Just
right for six-thirty in the evening. The Pretty
Things, who were also victims of the comedic cameraman,
demonstrated that for all their reputation of supposed
menace, they were really never anything more than
a good quality R&B covers band, reminding me
of the shameless propensity of many sixties bands
to rip off the work of US blues artists. Of all
the Festival acts they also seemed the worst mixed.
And before the Doctors took to the stage, we’d
observed the distressing sight of a pair of septuagenarians
- one with a hearing aid - grooving out to Stackridge’s
opening number on the Alternative Stage in their
Zimmer frames, exotic cigarettes in hands (I’m
not making it up). Shouldn’t they all be being
looked after somewhere? |
|
Mike
Sanchez |
| First
of the British bands on Sunday were Ricky
Cool and the Hoola Boola Boys. With his unlikely
haircut and painfully irrepressible good humour,
Ricky probably wasn’t quite what the damp
crowd needed, struggling as they were to come to
terms with the previous night’s hangover and
the morning’s first three or four pints. |
|
Ricky
Cool (L) - Beer stocks dwindle! (R) |
| Up
on the Alternative Stage, Juicy
Lucy played to what I swear was the same crowd,
now atrophied, that had been watching Stackridge
on Saturday. Not even the voluminous guitar of Mr
Fish, echoing from his Marshall stacks (yes –
Marshall stacks!) in an attempt to cover for the
absent and sadly invalided front man Ray Owens,
could rouse them from their deathly torpor. Indeed
the only real sign of movement was from the bar,
as beer stocks around the site began to run low
and speculators started stacking up in advance of
a shortage. And sadly we missed Geno Washington
due to “an administrative error”. The
Zombies touring band played the main stage,
fronted by Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent, and turned
in a pretty lively set, comprising a small selection
from Odessey and Oracle, and then a mixture of their
hits and Argent’s. Unwittingly they facilitated
one of the nicest moments of the weekend when guitarist
Keith Airey ripped into the lead riff of ‘God
gave rock and roll to you’, when for the first
time in three days the much-put-upon young and very
hard-working stage crew burst into huge grins of
recognition and barely-restrained air guitar. |
It
wasn’t long after this, as far as I could
tell, that the beer ran out, causing consternation
all round. We watched the excellent Richie Havens
and then as the rain fell retired to the Whiskyfun
Festival van, as the tones of Nine
Below Zero battled against the downpour. And
even Scrumpy Jack and Scrumpy Pete seemed somewhat
subdued by the rain when they returned later to
finish off their nightcap of a few twelve packs
and a packet of peanuts. And despite part-promoter
Jim Driver’s cheery optimism, how this nicely-conceived
event can run again next year I fail to see. Some
bands didn’t show up, others seemed pretty
miserable, many of the facilities were not as described,
the food was very poor, the beer ran out, the security
guards were somewhat heavy-handed, and the crowd
was as sparse as last year – albeit they were
all having fun. Next year – well, let’s
see. - Nick Morgan (photographs by Kate and
Nick).
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Colin
Blunstone and Rod Argent |
Listen:
Jah Wobble's
MySpace page
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Kate's
gig photo album  |
Check
the index of all reviews:
Nick's Concert Reviews
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There's nothing more down there... |
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