Saturday, May 19, 2012
Twenty Years And We're Still Together
Well, not quite twenty years, as it turns out this gig takes place a mere 7,281 days since I first saw The Frank And Walters, or 19.93 years if you want it that way. Sadly I haven't seen them as many times in between as I might like, but it's no real surprise that with their New York sojourn and the inevitable demands of putting food on the table our paths haven't crossed so frequently.
Support band Drawings For Paris (yes, another one of those names) ply a gentle trade in mature guitar-led pop with a moderately epic feel - they remind me of Salvation and that's never a bad thing in my book. Half a dozen tracks are downloadable from their website, and I'm especially fond of Here She Comes Again from their, er, "Salvation" ep!"
Moving on to the headliners, their story tells us something of where we've all been in the meantime. My first copy of Trains, Boats and Planes was on vinyl but I've moved on to CD versions of that and everything since, and the couple of weeks delay between the latest album Greenwich Mean Time becoming available in a digital format and the CDs being in their hands so they could stick them in the post even had me on the verge of reluctantly joining the modern world and buying the tracks in a digital format,daddio. And all the same, the album booklet being available for download in pdf format meant I could check out the lyrics to songs available as singles or in session versions before the CD itself popped into my eager, sweaty mitts.
This endless changing of the seasons is also heavily evident in the themes of this album, with artwork based around the elements of the clockwork mechanism and songs with titles like Twenty Years, The Clock and Trust In The Future all making that point clear.
Band stalwarts Paul Linehan and Ashley Keating are joined only by fresh-faced guitarist Rory Murphy, keyboardist Cian Corbett being unavailable for the evening. Trimmed down to a trio, old songs and new bounce along, energetically buoyed up on the ineffable humour that runs between Linehan and Keating like lightning runs down a conductor cable. When your drummer has a vocal mike almost exclusively so he can backchat his singer, it's a sign your band exists in a separate plane of its own internal dynamic.
Rory's broken guitar string leads into an improvised bout of Linehanisms, just as Paul's bass guitar strap coming loose towards the end of the set results in him completing most of This Is Not a Song supporting the weight of his bass on his knee despite the poor efforts at "helping" him by draping the strap over the strings on the fretboard.
This pretty much sums up the Frank and Walters - whatever happens, they just carry on, filling the world with beautiful, thoughtful sounds and apparently unaffected by changing fashions and sounding as good as they've ever done.
Twenty years and we're doing fine.
Twenty Years is track 11 on Greenwich Mean Time - buy it here.
setlist in full
Tony Cochrane
Trust In The Future
* broken guitar string debacle
Fashion Crisis Hits New York
Loneliness And Sweet Romance
Plenty Times
Little Dolls
Landslide
That's Life
Indie Love Song
The Model
The Parson
After All
Colours
This Is Not A Song
Michael
Labels: Drawings For Paris, gigs, The Frank And Walters
B I D Spells Bid
Once upon a time there was Janice Long and then John Peel on Radio1 in the evenings. This period pretty much pre-dates me listening to music in any meaningful way, having records of my own or having the slightest inkling that going to see bands in a live environment would be possible, never mind a commonplace part of my life.
Somewhere in the middle of all that stuff was plenty that I didn't really understand - well, it didn't have the same singalong immediacy as Neil Sedaka and all the other stuff Sir Jim'll was playing on Sounds of the Sixties which was the weekly musical input to my young life - but even though I was never a regular listener, Peel and Long (and Nightingale) brought me names that would stick in my mind.
Names and the odd tune, Annie repeatedly offering Napoleon XIV's They're Coming To Take Me Away and Barnes and Barnes' Fishheads on the sunday night request show, Camper van Beethoven's Take The Skinheads Bowling and the likes of Half Man Half Biscuit and Bogshed sneaked their way through into my consciousness. One of Peel and Long, I assume, also brought me This Island Earth's See That Glow and Jacobs Ladder by The Monochrome Set.
Fast forward a couple of lifetimes and I'm looking through a local venue's website for confirmation (and ticket price) of a show by one of my favourite bands and who should pop up out of nowhere? Apart from the 'we're climbing Jacob's ladder' line from the chorus I can recall nothing else beyond that I remembered that I liked it but nevertheless that residual memory was enough. True, I picked up a copy of Eligible Bachelors somewhere along the way, for 99p in the Virgin Smegmastore closing down sale, I think, but I hadn't even looked up Jacob's Ladder on youtube till the evening of the gig just before leaving the house.
So who on earth is going to go and see The Monochrome Set in 2012? At 8.30, there were four or five of us in the upstairs gig room but by showtime at 9.00 something like 60 people had crammed into the room, not bad on a wednesday night for a band who haven't exactly shared the ubiquity of Adele in recent times. There's a handful of diehard fans and a healthy swathe of the relatively youthful curious.
As for me, I thought they were great and I had a really good evening. There's a fair amount of Monochrome Set on youtube and I've looked at plenty of it since the gig. And I heartily recommend it if you want some slightly off-kilter pop music chook full of melodic and lyrical hooks.
_
Somewhere in the middle of all that stuff was plenty that I didn't really understand - well, it didn't have the same singalong immediacy as Neil Sedaka and all the other stuff Sir Jim'll was playing on Sounds of the Sixties which was the weekly musical input to my young life - but even though I was never a regular listener, Peel and Long (and Nightingale) brought me names that would stick in my mind.
Names and the odd tune, Annie repeatedly offering Napoleon XIV's They're Coming To Take Me Away and Barnes and Barnes' Fishheads on the sunday night request show, Camper van Beethoven's Take The Skinheads Bowling and the likes of Half Man Half Biscuit and Bogshed sneaked their way through into my consciousness. One of Peel and Long, I assume, also brought me This Island Earth's See That Glow and Jacobs Ladder by The Monochrome Set.
Fast forward a couple of lifetimes and I'm looking through a local venue's website for confirmation (and ticket price) of a show by one of my favourite bands and who should pop up out of nowhere? Apart from the 'we're climbing Jacob's ladder' line from the chorus I can recall nothing else beyond that I remembered that I liked it but nevertheless that residual memory was enough. True, I picked up a copy of Eligible Bachelors somewhere along the way, for 99p in the Virgin Smegmastore closing down sale, I think, but I hadn't even looked up Jacob's Ladder on youtube till the evening of the gig just before leaving the house.
So who on earth is going to go and see The Monochrome Set in 2012? At 8.30, there were four or five of us in the upstairs gig room but by showtime at 9.00 something like 60 people had crammed into the room, not bad on a wednesday night for a band who haven't exactly shared the ubiquity of Adele in recent times. There's a handful of diehard fans and a healthy swathe of the relatively youthful curious.
As for me, I thought they were great and I had a really good evening. There's a fair amount of Monochrome Set on youtube and I've looked at plenty of it since the gig. And I heartily recommend it if you want some slightly off-kilter pop music chook full of melodic and lyrical hooks.
Labels: gigs, The Monochrome Set
