New weird britain

Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
john eden said:
local scenes used to be quite shit on the whole - a bunch of people in rock bands trying to “make it”. They would then gravitate to London.

Now that people can’t make it or move to London there is space to bed in and do weird stuff. Paul STN and I went to a great mini festival in Yeovil which was a showcase for West Country strangeness and there was a proper sense of community.

There seem to be similar things happening in the North West etc.

It is all hype and people will remember the big Wire stories about Cambridge (including our own Pete Um) and the West Country (with our own Hacker Farm and IX Tab). I don’t think that sort of exposure ends up making any difference in the long term, but that is good from my perspective. These people are going to keep doing weird stuff because they can’t do anything else.
Click to expand...

I think there's a bit of a thing of people in very local scenes being kind of able to commit harder to whatever they do because people are kind-of prepared for it, right? I mean, there's a lot of mythology around super confrontational gigs with people doing extremely weird stuff in front of totally hostile audience but in practice a lot of the time it's actually some second support act and everyone just goes to the bar (or checks them out on Bandcamp and then turns up late) to leave them being weird to an empty room and it's shit.

Whereas there's a lot of bands around Sheffield who do a quite specific mix of self-parody and very serious and who'd probably be a bit of a different proposition if there weren't generally a bunch of regulars / mates in the audience who already know where the whole thing is pitched. I guess Pete Um kind of fits into the same bracket almost - like, he obviously does gig successfully outside of Cambridge but the audience probably doesn't come into it thinking "yep, deadpan talking over minidisks, here we go..." in quite the same way.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top