Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Field Music. The Ruby Suns. Zan Pan!
ICA, 23 February 2007
If you’re a fan of math rock maybe you’ll love Field Music too. They are English lit rock, very accomplished, very smart, very tough and tidy and a little bit fey; they announce ‘This is our penultimate song’ rather than ‘We’ve only got a couple of songs left.’ Tonight they play Shorter Shorter, A House is Not a Home, She Can Do What She Wants, all the neat, layered, clever pop they’re loved for from new album Tones of Town and earlier sets, with brothers Peter and David Brewis swapping between guitar and drums as usual, and with an extra dose of drumming from Maximo Park’s Tom English and John Bettie playing the trumpet and keyboards. It’s an adoring crowd at a sold-out gig, fans familiar with every line of every song, and they are mainly rapt, hearing how Field Music have rearranged and just played around with a lot of their stuff for the live setting. It all leaves me appreciative of their skilfulness and still waiting to feel really excited.
Before Field Music were The Ruby Suns, another band with those harmonies and sweet, sad tones from the Beach Boys. There’s five of them, twee indies from New Zealand based around Ryan McPhun and with his girlfriend on keyboards, plus a blow-up monkey, a few toy parakeets, leis round their necks and cutesy instruments (melodica, stylophone, plus little stickers all over their keyboards and too many handclaps). After very nervously playing three songs from their last album (which is better on record, by the way, and includes Maasai Mara and Look Out SOS!, two songs which help to explain why they were signed) the band liven up a bit. They even talk to the audience. Then they launch into some of the stuff for their new record (out on Memphis Industries later in the year) and look a lot happier. One – whose title goes unannounced – starts a bit like California Uber Alles and I start to feel a lot happier too, but then it drops back into twinkly so-so pop. It’s difficult not to compare The Ruby Suns with Architecture in Helsinki – another gang of Down Under mates with twee-pop in their hearts and a melodica on their stage – and they don’t come out of the comparison well.
And now down to business. The set of the night was up first, at 8:15pm, when the ICA was only about a quarter full. My new resolution, Bart Simpson style, is ‘I must always get to gigs in time to see the support band.’ Happily I did this time, and Zan Pan served up a massive helping of slinky psychy folkrock with an oozing dollop of funk sauce. They’re led by The Squire of Somerton, who released Transverberations on Memphis a couple of years ago, a track which may go into my Desert Island Discs should I ever get to sit and chat with Kirsty Young. Tonight the Squire is wearing a tight pair of red trousers, giving the crowd his best 1960s horror film stare, and playing a chunk of songs that have pomp and space-agey swooning, a tender, lonely Ziggy Stardust optimism. He sings of silver shards of memory in your eyes, of a brand new day, of riding to the infinite beyond. It’s the theme tune to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as reimagined by Prince and Marc Bolan. The Squire is a literary chap too, but his canon is not Field Music’s: he recommends we read The Man They Called My Wife, a 1960s novel by quite-a-long-way-under-the-radar US writer Stark Cole, and later sings us the storming Sirens Of Titan, named after the rather brilliant Kurt Vonnegut sci-fi novel from 1959 about the (non-)existence of god, loving the one you’re with and glowing flatfish creatures that make beautiful sounds. The songs are like medieval disco folk stories, something to sing and dance along to while discovering new, naturally occurring drugs in an English forest. Sometimes they launch into post-punky, brassy disco sounds, other times they saunter into JJ Cale cool foot-shuffles, or else they thug and crash about like a big horny dog running across the park right at you. One sounds like Let’s Go Crazy at the end, which suits me fine. The Squire of Somerton has been compared to Syd Barrett lots of times, but that doesn’t do him justice.
The rest of the band also deserve knighthoods. The drummer is a little man packed tight with joy and rhythm, baby. He twizzles his sticks while managing to be a banging thumping genius, he provides mellifluous, high and sweet backing vocals, he looks like the child of Helen Mirren and Maureen Tucker, and his grin is huge and unstoppable. He’s also called Richmond Stockwell; that name is the cherry on a very good cake. There’s a man in a kaftan on keyboards and Rick Wakeman, more or less, on bass. The four of them look like they are having a wonderful time, fully in possession of their own joy, and creating plenty for the few of us who got there early enough to see them.
If you’re a fan of math rock maybe you’ll love Field Music too. They are English lit rock, very accomplished, very smart, very tough and tidy and a little bit fey; they announce ‘This is our penultimate song’ rather than ‘We’ve only got a couple of songs left.’ Tonight they play Shorter Shorter, A House is Not a Home, She Can Do What She Wants, all the neat, layered, clever pop they’re loved for from new album Tones of Town and earlier sets, with brothers Peter and David Brewis swapping between guitar and drums as usual, and with an extra dose of drumming from Maximo Park’s Tom English and John Bettie playing the trumpet and keyboards. It’s an adoring crowd at a sold-out gig, fans familiar with every line of every song, and they are mainly rapt, hearing how Field Music have rearranged and just played around with a lot of their stuff for the live setting. It all leaves me appreciative of their skilfulness and still waiting to feel really excited.
Before Field Music were The Ruby Suns, another band with those harmonies and sweet, sad tones from the Beach Boys. There’s five of them, twee indies from New Zealand based around Ryan McPhun and with his girlfriend on keyboards, plus a blow-up monkey, a few toy parakeets, leis round their necks and cutesy instruments (melodica, stylophone, plus little stickers all over their keyboards and too many handclaps). After very nervously playing three songs from their last album (which is better on record, by the way, and includes Maasai Mara and Look Out SOS!, two songs which help to explain why they were signed) the band liven up a bit. They even talk to the audience. Then they launch into some of the stuff for their new record (out on Memphis Industries later in the year) and look a lot happier. One – whose title goes unannounced – starts a bit like California Uber Alles and I start to feel a lot happier too, but then it drops back into twinkly so-so pop. It’s difficult not to compare The Ruby Suns with Architecture in Helsinki – another gang of Down Under mates with twee-pop in their hearts and a melodica on their stage – and they don’t come out of the comparison well.
And now down to business. The set of the night was up first, at 8:15pm, when the ICA was only about a quarter full. My new resolution, Bart Simpson style, is ‘I must always get to gigs in time to see the support band.’ Happily I did this time, and Zan Pan served up a massive helping of slinky psychy folkrock with an oozing dollop of funk sauce. They’re led by The Squire of Somerton, who released Transverberations on Memphis a couple of years ago, a track which may go into my Desert Island Discs should I ever get to sit and chat with Kirsty Young. Tonight the Squire is wearing a
The rest of the band also deserve knighthoods. The drummer is a little man packed tight with joy and rhythm, baby. He twizzles his sticks while managing to be a banging thumping genius, he provides mellifluous, high and sweet backing vocals, he looks like the child of Helen Mirren and Maureen Tucker, and his grin is huge and unstoppable. He’s also called Richmond Stockwell; that name is the cherry on a very good cake. There’s a man in a kaftan on keyboards and Rick Wakeman, more or less, on bass. The four of them look like they are having a wonderful time, fully in possession of their own joy, and creating plenty for the few of us who got there early enough to see them.
