Invisible Happenings

In Which: Our Hero Makes A Second Bonzo Reference, Performs Some 'Manual Labour' And As Such Demonstrates A Sympathetic Understanding For What Those Less Fortunate Than Himself Must Regularly Feel, Plays A Gig And Insults A Huge Black Dude From London.

Life's like that, isn't it? as I believe Vivian Stanshall once correctly remarked. One minute you're hauling birdshit covered rotting timber from a roof, the next you're destroying the valuable equipment of an unsuspecting prominent jazz bassist. And all via scoffing chocolates in a disused Prince of Wales kitchen, staring into the blank vessels of an anisotropically loved one's eyes, and reupholstering two sofas. I suppose I can understand when people tell me I have a multifarious or consistently 'interesting' job. Such a motley of novelties has its ups and downs.

Last night we played a gig with The Invisible. There wasn't a huge turn out, which was a shame (well only slightly; I was quite concerned before that a BIG TIME Not-Mercury-Music-Award-Winning-Band would entice a full house = me defecating masonry), especially since Norwich was the first gig of their tour, and opening to a room of silence is always slightly unnerving. I used to think the people of Norwich must appear tremendously respectful to artists playing at NAC, but having actually done it now myself, the fact that nobody makes a sound throughout performance is incredibly eerie and off-putting. Us being the kind of people we are, in the absence of heckling we find ourselves babbling senselessly about puffins or moustaches.

Anyway, we had a merrily fraught sound check in which neither my guitar, Chris's bass rig or The Invisible's bass rig worked, and lasted a rather hasty ten minutes (The Invisible of course arrived an hour before doors opened - you don't have to be on time when you reach the echelons of having your album chosen as the best of 2009 by the iTunes office).

Look at me, I sound spiteful. I really don't mean to. I have an enormous amount of respect for them, their live show was faultless, and an incredible show of mastery without the baggage of inaccessible jazz-wankery that so often surrounds such music. I have seen the bassist Tom several times before playing for Polar Bear (surely the best British jazz band at the moment) and have never failed to be impressed - what is most astounding is the ability of three jazz players to transfer that language into a tightly regimented pop format without losing any of the rhythmic diversity, melodic interest or groove. Their music is sparse in the sense of its indie-disco simplicity and tightly controlled structures, and thus almost vulnerably accessible (an approach completely different to ours, and frankly most jazz players, in which one throws as much as one can at a song so that in the likely event of things going wrong, nobody notices, owing to there being so much else happening, and you having played it so fast that by the time things go wrong you've already moved on to something completely different). Surprisingly though, they managed to improvise within this framework - their set ended with a huge ten minute post-rock mountain, building up and up in a weird frenetic disco.

But now who's wanking on? I'm almost finished, I promise. I spoke to the band when they'd finished, and told them how much I enjoyed their set, and how I'd found it surprising the extent to which they managed to create drawn out improvised sections and epic climaxes. I was returned strained smiles and polite 'thank you's.

Of course I now realise the reason for this is that I basically went up to them and said, "Hey guys I really enjoyed your set tonight, which was totally surprising."

Oh well.

On a lighter note, I'm going to Finland on Friday. How rad is that?!

Actually, no need to answer that question. I know how rad it is. Very.