Anyone (in Oxford) can play guitar

When I was 13 I once moaned to a penpal that Oxford was very dull and there was nothing to do apart from shopping (and being dragged round Cornmarket by my mum wasn’t much fun either). The only exciting thing to happen was a Radio 1 roadshow at South Park, which I wasn’t allowed to go to. Listening to it on the radio instead, I heard a band called Ride, who were from Oxford. By the next Summer I started to read Nightshift and then Sound City came along, and I began to discover that Oxford wasn’t such a dull place after all. In fact, I started to think that every city had a local scene like this and long lists of great bands that couldn’t quite break through. It was only many years later that I realised just quite how lucky we were in Oxford and since then had difficulties explaining to others just how I spent my spare time in the early 2000s.

If I have to do that now, I’ll just need to sit them down in front of ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’. It tells the story of successive generations of Oxford bands, each one just about managing to do that little bit more than the last generation, until you get to the R-word (Tallulah Gosh, Ride,.Servedriver), but at the same time it also tells the more familiar story to many Oxford bands of the might have beens (Dustball, The Rock of Travolta, The Candyskins). It’s not just about the bands as distinct units, but also how they helped each other out.

Of course with a film like this it doesn’t tell the full story. There are loads of other bands who didn’t get a mention, and it was mainly focused around Jericho and the Cowley Road. But it is a great scrapbook of memories and made me glad I grew up in Oxford after all.

Female role models

It appears that the theme for this year’s gigs are revisiting bands from my youth and well loved albums. Halfway through Electrelane’s set tonight, something clicked, and I realised that the band had come along just at the right time of my life. They were around during my early 20s, when everything was hopeful and it felt like that I could do anything with my life. Just like Electrelane’s music and attutude.

They may well be the only band I can think of who have suceeded within the strict confines of the music industry. They are four girls, but they don’t need to play up their femininity. Mia’s guitar playing tonight was jawdropping, beating anything that most other guitarists would do. The layers and depth of their songs bring comfort and yet aren’t dull. They prove that who you are doesn’t really matter. All you need is the intelligence and bravery to go out there and just do it. It’s a good reminder that there are still a great number of possibilities out there.

Last Big Weekend

Flaming Lips and a Radio Telescope, originally uploaded by jellybeanz.

At the start of the week, this weekend already seemed a bit ambitious and obsessive. Friday night, rush to North London from work to watch Flaming Lips perform The Soft Bulletin at Alexandra Palace. Then on Saturday lunchtime catch the train up to Cheshire to watch Flaming Lips again, this time next to the third largest radio telescope in the world at Jodrell Bank. The plan for Sunday was to have a lazy day in the countryside followed by recovery in London in the evening.

Then the messages for spare tickets for Pulp on Sunday appeared, and in a perfect combination of planning and not-planning, Sunday turned into a rush from Euston to Hyde Park, in time for TV on the Radio, Grace Jones and… Pulp.

Of the Flaming Lips sets, nothing will really quite beat the gig at Jodrell Bank. This was the first Jodrell Bank live, and it is not entirely clear how they will ever beat this line up. Flaming Lips were the perfect band in that setting and they had a receptive audience who equally loved science (the cheers for the scientist who spoke in between the bands were as loud as the cheers for the band) and their glorious, hopeful music. Sometimes the Flaming Lips props of balloons, confetti and lazers seem over the top, but it was just right in this setting, with the radio telescope and the sky just reminding us how we fit in in this universe.

Partly it was the excitement of the first part of the weekend which made me decide to go and brave the final day of the Wireless Festival. When the choice was between sitting at home and going to see Pulp on a beautiful evening, the answer was simple. It didn’t quite beat the giant indie disco of the Blur show at the same location two years ago, but even then the gig was a lot of fun. Though it did seem a bit odd to be singing along with 50,000 others about how it feels to be an outsider.

Pretty epic weekend

Haven’t had a weekend like this in a while. It started on Thursday, with Chilly Gonzales at Koko, possibly his biggest headlining show in the UK for a while. The trouble with the growing popularity of Chilly Gonzales is that his shows now try to please, mainly performing songs off the most recent album, and losing a bit of the confrontation that made the shows fun in the first place. For example, at his Bloomsbury Ballroom show last year, he was standing on the photographer, spitting at the audience and stomping on the piano with his feet. The show at Koko was a lot more civilised by comparison, but that isn’t necessarily a good thing. It would be good to get a bit of that Chilly-edginess back in the show.

At the other extreme end of the musical spectrum, Saturday night was spent at Kings Place, listening to the Aurora Orchestra. The star attraction of the show was to hear a new piece composed by Nico Muhly for a six string electric violin, called Seeing is Believing. It will probably take a few listens for it to sink in, as there is so much packed into the piece that it is hard to recall how one section fitted in with another. However, one thing it does prove is that Muhly can do a lot more than just make things sound pretty. (This was how most of his arrangements have seemed.) The accompanying pieces were interesting too, with Muhly’s beautiful arrangements of two motets by William Byrd, and ending on a chaotic piece by John Adams.

From a silly entertainer to a night of contemporary classical music, the only way to end the weekend was for something in between. The Barbican should have made more of the fact that their Marathon Steve Reich weekend was really a marathon. When a show starts at 6pm on a Sunday night, the initial assumption is that they started early so everyone can be off home early for the end of the weekend. Instead, we found ourselves still in the Barbican at six and half hours later (well seven and an half – having got there early to see the free performance by So Percussion.) Still, if nothing else, it was a great bargain for the ticket price.

I’ve wanted to see Clapping Music performed live since I first heard about it aged 10, and what better way to see it perform than with Reich himself? It kicked off the evening’s theme in the Reich pieces, complex rhythms shifting against each other, sometimes just seeming like an endless patter and at other times dissonance. Later on, with the performances of the melodic Reich pieces, the same occurred but now with harmonies as well as rhythm. To fill the gaps between the change over, So Percussion also popped up in the bar to play various percussive pieces, including Drumming Part 1. In another setting, it would have been easy to imagine the whole room dancing and raving along to it, such is the narrow divide between the classical and contemporary world.

As the theme of the Barbican weekend was music inspired by Steve Reich, the bill also included full-length sets by Owen Pallett, Clogs and Max Richter. Owen Pallett performed a marvellous orchestral version of Heartland. With the Britten Sinfonia at hand, it would have seemed obvious that all the samples and loops could be delegated to the orchestra. Instead, the orchestra was used to double up on the accompaniment with all the usual loops in their normal place. The only issue was the sound, that the band were so loud in the mix that it was a struggle to hear the orchestra at times. Still, when it all got going at full pelt, for example for The Great Elsewhere, it sounded wonderful.

Five hours into the bill, after all the excitement of the Reich pieces, Clogs and Max Richter came at the perfect time to round off the evening and calm down proceedings. It was a great way to round off the weekend. Max Richter’s string quintet produced such beautiful textures that if I had a sleeping bag (and they let me) I could have easily settled in for the night in the Barbican auditorium.