I went to see the Dirty Projectors on Friday night.
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charleston and
spoombung have already given rock-solid accounts of how magnificent it was, and I'd have to agree. I'd go to absurd lengths to see this band at the moment – although, having said that, I haven't seized the opportunity to see them play with Battles at the Astoria later this week, mainly because it'll be rammed solid with people, and I prefer spacious venues that are about 2/3 empty.
Co-incidentally, or perhaps not, the Dome in Tufnell Park was about 2/3 empty on Friday night. Which is probably bad news for the promoter, and if the Dirty Projectors were on some kind of percentage deal it was probably bad for them, too, and of course they'd probably rather be playing to a packed house – but for me it was perfect. No idiots blocking your line of vision or screaming at each other or accidentally pouring their pint of Kronenbourg in your bag. In fact, the only major irritant of the evening were the second band on the bill, a French group called Cheveu.
I've since been to their MySpace page, and actually they don't sound that bad at all. But in context they were just profoundly annoying. The night was running late; 95% of the people there had paid their £8 to see the Dirty Projectors, but Cheveu, having failed to have a soundcheck, didn't just quickly sort out a linecheck and get going. They faffed about – loudly – for about 25 minutes, trying to achieve a perfect mix in their monitors; all the time the clock was ticking, people were looking at their watches and wondering if the gig would actually finish before the last tube left. Then they left the stage in order to make their grand entrance – which no-one really gave a shit about – with the guitarist wearing a large pair of amusing red spectacles. Nice touch. That's a bit like Frank Sidebottom wearing a pink tie, but at least Frank has a few levels of irony operating.
Anyway, their singer bellowed loudly into three microphones over bog standard bar-chords and Casio beats, thrashing about like a misunderstood genius. While the Dirty Projectors were playing, he also thrashed about at the front like a misunderstood genius, trying to attract attention to himself. He was actually an easily understood twat. So there you go. Gig review over, and mainly about the band I particularly disliked.
*
I emptied my shed today. It yielded up some interesting contents, including half an old sofa, a broken watering can, my grandad's cut-glass brandy decanter, two small teddy bears that had almost completely perished, 700 Spearmint CDs, 360 Host 7"s, 1200 Free French CDs, 300 Gag 7"s, 50 Keatons LPs and a hoe. Along with those were huge numbers of cardboard boxes that once contained items of musical technology that have either already broken, or are certainly well outside their warranty period. Surveying the pile of junk in our overgrown communal back garden was like a depressing overview of my failure to make a living as a musician.
(But to tell you the truth, I quite like that. If playing in bands is about anything, it's about glorious, unadulterated failure, the kind of appalling, argument-filled, cash-haemorrhaging f#ckups that made those odd moments of triumph seem like gold-plated heavenly intervention.)
There are few things as funny, in retrospect, as colossal piles of your own unsold CDs and vinyl. You had such hopes, at one point. You actually thought "hey, if I press up 2,000 copies instead of 1,000, the per-unit price is slashed massively – that's got to be a good idea." Of course, it was a terrible idea, because you only sold 142 of the bastards. Those spider-strewn boxes you see on the right, behind that tree, are a beautiful symbol of youthful optimism. My former boss and Spearmint's former manager, Nick Hobbs, used to be very into the idea of having a large stock of ones own back catalogue. It was his opinion that these records would, once you had achieved fame, start to sell steadily, generating you a regular income. To him, these CDs resembled a potential cash mountain. To me, today, they resemble a considerable burden and present a considerable storage problem.
So do I sling them in a skip? Or keep them? Maybe I should keep some of them... but how many? Is it likely that anyone will ever want to buy them? Or in 3 years time, will the CD – or indeed music as a whole – be viewed with the same amusement and scorn that we currently have for the 8-track cartridge, top-loading washing machines or powdered egg? Please provide answers below. I'm supposed to speak at a music conference in Brighton on Friday, and I'm thinking of using this simultaneously depressing and amusing scenario as my over-arching theme.
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creative
amused
