While I was still as far as ever from making it a full-time job, 2005 feels like the year my music journalism really kicked into gear, with seafront venue the Concorde 2 pretty much my second home. I was there on the penultimate day of January, no doubt bracing myself against the cold on the long walk down Madeira Drive, to spend some time in the company of Lars Frederiksen & The Bastards. As you can no doubt imagine, this band was fronted by one Lars Frederiksen, best known as co-frontman with Berkeley punk rock mainstays Rancid. This was not an instance of a successful rock musician forming a side-project to explore a hitherto unheard side of their musical psyche, more of a busman's holiday: a chance to play shit-kicking punk'n'roll with none of the pressure of the day job. There was a borderline cheesiness at play, Lars running onstage wrapped up like he'd just come in from that winter evening before stripping off his coat, hat and scarf and chucking them to a waiting roadie. The banter was pure playing to the gallery, all about how loyal British crowds had been and how he was no different to any of us and so forth, but coming from a Californian punk with facial tattoos (in the days before they were de rigeur for every SoundCloud rapper) these platitudes seemed at least partway heartfelt. Only a couple of the Bastards' original tunes were as memorable as Rancid's, but a bunch of cover versions, including the rock'n'roll standard Leaving Here and (if memory serves) For You by the Anti-Nowhere League, emphasized that this was a party set.
The last day of January found me in the cosier confines of the Freebutt, in the company of Death From Above 1979. These guys seem to occupy a special place in a lot of people's affections, perhaps in part as a result of releasing one cult album and then splitting. Back at the start of 2005, they were already pretty hip with the sort of folks rocking ironic mullets, a resource in which Brighton was not lacking. There were rumblings in the underground that accused them of swooping in to capitalise on the fashionable status of Lightning Bolt with a more mainstream-palatable variant, like some sort of gentrification of the bass'n'drums noise-duo scene, but their music was too dissimilar for that to hold water. To these ears, the Canadian pair sounded more like an amalgamation of Queens Of The Stone Age riffs and punk-funk danceability, and while my review noted that this sound allowed for little variety in their set, it was still pretty complimentary. Excitingly, it shared a whole page, complete with photos of both bands, with my appraisal of Lars and his Bastards, making for an all Brighton/all me page in the magazine.
In February, I went to see Hood play Po Na Na in support of Outside Closer, which ended up being their last album. Similarly, sometime around early 2005 I saw my old Southampton chums Black Nielson at the Pressure Point, but they weren't to last the year. Since then, frontman Mike Gale has proven their most prolific ex-member, releasing a bunch of material both as Co-Pilgrim and under his own name.
My first international punk rock gig of the year turned up in March, when excellent Italian screamo types La Quiete and Norwegian emo punks Catena Collapse turned up at the Hobgoblin. Great as these both were, the show was particularly memorable as my first encounter with Seven Arrows In Your Bastard Heart, a new band fronted by Adam and also featuring a bunch of Southampton types including Nick from Disoma and Wes from Parade Of Enemies etc. They were brilliantly described on the gig's flyer as "10 minutes of bile and fury", and if that sounds like your kind of thing their demo appears to be available for free download at the link below. I feel I must warn you that it's slightly longer than ten minutes. Maybe they'd written another song by the time they "laid it down".
https://upwiththelark.bandcamp.com/album/demo
I'd been a fan of Nile's Egyptological death metal blast since Peel started spinning tunes like Chapter For Transforming Into A Snake and Destruction Of The Temple Of The Enemies Of Ra on his show a few years earlier, so it was pretty special to finally get to see them when they pitched up at the Concorde 2, with Dying Fetus in support, no less. It was a rare treat, as Brighton was hardly a metal town - Behemoth, at the time of writing a festival-headlining extreme metal, er, behemoth, had played the Pressure Point at the start of the year to a tiny crowd, putting them at a similar level in Brighton's affections to Black Nielson - although, as we'll discover in due course, there was new venue in town which might change that.
The following week I was up in the smoke, in the company of my friends Lexy and Jo, to see Dead Meadow play the Camden Barfly. This was a cracking bill all the way, with Lords opening proceedings. Not to be confused with the Louisville punk band who were active around the same time, or indeed with '60s German beat combo The Lords, this lot hailed from Nottingham, featured people who'd previously played in the likes of Reynolds, Schema and Wolves (Of Greece!) and would go on to play in the likes of Grey Hairs, Hey Colossus and Kogumaza, and played a warped, punked-up take on '70s blues rock. To give you some idea, their repertoire over the years included more than one ZZ Top cover, but also a Bilge Pump number. They were putting it about a fair bit in '05, so we'll be catching up with them later.
Next on were Philadelphia band Stinking Lizaveta. I remember seeing their third album, er, III, in the racks in Southampton and being intrigued. The band picture on the cover made them look up my street, and they were on Fugazi man Joe Lally's doom label Tolotta, who'd put out stuff by Spirit Caravan, The Obsessed and, well, Dead Meadow, but I'd never heard of them and thought their name was pretty terrible. This was almost certainly my first experience of them, and we were all blown away by their instrumental doom jazz, complete with a crazy-looking upright double bass and at least one impressive beard. By the time Dead Meadow came on, I was three sheets to the wind and possibly not as receptive to their meandering psych rock as I should have been. I do remember bumping into Richie from You're Smiling Now But We'll All Turn Into Demons, who gave me a copy of a solo album he'd done which, if memory serves, was influenced by the paintings of Pieter Bruegel The Elder. I still have this somewhere and must listen to it again! According to an email Lexy sent the next day, I was last seen setting the world to rights with some dudes at a pasty stand at Victoria station, which sounds about right.
Somehow I got home, and by the following Sunday I was back at it at the Concorde, reviewing The Dwarves. Local punkers Slaughterhouse 57 opened the show, with Winnebago Deal playing in the middle. Not sure I can improve on my description of the latter as a cross between Fu Manchu and the truck out of Duel, but I will add that an ageing, mohawked punter decided to mount a not-entirely-welcome stage invasion. The Dwarves were already getting on for two decades in the game at this point, and as much as they'd spent that time getting fucked up and into fights, faking their own deaths and releasing records in absolutely filthy sleeves, they'd also hit upon a damn-near perfect fusion of punk'n'roll attitude and bubblegum hooks.
A couple of weeks later, contemporary records - by which I mean, in this case, an email sent to Jimmy - suggest that I managed to get to two shows in one evening. The first of these was a quick jaunt to catch Seven Arrows In Your Bastard Heart, who were playing at the Engine Room in support of Candy Sniper (the latter being another of those bands who I definitely saw on more than one occasion, but can't find any evidence of exactly when). This appears to be the first time I went to the Engine Room, a dingy cellar at the bottom of the restaurant-filled Preston Street which would become one of my regular haunts for at least the rest of the decade, with a particular slant towards heavy music: punk and hardcore for sure, but also the kind of thrash/death/sludge/black/post-metal which had been somewhat underserved in Brighton prior to this. My band Gorse would also play there a bunch of times, but we're getting a few years ahead of ourselves there... The second show of the night involved a hike across town to the Freebutt, where I caught Lords, who I told you were putting themselves about a bit, and Red Monkey. Without checking, I don't remember whether this was the first time I'd got to see the Newcastle indie-punks; it feels like I should have seen them in Southampton, but perhaps I'm just thinking of Milky Wimpshake, with whom they shared members. Either way, they were brilliant in Brighton, and I left that night clutching LPs by both ver Monkey and ver Wimpshake.
In April '05, there was no let-up when it came to indie-punk bands who'd probably heard a few Minutemen records, which is probably not a sentence anybody's written before. It would appear that the very next evening, I was back to the Freebutt to see the very good Giant Haystacks. This lot hailed from Oakland but featured a Scottish chap called Allan, who I believe is still bringing angular punk rock to the new world in the band Neutrals. Once again, money was exchanged and the second (and sadly final) Giant Haystacks album came home with me.
https://gianthaystacks.bandcamp.com/album/blunt-instrument
In something of a diversion from these last two events, the next gig I went to was Wednesday 13 on Friday 12 at the Concorde 2. Sticking with the numbers theme, the support band were Finnish goth-glamsters The 69 Eyes. I'm fairly sure I know people of otherwise sound judgement who think this lot are at least OK, but I'm afraid I thought they were laughably appalling, even suggesting to Jimmy via email that they might have been the worst band I'd ever seen. I bumped into a couple of my acquaintance after their set and proceeded to slag them off, before noticing that one of them had just bought one of their shirts from the merch stand. Whoops.
For those that don't know Wednesday 13, he'd first come to prominence fronting the band Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13, before coming to slightly more prominence by forming the Murderdolls alongside the drummer from Slipknot. As a result, by 2005 he'd come to sufficient prominence to be recording and touring under his own name, with solo debut Transylvania 90210 under his belt. I suspect that you've probably got the cut of his jib from the various names and titles quoted above, but just in case I should probably point out that his business was very much at the Rocky Horror Picture Show end of horror-glam-punk-metal, and all the better for the humour that description suggests. With perhaps a lower touring budget than in his Murderdolls days, one of his stage props was an umbrella emblazoned with the word "Fuck".
A week later, The 69 Eyes' crown was being challenged by The Glitterati, a bunch of trumped-up fashion twats playing at being cock rockers and performing as part of a package tour optimistically titled "The New School Of Rock" at the Concorde. This was a pretty blatant attempt to throw some bands into the slipstream generated by the success of The Darkness, also featuring the reasonably aceptable The Black Velvets, whose 70s-informed rocking was not unlike my Gilamonsters bandmate Steeny's rather superior The Bullycats, and the surprisingly enjoyable Hurricane Party, whose unironic, drumstick-twirling, permy hair 80s rawk was delivered with a charm entirely lacking in the evening's headliners.
Quite possibly needing a break from retro rock, if not from a certain venue, I was back at the C2 for Boom Bip, a pretty smart hip hop/electronica merchant who'd first come to my attention when he did an album with leftfield rapper Doseone a few years previously. On this occasion, he was touring in support of the excellent Blue Eyed In The Red Room album, which included high profile guest spots from Nina Nastasia and Gruff Rhys. Don't think either of these turned up, of course, but a few years later Messrs Rhys and, er, Bip would collaborate as Neon Neon and, no doubt attempting to match that Bruegel album by Richie out of the Demons, release a concept record about the life of motorcar mogul John DeLorean.
At the end of the month I was at, oh yes, the Concorde 2, for the double whammy of Isis and Jesu. The latter were the then fairly new band formed by Justin Broadrick, whose CV includes multiple fronts of extremity including early Napalm Death, Godflesh and Techno-Animal (and, at the time of writing, JK Flesh). Jesu felt like a shoegaze counterpoint to the fearsome industrial grind of Godflesh, retaining a degree of pummeling repetition but with a more melodic impulse in evidence. Isis, whose 2010 dissolution would probably come in the nick of time in terms of how people would receive their name, were at the peak of their influence at this point, having essentially been credited with the creation of post-metal alongside Neurosis. Purists will maintain that their best work was behind them by 2005, but I'd still dug the previous year's Panopticon and was chuffed to finally see them live.
A frankly bewildering musical about-turn next, although no change of venue. At the suggestion of my work buddy Dan, and with at least one other person (Miles? Greg? Sam? Steve?), I was back at the Concorde to go and see The Magic Numbers. I can't say their breezy indie-folk has proven an enduring presence in my listening habits, but they were pretty decent that evening. Opening up were The Pipettes, one of a bunch of twee-but-engaging Brighton bands who were doing the rounds in the middle of the decade. Their '60s girl group-inspired shenanigans would give them a couple of actual hits the following year, but a Sugababes-style constantly-changing line-up ultimately did for them. Various members would continue to make music, best of all Gwenno, who's released a couple of albums of charming psych-pop in Cornish and Welsh.
Finally going to a gig which wasn't at the Concorde, I caught Million Dead at the Pressure Point a week or so later. In what seems to be a recurring theme, this would be the last time I got to see them. Their second album Harmony No Harmony had done alright, but singer Frank has since suggested that for the last year of their existence, the band had become "Four people who want to kill each other," which certainly lends additional poignancy to HNH single Living The Dream. At the end of the show, I attempted to tell Frank how the Million Dead song I Am The Party had helped me deal with the death of John Peel, as described last time. As the venue PA was still blasting out music, I conveyed this by shouting in his ear while other people milled round, waiting for his attention, so I'm not sure he really took it in. Since then, he has of course become far more successful in his own right, while fellow ex-members of Million Dead will pop up in these parts again in Palehorse, Who Owns Death TV, Future Of The Left and probably some other bands I can't immediately bring to mind.
About a week later, I headed to the Freebutt to check out Since By Man. The Milwaukee band's rockin' post-hardcore was decent enough, but I was more into the other two bands: Google-resistant Danish types Lack, with their gloomy, arty hardcore, and locals The Plague Sermon, whose mixture of screamo attack and epic post-rock was well up my street. The latter became firm favourites for the rest of their existence; I already knew Jed and would become mates with frontman Aaron, starting the following evening, when I went to review forgettable emo bunch Hopesfall at the Concorde 2. My name had already been crossed off on the guest list when I got there, and I figured out that it had been taken by the similarly-named Olly out of Johnny Truant. I don't remember whether I ended up paying in or blagging it, or whether I already knew Olly Truant, but when I got in I approached him in the front bar to discuss this hilarious turn of events. Anyway, he was sat with Aaron from The Plague Sermon, and chatting to those two meant the night wasn't a total waste of time.
A rather more favourable write-up - and my first lead review, no less - was forthcoming a week later when Napalm Death played The Old Market, their first time in Brighton/Hove since 1988. This seemed like a long gap, but they've nearly equalled that again, with their first show in Brighton since 2005 scheduled for November 2020, Covid-19 allowing. (As an aside, many of the buzzwords and key phrases used around the coronavirus crisis feel like they could come from a Napalm tracklisting).
Anyway, this show as on the Bank Holiday Monday at the end of May (or Bank Holocaust Monday as the flyer I've kept tastefully put it), so it was an early kick-off with a bunch of bands on the bill. Work commitments meant that myself, Dan and Greg didn't make it down in time to see most of these, including Constant State Of Terror, for whom Adam was playing bass. I have it in my head that Architects might have played too, though they weren't on the flyer; either way, it was another ten weeks or so before I'd see them for the first time. In the event, the supports we did catch were the sutably death-themed Do Or Die and Diecast, their solid-but unremarkable qualities summed up by the fact that the most memorable thing about either set was the way Diecast's singer kept referring to the Southern, seaside city in which they were playing as Birmingham.
There's no doubt that the Old Market could have been fuller, but Napalm were still on blistering form. They were back down to a four-piece following the departure of Jesse Pintado, and to my mind there was something about the sound of them with only one guitar that felt quintessentially Napalm, harking back to their first couple of albums and what I thought of as their classic period. As previously discussed, their 2000 album Enemy Of The Music Business had brought them back to the top of their game, and this winning streak was still in evidence five years later on the just-released the Code Is Red... Long Live The Code. This new album got a decent showing that Bank Holiday Monday, alongside classics from across their career. As it was a live review, I needed to do a short interview with bassist and longest-standing member Shane Embury afterwards. Standard rock star practice has musicians banging on about how great the crowds are in the UK and so forth; Shane told me, rather winningly, about his trapped wind.
As I've almost certainly said before, when I first heard Napalm, on the now-infamous Arena heavy metal documentary in 1989, I'd initially thought, incorrectly, that I'd hit the limit of what I could reasonably enjoy. In a couple of years, I'd progressed through The Cult, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Anthrax and Slayer, but surely these herberts were too extreme for me? Well, obviously, I was wrong. However, sixteen years later, and a couple of weeks after Napalm played Hove, I had a remarkably similar feeling as I was pinned against the wall of the Freebutt by the sound of Wolf Eyes.
I wasn't entirely unprepared. I had heard, and to some extent enjoyed, the previous year's Burned Mind album. According to Wikipedia, this was one of 22 Wolf Eyes releases in 2004, including two different 12"s of the track Stabbed In The Face, but as it came out on Sub Pop rather than some label releasing limited pressings on CD-R or tape, it had a little more of what you might call a promotional push. It was, clearly, a horrible racket, but it was only when I experienced it in the flesh did I consider that maybe this was, finally, the limit of what I could reasonably enjoy. I'm still not sure, really. Most of a decade later, I'd end up at Sticky Mike's Frog Bar during a boozy night out with my work mates to discover they were playing downstairs. Having described them as the most extreme band I'd ever seen, I was somewhat disappointed to find, when we snuck in at the end of their set, that they were playing something closer to bog-standard industrial goth.
If records can be believed, and for the sake of this entire enterprise we're all going to hope they can be, then the day after Wolf Eyes played the Freebutt, I went to see the rather less extreme Towers Of London at the Engine Room. I think I was down to review the then-rising sleaze-rockers, but it turned out somebody else covered an earlier show so I just went for fun, with my work buddy Miles and his mate Craig along for the ride. Clearly they were ridiculous, though in comparison to The Glitterati it was like seeing the Pistols at the 100 Club or something.
One of the things that the Engine Room provided for Brighton was a place to put on reunion tours for bands who were neither big enough for the Concorde nor hip enough for the Freebutt. Like, for example, Nuclear Assault. This New York metal band had been big favourites of mine since '89 or '90, to the point where I once wound Jimmy up (while pished) by insisting that they should have been in thrash's Big Four instead of Megadeth. Little did I know that by 2020 there'd be Facebook groups dedicated almost entirely to these sort of arguments. Anyway, I was stoked to see them, with three quarters of the classic line-up, in a small club in my adopted home town.
The following week I found myself reviewing Hayseed Dixie at the Komedia. While their shtick (principally, heavy rock songs performed in a bluegrass style) has worn incredibly thin by the present day, back then I was still receptive to a band who justified their existence by insisting that the Lost Highway about which Hank Williams sang was the exact same thoroughfare as AC/DC's Highway To Hell. By this point, it was rare for Anna to accompany me to a show I was writing about, and in retrospect her presence here offers a little hint of the country and folk gigs she'd start taking me to a few years down the line.
It was back to what probably passed for business as usual at the time when I headed to the Concorde 2 to check out a package tour of young contenders put together by the Earache label. As mentioned last time, Beecher had headlined the venue the year before, and were soon to release a genuinely impressive album called This Elegy, His Autopsy. Unfortunately, the strong attendance of 2004 was in no small part due to support act Norma Jean, who enjoyed a cult status bigger than the combined draw of this gig's line-up of Mistress, Callisto and Malkovich. I don't recall much about Callisto, but Dutch hardcore openers Malkovich, whose singer appeared to be dressed as Axl Rose in his skimpy shorts era, were great, as were the properly filthy-sounding Mistress, the only band on the bill with any sort of connection to the label's glory days of grind. Beecher, as hinted at earlier, hit their peak form in 2005, but the rather empty Concorde 2 on that July evening feels like a metaphor for the indifference with which This Elegy, His Autopsy would be received, and they split early the next year.
I'd seen Cove a few times by this point, but they've gone unmentioned until now as the details of the gigs they'd played have been lost to those pesky mists of time. Typically, I managed to get a live review of them commissioned only to find out that this was their farewell performance - though it turns out I'd misunderstood and it was only their bassist who was bidding adieu. Lords, who I told you were putting themselves about a bit, opened, and weren't on top form this time. Also on the bill were I'm Being Good, who'd probably set some sort of record for longevity in Brighton bands if it wasn't for the dogged survival of Peter & The Test Tube Babies. In my head at least, they'd started out paddling in skronky indie waters, but by the mid-2000s they were doing something heavier and instrumental. Cove themselves played a set which was slightly scrappy but not without a certain fury, their noise rock definitely worth revisiting in the now if you can find their records.
A few days later and I was back at the Freebutt, this time to review Welsh post-hardcore band Hondo Maclean. I'd seen them play in Southampton a few years earlier and hadn't been all that impressed; they'd evidently improved somewhat, and also packed out the venue in a way which wasn't entirely pleasant in August heat. More significantly, however, this was the first time I saw Architects, who were supporting. Aaron from The Plague Sermon had already recommended them to me, while Olly Truant, who I thnk was managing them at the time, collared me before their set to enthuse about them and introduce Tim H-B and Dan & Tom Searle to me. They were still teenagers (and, in conversation, incredibly witty ones), but there was already something impressive about their Botch/Dillinger-informed aggro tech metal. This lot, I thought, might even get bigger than, I dunno, Beecher?
The next day found me back at the Hobgoblin for another international punk rock show. Opening were locals The Plague Sermon and semi-locals Seven Arrows In Your Bastard Heart. I note with amusement that the desciption of the latter on the flyer described them as "opinionated". The first touring band was Raein, an excellent Italian screamo band who shared members with La Quiete, meaning that at least a couple of their line-up were presumably using all their annual leave to play in places like the Hobgoblin. No wonder Raein had a song called Endlesstourlife. Headlining were German screamo types Louise Cyphre, but I entirely missed their set. A bunch of folk had come over from Southampton, presumably to lend their support to the mostly Soton-based 7 Arras, and I ended up spending the entirety of Louise Cyphre's set chatting to Rob (ex-Minute Manifesto, Trophy Girls, etc etc) in the front bar, where he was complaining about... well, mainly about bands like Louise Cyphre. I wasn't too bothered about not seeing them, as I'd already semi-written them off on account of their terrible name, and in all honesty I was there mainly to see my mates' bands anyway.
The next weekend found me down at the Freebutt on both Saturday and Sunday, the first of these to see Trencher, You're Smiling Now But We'll All Turn Into Demons, Collapse and Ack Ack Ack. I've yet to mention local promoters Tatty Seaside Town here, largely because I've been unable to verify which gigs were theirs out of the many I was attending in the mid-'00s, but this was almost certainly one. TST was, and indeed still is, the work of Colin, at that point the owner of Edgeworld, my favourite record shop in the then-crowded market of Brighton vinyl emporia. I'd first met him at the record fairs in Southampton Guildhall, where he had the coolest stuff by far, and would end up in his Brighton shop around once a week from when I moved there to when he sadly closed up in early 2012. Resident is great and all, but going into Edgeworld felt like the closest thing to seeing John Peel's playlists in physical form, with sections given over to obscure or really specific genres. Edgeworld had given gainful employment to various members of the local scene, and after it closed, the physical space was taken over for a while by former employees Tom and Ash, each of too many bands to mention but both in the fantastic Charlottefield, and they continued to sell records as Endless for a while; Colin still does Edgeworld stalls at record fairs, gigs and in pubs.
Anyway, back to Tatty Seaside Town. They put on a mixture of top-notch touring bands and exciting locals, all part of an underground scene which, to my mind, has never exactly fitted into a genre category. I guess the closest thing would be noise rock, but even if a lot of the bands who played TST shows could be described as such, that still feels slightly reductive. One thing I will say is that Colin would put on bands who were largely ignored by any mainstream music media at the time, certainly since Peel's death, and that his tastes aligned so closely with mine that I'd come to view the TST tag as a reliable mark of quality in much the same way as I had the STE back in Southampton. Must be something about three-initial names.
Certainly, the bands crowded onto that Freebutt bill didn't sound too much alike. Ack Ack Ack were a trio that featured the afore-mentioned Ash on drums and a guitarist/vocalist shouting into a gas mask, possibly with his top off. I guess you'd put them in the noise rock camp thanks to a vague similarity to Shellac. Collapse are the band I remember least, either because I didn't know any of them, or they didn't last long, or maybe they were from out of town, but my review of the time suggests they sounded like "punk funk hipsters being given a good hiding down a darkened alley." The Demons were by this stage wearing monkish robes onstage, a costume choice they elected to keep going for an impressively long time, and were representing the psych/garage end of the TST spectrum. Trencher, with their bass/drums/tiny keyboard attack, were both artier and grindier than the other bands, with a certain queasy horror emanating from their disorientating noise. They did their cover of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells at this show, a turn which had made its way into the world on a split 5" record (surely the ultimate art-grind format!) with Cutting Pink With Knives, though renamed Ode To The Exorcist in case you thought they might have bothered because they were massive Oldfield afficionados.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHITR-p02Ck
The next day was a rather different affair, a nine-band bill topped by Kent sluggers November Coming Fire. I can't find a listing for the complete line-up, but seem to remember only two of the supports holding my attention. Castor Troy had come down from Coventry to provide a break from identikit moshcore, their music incorporating brief bursts of frantic aggression and lengthy post-metal elegies. Architects were also in the house, and appeared to have raised their game even in the ten days since I'd first seen them. This lot, I thought, might even get bigger than, I dunno, Stampin' Ground?
I'd been relatively unbothered by NCF's gothy hardcore when I'd seen them back in 2004, but since then they'd diversified their sound admirably, with rock'n'roll, punk and post-rock elements feeding into something which was possibly too broad to qualify as a new direction. The following year's Dungeness album was a really good record, and I'd end up giving that a good review too.
The following weekend, I went to the Reading Festival for the first time in seven years - and, to date, the last time, a state of affairs which seems unlikely to change given the state of it these days. In fact, both the announcement of the line-up and the actual August Bank Holiday weekend are now routinely "celebrated" by people of my age complaining about the modern day bill, and reminiscing about the glory days of the late '80s to the mid '90s.
2005, you will note, fell a little outside this period, but the prospect of seeing Iron Maiden headline was enough to draw myself and Jimmy there, if only for the Sunday. Looking at the line-up for the whole weekend now, it definitely looks like a transitional period. On the one hand, Friday night's headliners were the Pixies, who'd headlined in 1990, while this was almost certainly the last time The Wedding Present or Dinosaur Jr would be asked to play the main stage. On the other, the mid-'00s indie rock scene was well represented, from The Killers and Kings Of Leon, already occupying spots one down from the headliners, through Kasabian and The Arcade Fire on the NME Stage, to Arctic Monkeys, on the smallest stage and so anonymous they appear on the poster listed alphabetically rather than in order of appearance.
Our old work friend Kev was also in attendance. I feel like he might have had an ankle in plaster or something, although it's entirely possible I've made that up. Despite this (possibly imaginary) injury, he was doing the whole weekend, which was fair enough as he was a huge fan of the Pixies and Saturday headliners the Foo Fighters. I remember him telling us how bad the campsites had become in terms of teenage misbehaviour, which appeared to have moved on from getting wrecked and shouting "Bollocks!" half the night to wanton acts of destruction. He'd apparently seen someone shoot a firework directly into a stranger's tent. No wonder I preferred the more sedate environs of an All Tomorrow's Parties in those days.
I walked across the site that morning in 2005, and I have to admit to feeling strangely at home there, never mind that I'd only spent a total of ten days on this turf before. A less welcome sensation came from the sound of Bullet For My Valentine, opening the main stage. It's something of a cliche to speak of bands playing shows as if they're headlining; in BFMV's case, it was more a case of seeing a band who clearly thought they would be headlining in the near future, though their Metallica-go-emo shtick never quite made it that far.
Much more up our street were the brilliant Turbonegro, whose camp glam-punk represented the sort of dangerous free thinking which would get nowhere near the main stage these days. After that, I headed to the NME Stage to see Sons And Daughters, a Glasgow band with a great line in sultry tunes somewhere in the country/rockabilly/Bad Seeds end of town. While trying to find out what became of them (turns out they split in 2012 or thereabouts), I stumbled across a terribly written fansite whose author is apparently also responsible for "That Sitcom Show" ("a fantasy scenarios where sitcom episodes are turning sexual") and "Sis Loves Me" ("See step sisters and step brothers in awkward situations leading to some unexpected intercourse"). Cripes.
I have memories of the sound of Funeral For A Friend drifting ineffectually across the field as we got something to eat, and then of NOFX playing a main stage set which seemed to consist principally of endless unfunny banter, occasionally interrupted by an actual song. Thankfully, Iggy & The Stooges were on hand to provide some real rock action. Ever since the Velvet Underground at Glastonbury twelve years earlier, I'd had reason to be concerned about the worth of such reunions, but with a set that concentrated mainly on the first two Stooges records and Iggy in fine fettle, at this point not far short of sixty and still determinedly pretending to have what might be described as "unexpected intercourse" with a speaker stack, there was little to complain about here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah5TWDuhr-g
For a change of pace, we headed to the NME Stage to see LCD Sounsdystem, whose art-dance-punk offered the kind of party-starting hedonism that we simply wouldn't have got from Incubus on the main stage. At some point, Jimmy and I parted company, my skinny chum checking in with Marilyn Manson on the main stage while I went into something called the Dance Arena to see MIA. Even bearing in mind her present day insistence on propagating 5G-orientated "plandemic" conspiracy theories, I still reckon I made the right decision, not least because her vaguely uncategorisable beats and rhymes kept up the dancing mood after LCD Soundsystem.
Despite the seemingly foolproof arrangement of meeting by a noodle van, I managed not to meet up with Jimmy again and instead headed into the fray to get a decent spot for the mighty Maiden. Where they'd slightly disappointed at Earl's Court in 2000 with a few too many '90s tunes hogging space in their set, this time round they were doing the first of what might be called, with no criticism intended, their nostalgia tours, in this instance only playing tracks from their first four albums. Thinking about it, this must have confused yer average Razorlight fan in attendance, who seem unlikely to have been familiar with any of an opening salvo of Murders In The Rue Morgue, Another Life and Prowler, but really, who cares about them? Being at a once-loved festival and enjoying one of my formative musical influences play an all-killer set on a lovely August night feels like a good way to end my Reading-attending years.
So, I hadn't exactly figured out what I was doing afterwards. It was too late to get a train back to Brighton. Kev had offered to find me some space in his tent, but without a mobile I had no chance of actually finding him. Anna's friend Vic, who lived in Reading, had vaguely suggested I should crash at hers afterwards, but when I found a payphone I couldn't get an answer from her landline.
In the end, I decided to head to the train station, where I could at least get a 4.30 train home. My plan to get a little kip in the meantime was somewhat shafted by the company of a rather socially inept, middle-aged Maiden fan. He proceeded to talk to me at length, telling me that he only really liked three bands: obviously Maiden, but also The Who and, as he proudly informed me, he was the owner of "over 25 tapes by Hawkwind!" He had a strange chip on his shoulder about Glastonbury and its founder, who he believed to be called Michael Beavis ("Do you know, they were going to have that Kylie Minogue playing this year?") and was strangely fascinated by sleeper trains ("and then, when you get to Waterloo, they give you breakfast!"). These topics were repeated over and over during the several-hour wait, interspersed with details about his favourite Iron Maiden albums. This might sound like a bit of a nightmare, but in truth I could have had much worse company, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that I think of this fellow often, I hope wherever he is he's still able to enjoy his Hawkwind tapes.
I can only find reference to a couple of gigs in September. Me and Greg went to see Sunderland post-punk types This Ain't Vegas, who for some reason were playing Club New York, a terrible dive at the bottom of Dyke Road. A few days after that, Los Angeles band Wives pitched up at the Engine Room. I can't find any details about the rest of the bill, but my review complained about a "seemingly endless supporting line-up", and with the venue closing a full hour earlier than advertised, Wives only played half a dozen of their mostly sub-two minute tunes. They then split up immediately after this European tour, though two of them would return in No Age, who we'll encounter a few chapters down the line.
October found me at the Concorde 2 for the first time in a few months to go and review ska punk ragers CapDown. My friends Burton and Rich's band Navajo Code supported, and while their post-hardcore probably wasn't what the bulk of the crowd were after, they went down pretty well. This lot got some decent gigs, suuporting My Chemical Romance in London and even touring the US with Planes Mistaken For Stars, so it's a shame they didn't enjoy a higher profile, though Burton will certainly crop up again here in other bands. Here's a video where they all decided to wear the same clothes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi81jimBHUo
CapDown, or Capitalist Downfall as I like to call them, were sort of the one ska band that people who didn't like ska bands liked, if you see what I mean. I guess they had enough of a proper punk rock edge both in sound and attitude to appease at least some of the DIY underground, and managed to write songs that were catchy but not as annoying as you'd normally expect. Careful with that reckless praise, man!
I'm pretty sure I saw The Priscillas at the Freebutt a couple of weeks later - I mean, I definitely saw the London garage rockers there at some point, and this looks the most likely date. I can say with conviction that I went to see the Dogs D'Amour at the Concorde at the end of the month. In support were Eastbourne punk'n'rollers H8Ball, normally more likely to be playing with reformed old school punk bands but possessing a rough-hewn charm that somehow chimed with the headliners' slightly more refined tendencies. H8Ball's bassist Steve would go on to play in a bunch of bands with whom I'd cross paths, including Brutal Regime and Watchcries, and at the time of writing has just started a band called Attestor with my mate Darren.
The Dogs D'Amour were, and I suppose to some extent still are, a rum old bunch. Vaguely tagged as part of the UK's glam metal scene, thanks largely to their haircuts and cowboy boots, they were closer in sound to the Stones or the Faces, albeit with a winningly ramshackle edge and convincingly gutter-dwelling vibe that in some ways anticipated the much inferior Libertines (incidentally, if you ever want to have a conversation about how the Little Angels sounded uncannily like Robbie Williams way before he ever released a solo record, I'm yer man). Their frontman and M.E.S.-style only constant Tyla was cut from similar cloth as Ginger out of The Wildhearts, who actually featured Dogs drummer Bam in their original line-up. I really enjoyed this show, despite only really being familar with a smattering of Dogs material released between '88 and '90, including this gem (which also, incidentally, sounds a lot like Jimmy and Steeny's pre-Gilamonsters band Mondo Diablo).
It's harder to find comparisons for Melt-Banana, who absolutely clobbered the small Pavilion Theatre (not to be confused with perennial dive bar the Pav Tav, or indeed the actual Royal Pavilion) about a week later. As per the last chapter of this blog, their sound proved equally appealing to fans of indiepop and hardcore thrash, while their recent-ish album Cell-Scape possessed a sort of monstrous cyberpunk feel. They were so good that I have no memory of either support band, despite these being the excellent I'm Being God and legendary US weirdos Truman's Water. Oh yeah, this was a Tatty Seaside Town show, by the way.
The next day brought a return to the Concorde 2 to see Four Tet again, this time with support from Explosions In The Sky, already upwardly-mobile following the previous year's Freebutt appearance. As with The Priscillas above, I think this was also the month when I saw The Dirty Three at the Komedia, a band whose work has endured with me much more than that of Explosions. Japanese rock'n'rollers Spookey certainly played the Freebutt that November, though their take on garage punk couldn't help but feel a bit polite and tentative with the noise of their countryfolk Melt-Banana still ringing in my ears a fortnight on.
As far as I can tell, my last gig of 2005 fell on the ridiculously early date of December 1st, when a package tour of bands hit town en route to all playing at the Mars Volta-curated All Tomorrow's Parties Nightmare Before Christmas at Camber Sands. The Locust, 400 Blows and Year Future were all signed to GSL, the label co-owned by Mars Volta man Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, and while the first-named of those headlined and have the most formidable rep, I was most into 400 Blows, who I remember hitting a sweet spot somewhere between The Jesus Lizard and Dead Kennedys, while dressed as LAPD cops in a way which was weirdly reminiscent of the Police Academy movies.
On that strange note, let's leave behind 2005 and look forward to 2006, which will consist largely of the same sort of shenanigans, as well as a belated return to ATP for a weekend filled with booze, bad behaviour and, I'm afraid to say, Xena The Slutty Zebra. Until then...
