Brighton 2007: Degrees Of Separation

My first gig of 2007 was a pretty classy affair. Anna and I took our seats in Brighton's Corn Exchange for the opening night of the 0 Degrees Of Separation tour, featuring Juana Molina alongside Adem, Vashti Bunyan and Vetiver, all described by Uncut at the time as "contemporary acoustic musicians". Calm down, Uncut, you're making this all sound so exciting!

The deal was that, rather than simply each playing for half an hour then buggering off, these contemporary acoustic musicians would perform a sort of ongoing collaboration, so while each would have a period of the evening when they took the lead, the others would drift on and offstage, capturing what I'm afraid we're going to have to call "the vibes" of the two most significant influences on this bunch: the community spirit of trad folk and the freeform jams of hippiedom past.

I remember it all as being rather effective, with the comparatively modernist feel of Juana Molina's looped vocals and Adem's folktronica gelling with Vashti Bunyan's gentle British folk and Vetiver's vaguely psychedelic, audibly San Franciscan take on the genre. And obviously, having started the year with a highbrow, seated gig in an upmarket venue, I would decide to dedicate myself principally to such sophisticated entertainment.

Yeah, right. A mere four days later I was enjoying another chilly January walk down to the Concorde to watch Arizonan punk'n'roll reprobates The Supersuckers. Now, when I'd last encountered them, a little over six years previously in Portsmouth, this bunch of larger-than-life rockers kicked up such a storm that their typically tongue-in-cheek self-aggrandisement (this is, let's remember, the band who released a greatest hits album called How the Supersuckers Became the Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World, despite never having had any hits) didn't seem too wide of the mark. At this stage, however, their undoubted knack for lowbrow garage band jams had become second nature to such an extent that their rough edges had been somewhat sanded down. So while I still dug them, I probably enjoyed the supports, Swedish rockers Disco Volante and Eastbourne punks H8Ball, a fair bit more.

This pattern continued a week later when local rockers McQueen put on a launch gig for what I believe was their debut (and possibly only) album. Don't get me wrong, McQueen were decent enough: four women who probably wouldn't object to being called "rock chicks", playing the sort of slightly punky version of glam metal that residents of the Sunset Strip gravitated towards post-grunge. But although they'd end up getting American management and touring with Velvet Revolver, the bands they'd picked to open this show would go on to longer-lasting relevance: The XCerts, whose indie rock would become increasingly Springsteenish en route to a Top 40 album in 2018, and The Ghost Of A Thousand, themselves about to release a debut album and a band who I'd properly get into, and get to know, over the course of the year.

Before too long, I'd also become friends with members of With Scissors and Kill Kenada, two bands I saw at scuzzy seafront venue Volks on Valentine's Day, once again not quite getting this whole romance thing. A couple days later, you'd find me at fairly tedious fashionista night The Do (for the first and only time), located in hip venue The Core Club, waiting for a post-midnight set from brilliant Sheffield teens Rolo Tomassi. This really would be the start of something wonderful, as Rolo have become the sort of band I go and see nearly every time they pitch up in Brighton; throw in catching them at London shows and festivals, and I suspect they're one of the bands I've seen the most in my life. I also believe that some or all of the band now reside in Brighton, so I guess this was the start of something for them too. Anyway, at this point they'd only released one EP, the third release on a new label called Holy Roar, and their principal mode of attack was the sort of casiogrind you'd associate with bands like Trencher or The Locust. While it would be a stretch to say that I immediately predicted longevity and greatness, my review of this first contact did remark on both the entertaining lung-shredding vocals of Eva Spence and the quirky organ sounds generated by her brother James. Another couple days later - the gigs really were coming thick and fast in February '07, eh? - the singer from Down I Go, playing The Engine Room alongside The Phil Collins 3 and An Emergency, was telling the audience that they'd played an all-dayer the day before where he'd been out-screamed by a teenage girl. I've been unable to verify this, but it seems pretty obvious that he was talking about Eva.

A whole four days passed before I was back at it, with more long-term faves Part Chimp at fairly insalubrious nightspot The Ocean Rooms. This was, I'm pretty sure, another show from top local promoters Tatty Seaside Town, and boasted an opening set from a new duo called Fuck Buttons. Five years later, this unassuming pair would have their music used in the opening ceremony of the ruddy Olympics, and while nobody in this room would have seen that coming, it was clear that their electronic noise was pretty damn arresting. I don't remember too much about middle band Infants - a Google search throws up a deathcore band from Hull called Infant Annihilator, who I'm pretty sure have never played a TST gig - but Part Chimp were their usual overwhelming selves, playing tremendous material from the first two albums at ear-splitting volume.

 

As I've remarked previously, this period was a rare one in Brighton's history, in that cult metal bands of some repute were playing small venues with surprising regularity. Indeed, in the first two weeks of March, there was so much going on that I missed appearances from Decapitated and Necrophagist at The Engine Room - though not an incredible international bill of Rotting Christ, Malevolent Creation, Incantation and Rotten Sound. As the only band with a pronounced punk edge, the Finnish openers fell a little on deaf ears with their grindcore blasts, though I certainly dug them.  

It's always been a source of some amusement to me that New York death metal veterans Incantation share their name with the 80s band who played New Agey versions of traditional South American music. There were certainly no pan pipes in evidence on the night in question, just lumbering heaviness -  a quality shared by Malevolent Creation, who to my mind probably represented the pinnacle of death metal's second tier, pumping out a back catalogue of decent quality while never quite hitting the big league. I guess this was why they weren't even headlining a club as small as The Engine Room, instead supporting a Greek black metal band. People with no knowledge of or interest in the world of black metal may be surprised to learn that there is a distinctive strand of the genre that originated from Greece, and Rotting Christ were very much the Patient Zero of this strain of Hellenic black metal, having formed way back in '87. I've not followed their more recent albums, but at this stage in their career they'd introduced a hefty progressive quality into their work, creating something far more spohisticated than you'd expect from a band called, well, Rotting Christ. I even compared them to Somewhere In Time-era Iron Maiden in my review, which I suspect may have been going a little too far.

On the other hand, I was confoundingly sniffy about Amenra in a review of their show at The Prince Albert a couple of days later. I've enjoyed their work over the years since and can't fathom why I didn't dig them more live, although perhaps it was on account of being really into the two supports: Minus Two Quartet, a duo featuring Stuart Lee out of Jacob's Stories, and widescreen crustcore champs Fall Of Efrafa. The very next day, it was back to The Engine Room to check out Crippled Black Phoenix. Charlottefield opened up, another local band who I've recommended before and will do so again whenever they're mentioned. I might be wrong about this, but I have a feeling they had some equipment issues on the night in question, and I think I subsequently heard that the headliners were somewhat unhelpful in terms of lending some kit. 

Anyway, Crippled Black Phoenix were a new band, quite possibly touring for the first time, centred on Justin Greaves, known to devotees of cult metal as drummer with Iron Monkey and Electric Wizard Mk II, but in this context concerned with songwriting, guitar playing and music of a far more esoteric bent. Mogwai bassist Dominic Aitchison and Gonga vocalist Joe Volk were also involved, though in time CBP would become more of an amorphous collective centred round Greaves, which rather explains why over 20 musicians have come and gone from their ranks in a decade and a half. 

By the time of writing, CBP have released seven albums and as many EPs, and their music has come to be understood as part of the wider landscape of prog rock. I'm not sure, back in 2007, how many people were expecting music more in line with a Mogwai/Electric Wizard hybrid, but what we got was something with elements of Ennio Morricone, Hawkwind and English folk music - all stuff I love, incidentally, but in these early stages of the band they'd yet to find their feet as a live band.

Folk music also plays a part in the music of Midlake, who I saw at The Concorde with Anna and (I'm pretty sure) Sam, Matt, Adam and Sandra. Once again, I've not really kept up with this band in the years since, so perhaps I'm not qualified to judge, but it feels like this would have been their critical, if not commercial, peak, touring the quietly wonderful album The Trials Of Van Occupanther, and its lovely mixture of Fleetwood Mac, Flaming Lips, folk, country and rock.

In big news for fans of underground American alternative metal, though probably not for anyone else, Pelican and These Arms Are Snakes were on tour together in Europe. Their shows on these isles started in Southampton where, unbeknownst to me, my future bandmate James would attempt to get into the show for his first stag night, only to end up at a disappointing 70s theme club. Happier times were had six days later, as the UK leg of the tour wound up at Audio and us Brightonians enjoyed this comradely pairing of instrumental post-metal and rocking post-hardcore.

A week later, we were off to All Tomorrow's Parties, but for the first time this didn't involve heading to Pontins at Camber Sands. Instead, 2007 marked the first year that ATP took place at Butlins in Minehead, a comparatively upmarket site in the North Somerset coastal town where my gran had lived for a few years around the turn of the millennium. It was slightly disconcerting to discover that the main stage was now set up in a sort of concourse, the neon logos of various fast food outlets visible around its perimeter, though the two smaller stages, one upstairs and one off to the side of the main building, both felt appropriate to the spirit of the enterprise. 

On curating duties for this weekend were The Dirty Three, and the line-up reflected their interests, contemporaries and other projects pretty well. The preponderance of Australians, both on the bill and in the audience, made me imagine disappointed Melbourne publicans wondering why their drinking establishments were so quiet that weekend, while various musicians played on multiple occasions in different bands. For all that, though, and despite the presence of people like Low, Nina Nastasia and Einsturzende Neubaten, this was an ATP where expectations were more than usually weighted towards one particular grouping: the debut performances of Grinderman, the Bad Seeds splinter group featuring Nick Cave, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis (the latter also, of course, a member of the curators).

Cave also gave a solo performance, seated at a piano with a plastic bag full of lyrics, which took in a generous helping of greatest hits and acted as a sort of calm before the raucous main event. Grinderman are perhaps best, and most commonly, understood as a sort of late period return to Cave's punk roots, a notion somewhat backed up by the comparatively elegiac albums he's gone on to release with the Bad Seeds in the 2010s. This wasn't The Birthday Party, of course; nobody was pretending to be in their early 20s, and a song like No Pussy Blues was clearly, and self-deprecatingly, the work of men in middle age. But what Grinderman did have was a stripped-back, comparatively frill-free approach which held a baser appeal than the more ornate Bad Seeds records of then-recent times. (Indeed, I'd somewhat drifted away from their early 21st Century records, only wooed back by Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus). Somehow, I'd never seen Cave live before, and was gratified to find him a convivial host in this context. We'd seen him, Bobby Gillespie and their wives and children hanging out around the holiday camp, a bucolic scene which I imagine would have been unimaginable to Cave's drug buddies back in early 1980s Berlin, and Gillespie ended up joining Grinderman to provide extra percussion. We'll get back to both Grinderman and the Bad Seeds (and Bobby Gillespie!) again in later chapters. 

 

All that excitement must have taken it out of me, as it was a good fortnight before my next gig, another international (and very mixed) metal bill at the Engine Room. Local black metallers Iceni opened proceedings with their debut performance. I'm not sure how much they went on to do, but I'm pretty sure this was the only time I crossed (left hand) paths with them. The audience appeared to change almost entirely for Bossk, doing their post-metal soundscapey thing, before a return to black metal, albeit of a rather esoteric stripe. Negura Bunget augmented their sound with traditional instruments from their native Romania, including a bizarre horn which was so long it stretched well off the small stage. At the time of writing, Wardruna have been critically garlanded for music not dissimilar in atmosphere and intent, so it seems a shame that NB remained relatively marginalised in the wider scene. Drummer and, it would appear, mainman Negru kept the band going through about as many reshuffles as Crippled Black Phoenix, before sadly dying in 2017.

 

The headliners that night were Ephel Duath, another oddity in the world of metal. They'd recently stripped down to a trio of vocals, guitar and drums - in terms of sonic components if not membership size, they were essentially playing avant-garde jazz metal with the same line-up as The White Stripes, which was something of a rum do, to say the least.

That weekend marked the second year of The Great Escape festival in Brighton, but having been pretty hacked off with the whole thing in 2006, we decided just to get a day ticket because Anna particularly wanted to see Willy Mason. In the end, I'm pretty sure we just went to the Pavilion Theatre and spent the whole night there, so that we definitely wouldn't miss Mr Mason - that we had to do this rather than wander round different venues checking out a variety of different bands is something of an indictment of the fatal flaw at the heart of this festival. Canadian singer/songwriter Patrick Watson, who confusingly had a song called The Great Escape, opened, but for me the highlight of the evening were The Besnard Lakes, not entirely dissimilar to Midlake but with a bit more psych and a bit more rock involved. Willy Mason seemed like a good egg - he apparently performed a couple of acoustic tunes outside for the queuing folks who couldn't get in, which was a nice touch - and if the Number 23 hit Oxygen is the only one of his tunes I can remember today, I'm sure the fault is mine. 

 

A week on from Ephel Duath, I was once again being entertained by Italian outsiders in a Brighton basement - well, a Hove one, actually. The Greenhouse Effect was a bar we'd occasionally have work drinks in, particularly as there was a club opposite we used to use for Christmas parties. For a brief period, it was also one of the venues Tatty Seaside Town used, and under their auspices on the night in question it was hosting OvO, a sort of theatrical noise rock/industrial duo whose punishing performance bordered on the psychologically uncomfortable. In support were Zettasaur, a new (to me) band playing exactly the kind of angular, leftfield skronk I associate with TST gigs of this period, and indelibly brilliant Brighton long-timers I'm Being Good.

Excitingly, Anna's parents were living in New York at this point, and we headed over there for a week that May. This is by no means an original observation, but there's something psychologically overwhelming about pitching up in a place you've never been to before, but which you know so well. It was like stepping into the Marvel comics I'd been obsessed with as a kid, so many of which were set there. Films, TV shows, music... there really isn't another city in the world which had cropped up so frequently in my cultural upbringing. I was also chuffed to be able to explore the city's record shops, and particularly pleased to find a copy of my chums Help She Can't Swim's album The Death Of Nightlife in one of them.

Clearly, going to a gig in the Big Apple was pretty high on my list of things to do while we were there, and given that I'd missed CBGBs by about seven months, this itch ended up getting sratched by a visit to the Knitting Factory for a show which was part of the NYC Popfest. The Knitting Factory was a Manhattan venue most famous for hosting avant-garde jazz of the John Zorn variety, while the NYC Popfest was the inaugural edition of an annual multi-venue festival which would run until at least 2016. I should mention that the "Pop" of its name was indiepop rather than, er, actual pop. Playing elsewhere that week were the likes of Best Fwends, BMX Bandits and The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, while the line-up for our chosen gig consisted of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, The Ballet, Ballboy, Harvey Williams and My Teenage Stride. When we arrived, we thought there was a big queue (or "line", to use the American parlance) to get in, but it turned out this was the roped-off smoking area; five weeks before the UK's smoking ban, it was the first time we'd seen something which would soon become as familiar as any other aspect of gig-going. Headliner Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, a one-man band playing lo-fi electronic tunes with bleak, sometimes humorous lyrics, was probably the musical highlight, but it was particularly fun to be on the other side of the pond watching fellow Brits Ballboy, an Edinburgh band who'd been big favourites of John Peel, for whom they recorded four sessions as well as scoring multiple Festive Fifty entries with tunes called things like I Hate Scotland and I Don't Have Time To Stand Here With You Fighting About The Size Of My Dick. At some point after they played, we drunkenly accosted a couple of members of Ballboy to talk about how we were from Britain as well, and to extract a promise from them that they would play in Brighton soon. 

To the best of my knowledge, Ballboy have never played Brighton in the many years since these events took place, something for which I can't help but feel partially responsible. 

 

Back on home turf, ace Swedish hardcore band Trapdoor Fucking Exit played a sweaty show in a bar called Zuma that was round the corner from my house; I've a feeling that my buddies Hot Damn! might have supported, but it could just be that those guys were in attendance as punters. With Scissors were back at it a week later, opening up a pretty stacked bill at The Engine Room featuring touring US grindcore/screamo types Ed Gein and Phoenix Bodies, alongside UK mathcore types Chronicles Of Adam West, who like Rolo Tomassi had recently released an EP on Holy Roar. Phoenix Bodies, who not to be left out had had their album licensed for UK release by, yes, Holy Roar, were my favourite band of the night, their short blasts of grind/emo violence viscerally thrilling and stoopidly amusing in equal measure. History does not record whether they played evergreen classics You've Been Hamburgled or I Guarantee You're A Pile Of Shit, but let's just say they did.

One of the STE shows I regret missing back in the day in Southampton was a 1999 appearance from Florida thrashpunkers Asshole Parade. I'm not sure whether they'd split up and got back together, or just gone quiet for a few years, but I didn't repeat the error when they returned to active duty in the mid-00s and showed up at The Engine Room with semi-locals The Steal in support. Boris played the same venue a week or so later, though they're another band I've ended up seeing so often that I can't recall anything specific about the show, not even the supporting line-up; it doesn't help that internet searches tend to bring up results pertaining to a certain buffoonish politician...

There's less uncertainty around the following week's big gig: Converge at the Concorde2 alongside Rise & Fall, Animosity and Rainydayfuckparade, the latter (local) band proving they could still smash it on a larger stage than those to which they were more accustomed. I wasn't too bothered by Animosity's death metalcore, but Rise & Fall's crustier hardcore attack was more up my street. Converge, at this point touring sixth album No Heroes, lived up to their fearsome reputation, and no mistake. 

 

Ten days later, I headed up to the smoke for my only London show of the year, in the rather grand setting of Somerset House. I'd been to this palatial courtyard once before, to see PJ Harvey as previously discussed, and once again I'd been lured there by longterm favourites, in this instance Mogwai. 

As I pointed out in my review at the time, Mogwai had carved out a pretty unusual space for themselves. This show was part of a series hosted at Somerset House, with other scheduled turns including the likes of Mika, Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, gawd bless 'er; the next date in Mogwai's diary, however, was Birmingham's experimental festival Supersonic, where they'd play alongside folk like Sunn 0))) and OM. No doubt detractors would point to this seeming contradiction and suggest that taking part in one of these things should disqualify you from the other, but I prefer to admire the way Mogwai's success on their own terms allowed them access to the mainstream while still participating in more underground endeavours.

 

Anyway, this was a splendid evening. Malcolm Middleton out of the then-disbanded Arab Strap opened proceedings, having recently released what is probably still his best solo album in A Brighter Beat, and it was pretty sweet to get to write about him in a rock magazine which would normally have had no cause to get involved. Mogwai were stunning; this would have been the first time I'd seen them play outdoors since Glastonbury '99, and I'd forgotten how well-suited they were to performing under gradually darkening skies. Still nominally touring the previous year's Mr Beast, they played a set which drew on plenty of back catalogue, including some fairly deep cuts; opening with Superheroes Of BMX, a track track from their 1997 4 Satin EP (a #110 chart smash!) could be considered a bold move, and a track from their Zidane soundtrack was included in place of rather better-known tunes like Mogwai Fear Satan, Christmas Steps or My Father, My King. But this isn't a complaint: it was great to hear R U Still In 2 It, featuring vocals from Aidan Moffat, the other half of Arab Strap, and there were still plenty of brilliant tunes on offer, whether big riffers like Glasgow Mega-Snake and Ratts Of The Capital or melodic treats like Hunted By A Freak and the encore of Cody and 2 Rights Make 1 Wrong. 

A couple of weeks later, I was in London again - but for a work roadshow, from which I had to hurry back to make it home in time to see Brighton degenerates 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster play The Barfly, until recently known as The Gloucester but briefly co-opted into a national chain of gig venues. It had seemed, to be honest, that this lot were maybe a spent force; guitarist Andy Huxley had left a couple of years earlier, and their deal with Island was similarly in the rear view mirror. They'd scored five Top 40 singles (more than many famous or critically-acclaimed bands, it must be said - The Fall only managed three, two of which were cover versions) but, despite numerous festival and support slots and a prominent appearance on the Shaun Of The Dead soundtrack, lasting success seemed to have eluded them; 2004's second album The Royal Society, surely the record which was supposed to see them break big, stalled at No.68 in the album charts.

With the benefit of hindsight, this period of the band, culminating in a third album in 2010, was very much a last hurrah - but, on this occasion in particular, they were going down all guns blazing. Huxley had been replaced by Rich Fownes out of With Scissors, a winning character who I'd get to know (I think through his then-girlfriend Tora, who in turn knew Leesey out of Help She Can't Swim), whose frenetic stage presence complemented the shamanic vibes of frontman Guy McKnight. I try and steer clear of pulling direct quotes out of my reviews, but I'm not sure I can improve on my description of 80s Matchbox as "The Misfits meet The Birthday Party in an arthouse cinema, or, if you'd prefer, bubblegum avant-psychobilly." Certainly, if their time had been and gone, nobody had told the band -or the packed-out hometown crowd, who went absolutely batshit throughout the set. 

 

More straight-up punk thrills were to be had the following week, when Southampton fast hardcore favourites Whole In The Head and Leeds D-Beaters War All The Time presented their raging wares at that Zuma bar in Seven Dials. WITH and WAAT had a shared history, with the former's Jamie and the latter's Dingo both having played in peerless Soton thrashers Minute Manifesto, and a shared present, in the form of a natty split 7". WITH also featured Nath from Haywire, while WAAT had, it seemed to me, emerged from the ashes of the splendid Boxed In (not to be confused with the more recent indie band of the same name, as I've surely pointed out before). I'm pretty sure Brighton punks Constant State Of Terror also played - I mean, there's absolutely no reason why they wouldn't have, really - so that's three great bands to watch, a bunch of friends both playing and in attendance, no hassle, no bullshit: this is what gigs, or at least DIY punk shows, are all about. Mind you, as War All The Time apparently also played in The Philippines that year, it probably wasn't their most extraordinary experience of 2007.

Also playing a Brighton basement bar in the first week of August 2007 were Portsmouth's ace hardcore types Attack! Vipers! Like You're Smiling Now But We'll All Turn Into Demons, who we'll probably be talking about again before this chapter is done, I'd known Joe from A!V! since my Southampton days, when The Gilamonsters had played with his old band Jets Vs Sharks at an STE show, and I'd try and make it to see them whenever they touched down on Brighton tarmac. At this point , they'd recently released their banging debut album The Mirror & The Destroyer, and I really thought they had a shot at following the likes of Gallows and The Ghost Of A Thousand into wider acclaim. That might not have quite happened, but there were plenty of great records and shows to come. This show was on a Sunday, and I seem to remember perhaps wasn't particularly well-attended as a result, but they were still cracking. By chance, I'm wearing an Attack! Vipers! t-shirt as I write this.

Another interesting pairing turned up a few days later at the Engine Room. Humanfly featured members of Canvas and played proggy post-metal; The Freezing Fog featured members of Beecher and played stoner/classic metal. They probably shouldn't have gone together, but both bands were excellent, and Humanfly in particular would release a few great records; I'm fairly sure they'll be turning up here again sometime in the next six years' worth of gigs.

The following weekend, there was a very different sort of entertainment on offer with the inaugural Loop, which according to a website I just found was "a new one-day music and digital art festival spread across four specially created performance areas in the heart of Brighton." The main stage was a large marquee erected in Victoria Gardens, a green space which has as much claim as any to represent the geographical heart of Brighton. I have a vague memory of seeing Jamie Woon in the garden of the Sallis Benney theatre (although he doesn't seem to be listed on the festival bill, so I could well be getting confused here), but for the most part this was about a trio of great performances from local bands in that marquee. Well, local-ish; Foals had lived in Brighton for a short period, though the fledgeling art-rockers were really from Oxford. At this point, they'd only released a couple of singles; their Top 3 debut album Antidotes was still over six months away. I'd cool on them later on, but they were ace at this point, all intricate math-rock/dance-punk, and frontman Yannis Philippakis already seemed to be developing the sort of big room stage presence he'd need when his band got to arena. A band notably short on rock star posturing, Fujiya & Miyagi were much more understated but were certainly on their way to being one of the best bands in town. I'd worked with frontman David for a while, but there was no bias to my view that their music - somewhere between Talking Heads, Hot Chip and German experimental music - was a slinky, mesmerising delight. Headlining were The Go! Team, and while the perennial party-starters were somewhat hampered by less-than-great sound, their dayglo soundclash was at its prime back then.

 

Not playing at Loop, though conceptually closer in spirit than you might expect from a band featuring dudes out of Helmet and Don Caballero, NYC avant-rockers Battles pitched up at the Concorde a mere three nights later. At this point one of the hippest bands on the planet, their curious mixture of intricate noodling and glam rock stomping won me over, as did the way drummer John Stanier had one of his cymbals set up at a comically ridiculous height.

I'd always figured I kinda liked Yo La Tengo without being overly familiar with their back catalogue. Back in 2007, they'd have been touring their majestically-titled eleventh(!) album I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, and I headed to the Concorde once again, in the company of Steve and Charlotte who, as fully paid-up members of the band's fanbase, probably got more out of the show than I did. Don't get me wrong, though: there was plenty to admire in the band's mixture of sweet indie-pop and New York-style art-rock (obviously, I'm thinking more Velvet Underground/Television-type stuff than, say, Battles), even if I'd have struggled to name many of the tunes.

Hey, remember The Freebutt? The place had been closed since the previous year, but was finally refurbished and back in business by Autumn '07. There was talk at the time that it was now owned by the same company who'd acquired the Joiners in Southampton; whether or not this was the case, the stage had been moved and widened, from the left hand to the back wall, in exactly the same way the Joiners had been adapted a decade or so earlier. The movement of the layout necessitated a hugely annoying pillar, something of a staple for Brighton venues at the time, and there were still teething problems with the sound when Johnny Truant played a low-key show there, with support from ace fellow locals Thrown To The Wolves and instru-metal types Latitudes.

The rucksack-hawking Eastpak Antidote Tour tended towards North American poppy punk and metally hardcore, but for reasons known only to themselves they decided that their Autumn '07 offering would focus on Euro-metal. I was despatched, once again, to the Concorde, to cast my critical eyes'n'ears over four bands, only one of which was really any good. Headliners Soilwork played functional melo-death, Caliban's two-dimensional metalcore had me lamenting the waste of a good Shakespeare reference and openers Sonic Syndicate felt like a pop group, or possibly a Eurovision entry, in metal clothing. Dark Tranquillity provided the evening's by-a-country-mile highlight, annoying spelling and all; their take on melodic death metal had real class, and vocalist Mikael Stanne was in possession of a winning amount of old-school showmanship. Years later, at a Black Label Society gig, a fellow would tell me I looked like "the singer out of Dark Tranquillity." "You probably get that a lot," he suggested. This remains the only time anyone has ever said it to me.

 

Gnarly Rhode Island noise-rockers Daughters arrived at The Engine Room the following month, with a pretty great supporting line-up of With Scissors, metallic screamo types Errander and post-Refused Swedes The Grizzly Twister. Daughters had thrown something of a curveball the previous year, ditching the frenzied noisecore of their Canada Songs debut for malevolent art-punk on follow-up Hell Songs. This didn't make for any less intense a live experience, and as time has gone on this constant evolution has come to define the band - probably bigger in the present day than ever.

In that present day we were only just talking about, Raging Speedhorn are six years and two albums into a comeback, which makes it weird to look back to 2007 and realise that, much like 80s Matchbox, it already seemed like they'd been written off after line-up reshuffles and label changes. Not only were they back playing the sort of venues (the Engine Room, in this instance) they'd routinely demolished at the start of the decade, but they'd switched up their sound, incorporating the sort of moody Neurosissy sounds which were hip at the time - but arguably not what people wanted from a band who hadn't exactly built a reputation on subtlety. They were actually pretty good back then, but it wasn't really much of a surprise when they split the following year - or that their comeback has been based on their first principles of belligerently bouncy sludge.

Yet another evening was spent down The Engine Room, in the company of The Plight, Thrown To The Wolves and No Dice, the later having a bit of a shocker with equipment failure and a meltdown from their singer. The Plight were a decent hardcore'n'roll band from Leeds who'd recently released a great mini-album called Black Summer, and while they ultimately failed to make it to the level of contemporaries like Gallows or The Ghost Of A Thousand, they were a suitably lively experience in the flesh.

Next up, it was back to the "new" Freebutt to meet Qui. This outfit have existed as a duo both before and since, but at this point they were at their highest profile thanks to the addition of a vocalist, one David Yow. While clearly not on a par with his work fronting The Jesus Lizard or Scratch Acid, Qui's music was engaging enough, and the main thrill was clearly seeing Yow -  a man I'd last seen playing the main stage at eading some thirteen years previously - doing his unhinged thing in such a small room.

Almost exactly six months on from their OvO show there, I returned to The Greenhouse Effect for another way beyond leftfield Tatty Seaside Town joint, featuring (deep breath) Fat Worm Of Error, You're Smiling Now But We'll All Turn Into Demons, Sunshine Republic and Elapse-O. The last two have largely faded in my memory, though I have a feeling I quite dug Sunshine Republic, and that they were doing something pretty improvisational. As mentioned (by me) many times, I seem to have seen the ...Demons at least once a year around this point, and this would have been the first time since The Gilamonsters had played with them in London the previous summer. The Portsmouth psych-rock tykes were definitely at their most productive in this period, almost taking the piss by releasing a three album box set in a special presentation box complete with elastic band fastening. The albums in question boasted the oddly familiar titles The Freewheelin' Demons, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Demons! and Black Demon Time, and included one of my all-time favourites in total banger Jammin' On The 13th Floor.

 

Fat Worm Of Error featured members of Deerhoof - like Yo La Tengo, a band who'd somewhat passed me by, despite being much-loved by certain pals - but were substantially weirder. Their most recent full-length at the time of this gig would have been the memorably-monickered Pregnant Babies Pregnant With Pregnant Babies album on Load, a label whose attitude towards accessibility and conventional musicality can be gleaned by glancing at a roster whose most famous names are Lightning Bolt and Arab On Radar. As it happened, Fat Worm Of Error's deconstructed free noise actively irritated me, making this a rare show that I exited early. Sorry, Fat Worm Of Error.

Next on the calendar was the first of two visits to The Pressure Point for very different bands. Octavia Sperati were a goth/doom band who I only just discovered were named after a 19th Century actress from their native Norway, and I went to this show because my buddy Liam was bang into his European lady metal bands at this point. (Thinking about it, his band King Serious might have supported too.) More Scandi thrills at The Pressure Point followed a week or so later with Danish indie/folktronica troupe Efterklang, a gig attended by a larger group of my workmates (though not, I fear, Liam).

Louisville punks Coliseum had released one of my favourite albums of the year with their second full-length No Salvation, so it was cool to get a chance to see them at The Engine Room a few days before Christmas. Sharing a name with countless venues around the world, not to mention semi-sharing it with prog rock oldsters Colosseum, has made it nigh-on impossible to check who else played, though. No such problem with my last gig of 2007. Even in a town as relentless as Brighton, it's pretty unusual to find much of anything going on in the Christmas Gooch (AKA the last week of the year), but 80s Matchbox decided to throw a low-key party at The Engine Room, with support from Nottingham post-punks Wander Phantom, local riff-racketeers Motorbikes and the admirably dumb Mexican wrestling/thrashcore tag team Los Mendozas. Not sure whether it was the post-Xmas comedown or just the result of the often-inadequate Engine Room sound, but this wasn't quite the triumph of the Barfly show five months earlier. Most notably, Guy McKnight cut a rather more restrained figure, perhaps to the bemusement of his bandmates, one of whom thanked me for noting it in an otherwise favourable review published the other side of the New Year.

And that, clearly, is where we'll end it this time. Next time... well, next time will probably be another Buffy chapter, but the next music entry will see me get to grips with the most productive band I've been a part of thus far. Yes, we've finally made it to the story of Brighton doom outsiders Gorse, a band once described by a man stood on the Holloway Road as indie/sludge. That's a description to set pulses racing, surely?