Brighton 2008: Gig, Lazarus, Gig!!!

 

2008 was a pretty big year for me. Anna and I got on the property ladder by buying a flat in Vere Road, beginning a six year period when we would spend an awful lot of time in nearby pub The Signalman, mostly with our friends Emily and Burton. I joined Gorse, as discussed exhaustively in a previous chapter of this blog. And, of course, there was plenty of live music, including four festivals, as many trips to London and countless visits to venues both big and small in Brighton. Well, I say countless, but, as regular readers will know to expect, I'm about to recount as many as I can remember.

It started in mid-January with the first of the year's many evenings spent down at the Concorde2. This was a reviewing job to assess Surrey emo mob Hundred Reasons. Many years previously, I'd gone to see them as hotly-tipped up-and-comers plying their trade at Southampton's Joiners. They may have been in a much bigger room in January 2008, but it still felt like their career trajectory at this point was heading somewhat downwards. Mind you, literally on the day I originally wrote this sentence, the reformed Hundred Reasons, with a none-more-early-00s supporting line-up of Hell Is For Heroes and My Vitriol, announced a string of 2023 dates at decently-sized venues like Brixton Academy and Glasgow Barrowlands, so what did I know?* Anyway, back in '08 HR were certainly better than supports From Autumn To Ashes and Flood Of Red, though openers The XCerts were the most engaging band of the night.

*(And it's taken me so long to finish this chapter that they've since announced they'll be playing the Royal Albert Hall in 2025.)

A couple of weeks later and I was at The Pressure Point watching two outfits who'd emerged from recent-ish favourites of mine. Who Owns Death TV included in their ranks Julia Ruzicka and Tom Fowler out of the now-defunct Million Dead (and the latter also then on the Pale Horse payroll). With clear water between this enterprise and their former frontman Frank Turner's folk-punk direction, this lot played noise rock with hints of The Jesus Lizard, Shellac and Sonic Youth. Headliners Jubilee, meanwhile, featured Aaron North, a fellow I'd previously encountered as the six-string wild card in ace noiseniks The Icarus Line. Inbetween, he'd been a member of Nine Inch Nails, but Jubilee were as different from his previous endeavours as The Pressure Point would have been from the arenas he'd have played on NIN tours. Their sound was very indie, and British indie specifically, operating somewhere at the nexus of Britpop, baggy and shoegaze; it's not hard to imagine the name being selected by sticking a pin in Parklife's tracklisting, given that Blur's first three albums certainly incorporated all these sounds.

Sadly, neither band would last too long. Who Owns Death TV released one solitary 7"; Jubilee managed two EPs before Aaron North had a nervous breakdown after completion of a still-unreleased full-length. At the time of writing, he's never returned to music.

A sad note indeed, so it feels like a rather uncomfortable segueway into thrashcore buffoonery. February started with me going to see three cult American bands in four days at shortlived Brighton rock venue The Barfly (now The North Laine Brewhouse, unless that too has shuttered since I last took notice). The first of these, as those in the know may have surmised from the above description, was Municipal Waste. I arrived too late to see The Shitty Limits, sadly, though I'd catch them later in the year. They'd made enough of an impression on Waste mainman Tony Foresta for him to big them up onstage (though he couldn't remember their name). Local punks Abandon Ship played what, if I remember correctly, was their last show, sadly to a background chorus of the more knuckledragging members of the Waste fanbase chanting "Municipal Waste are gonna fuck you up!", which I didn't feel was in the spirit of the evening's admirably broad punk/metal crossover. Firmly in the latter category were Toxic Holocaust, whose set I remember being solid but a tad uninvolving. Municipal Waste were great, however, their crossover energy (think Nuclear Assault, DRI, Anthrax, etc) a good-natured blast to the faces of all involved.

 

The very next night I was back at the same venue for Baroness, Kylesa, Taint and local support The Plague Sermon. This was a strong line-up of exactly the sort of metal I was into at that point - sludgy but melodic, with roots in the punk scene and hints of hardcore and noise rock. It was great to see The Plague Sermon getting to play with bigger bands, all of whom crushed. After a night off, it was then back to the Barfly for a rather more measured affair. 

Earth belong in a small private pantheon of bands who were, initially, just too much for me, before gradually becoming favourites. The first time I consciously heard them was on a Sub Pop compilation tape that came free with the short-lived Lime Lizard magazine back in the day. On the A-side were Velocity Girl, Pond, The Dwarves, The Walkabouts and The Fastbacks. One the B-side was just the one track: Seven Angels by Earth.

 

I wasn't put off by the fact that Seven Angels was evidently as long as five other bands' songs put together, but the way it consisted of nothing but heavily distorted guitar chords, played so slowly they could barely be decribed as riffs, was pretty discombobulating for eighteen-year-old me. I reckon I'd have heard Gluey Porch Treatments by Melvins before this point, but while there were sonic similarities with Earth, the majority of tunes on that record clocked in at less than three minutes, and had vocals. Somehow, it seemed as if there was nothing to what Earth did, and yet it was uncomfortably overwhelming at the same time. Anyway, because this is the sort of person I am, I would diligently listen to the Earth side as often as the far poppier A-side of this tape, and at some point Seven Angels clicked with me. The next time a band like Earth crossed my path it would be Sunn O))), and while it would be a lie to say that I loved them immediately, my earlier listening experiences certainly laid the groundwork for appreciating them.

It was no surprise that Earth never made it big, but they were ultimately derailed not by the fearsomely uncommerical nature of their oeuvre, but by mainman Dylan Calrson's struggles with addiction. When he resurrected the band in the 2000s, he retained certain aspects - the minimalism, the repetition - but turned down the distortion and incorporated more instruments, including drums and sometimes cello, piano, etc. The overall effect was of a sort of contemplative variant of country music, with something of Ennio Morricone or Ry Cooder's Paris Texas soundtrack. This was the arid desert sound they brought to Brighton on a February night, and it was remarkable. We'll be seeing Earth again in due course.

 

A couple of weeks later, I was invited to a gig at the Pressure Point by Ivano from the label Big Scary Monsters, who'd been e-mailing me about various bands. The BSM band were Chicago residents Anathallo, in the UK as tour support for Manchester Orchestra. They had something like seven members and unsurprisingly had some relatively unusual instrumentation, and I guess their sound fitted into that sort of indie/math sound that was prevalent at the time through bands like Broken Social Scene, Minus The Bear, Yeasayer, etc. Not the kind of thing I'd have naturally made a beeline for perhaps, but I enjoyed their set and thought they were more distinctive than the still extant and considerably more successful headliners. 

 

The last week of February saw a run of three great shows in three nights. There was The Ghost Of A Thousand, supported by The Plight and Blackhole, at The Freebutt, followed by a tech-metal bonanza of The Dillinger Escape Plan and Between The Buried And Me at The Concorde2, and finally Fucked Up and The Dresdens at The Engine Room. I've written about the majority of these bands in the past (and will do again), but it's worth mentioning that the Fucked Up show was way better than their slightly underwhelming Brighton debut at the Freebutt, with Father Damian now an absolute banter machine. Talking about their recent tour supporting Gallows, he recalled "I decided there were enough kids for me to stage dive, like thousands of tiny ants holding up an elephant."

I had a couple of weeks off from gigs, possibly for a bit of a lie down, before being lured back to The Engine Room to see Discharge, with a supporting line-up of H8Ball, Insane Society and Constant State Of Terror. To be honest, I found the headliners a little disappointing, though this may have been in part due to the sky-high expectations associated with seeing such a legendary band, one of the few who could be said to have birthed an entire subgenre. They're still touring now, fifteen years later, so I should probably give them another go sometime.

A week later  there were far more agreeable punk rock vibes at what I believe may have been the inaugural Ralf Fest. This was a birthday celebration for Brighton's favourite Dutch punk Ralf (natch) at the West Hill Hall, a community centre-type venue just round the corner from my then gaff, with lots of my own chums in attendance, including a contingent from Southampton that wasn't limited to the members of the bands I'm about to detail.. The first half of the bill was made up of local-ish mates: Screwed Up Flyer from Southampton, featuring Tony and Mike; B-town D-beaters Constant State Of Terror (with, amongst others, my old mucker Adam); and Whole In The Head, at the time officially recognised as Southampton's most raging. After that rabble came Geriatric Unit from Nottingham, a band with a pretty heavyweight line-up, featuring as they did members who'd done time in Heresy, Iron Monkey, Hard To Swallow, John Holmes, Wolves (Of Greece!), Endless Grinning Skulls and probably a dozen or so more noisy outfits. As well as having the best name for a bunch of aging punks (not sure how old they actually were at the time, but I suspect they were probably only around their early 40s), they played such a potent set of thrashy hardcore that, even though I never saw them play again, I greedily lapped up all the full-lengths they went on to produce.

 

Next up were Fix Me, a Spanish band who'd formed from the ashes of E-150. I'd never actually checked out the latter - and as I needed a break to go get some food by this point, I never checked out Fix Me either. I did make sure to get back to the West Hill Hall in time for the headliners though, as they were Ralf's legendary countrymen Seein' Red. This lot had formed (here's that phrase again) from the ashes of Larm, an even more legendary band who'd been making a similar racket to early Napalm Death before the Brummies had even released anything. Seein' Red had made their recorded debut in '89, and while they were marginally less full-on than Larm, with a style that was less proto-grind and more hardcore punk, this was a righteous racket to conclude the evening's celebrations.

 

The next day was Easter Sunday; what better occasion to head to the Engine Room for an international extreme metal gig? I think last time, I claimed to have seen local blasters Iceni once; well, it turns out I saw them a second time, as the opening act on a bill completed by Italian thrashers Methedras, blackened Poles Devilish Impressions and Swedeath survivors Dismember. The latter were second only to Entombed in their country's influential early '90s scene, and were still winningly brutal in 2008.

April seems to have been a fairly quiet month for me gigwise, and for some reason the next show I went to was The Presidents Of The United States Of America at the Concorde 2. I forget which of our friends was keen to see the two-hit wonder jokers, but this was one of those times I spent more time in the venue's front bar than actually watching the band...

The only other show I can recall from that month was Cursed at the Engine Room. I hadn't been able to get in when the excellent Canadian crustpunks played the Freebutt on their previous tour, so was well up for this one, and they didn't disappoint... although they would split at the end of the European leg of this tour, having been robbed in Germany and left understandably demoralised. Vocalist Chris Colohan went on to do another top band, Burning Love, and is currently in the sort-of supergroup SECT with dudes from Catharsis, Earth Crisis and, well, Fall Out Boy.

 

Ten or so days later I was back at the same venue to review a show which I described with the headline 'Cavalcade of one word name bands play to their mates'. The line-up in ascending order was Dascha, Pictures, Maths and Throats, a selection from which Maths stood out as obvious highlights - although what stands out most in my memory was their singer spilling my pint while doing one of those 'hardcore singer goes for a walkabout in the crowd' moves, and then finding me afterwards to apologise, buy me another pint and give me a CD. I didn't mention this in the review.

My excellent friend Ben had somehow ended up with two spare tickets to go and Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds at the Hammersmith Apollo a few days later, so Anna and I went up to enjoy a pretty great 20-track set that was only partly spoilt by a guy near us continually calling out for No Pussy Blues. We tried to explain that as that was a Grinderman song it probably wouldn't be making an appearance, but he persisted, to no avail. I would be hearing that song live before summer was out though...

 

The last time I'd heard No Pussy Blues had been at All Tomorrow's Parties in 2007, and fittingly the next item on our agenda was a trip back to Minehead for ATP 2008. The chalet crew this time was Anna and myself, along with Ben and, I think, Emma. This may have been the ATP where with our our extended crew - Emily, Burton, Luke, Brian, maybe Lex, Jamie, Nansi, Ben, Clare etc - we ended up staying up till daylight one night trying to construct human pyramids, watched by curious festival-goers and at least one small local boy on a bicycle. This would, in turn, explain why I seem to be able to remember less of the actual music than normal.

 

This particular edition of my favourite festival of the 00s was curated by Texan post-rockers Explosions In The Sky, a band who'd gone from Brighton's Freebutt to (admittedly niche) festival headliners in a few short years. While I suspect some viewed them as slightly too mainstream-aligned to be hip, their ATP bill included cult names like Eluvium and World's End Girlfriend amid better-known outfits and a smattering of hip hop. Of the latter, it was fun to see De La Soul nearly two decades after first being entranced by Me, Myself & I, while at the opposite end of some putative spectrum, Saul Williams physically threw himself into a set of visceral, rock-informed agit-rap. We also went to see Ghostface Killah, and encountered some of the issues around Wu-Tang live activities. So yeah, there was an element of Wu-aoke as Ghostface and Raekwon (himself performing the next day) dropped choruses from the wider Wu legacy. Of more concern was the way the MCs encouraged various girls onstage. That's cool, we thought. God knows you don't get much audience participation at a festival dominated by post-rock bands. That the song they were encouraged to dance to was called Greedy Bitches left something of a bad taste in the mouth, however. Now, apparently, this song is about a time Ghost's tourbus Oreos stash was consumed by some ladies while he was having a snooze. I'm sure every biscuit-lover can appreciate the man's frustration. But at ATP, it just seemed crass, like the female audience members were being encouraged to participate in their own mocking. Anna and Emma left, and I wasn't too far behind them.

I still listen to Ghostface Killah though, displaying the double standards of the white liberal hip hop fan to a tee.

 

Human pyramids and offensive hip hop aside, I remember seeing The National (who I thought sounded a bit like James), Jens Lekman (whose witty Swedish indie pop was rather charming), Battles doing their art-math-glam stomp... and, honestly not much else. I'll have more detailed recollections of ATP 2009, promise!

I only had a month until Download, and the two shows I went to in that time, both at the Concorde2, had a distinctly Downloady flavour to them. The first was Skindred, supported by Sad Season and Idiom. If the latter were exactly the sort of band you'd expect to support Skindred, the former, featuring ex-Sikth vocalist Mikee Goodman, were rather different, with a vaguely Bad Seeds quality to a sound I described as "dragged through a shipwreck backwards." Well, I know what I meant. I had high hopes for this lot and was rather disappointed they never really did anything.

Skindred, on the other hand, were already well on their way to becoming one of the most celebrated rock festival bands of the time. Their ragga metal hybrid really comes into its own as a live experience, and the sweltering temperature of that early summer night by the seaside did nothing to calm the crowd's spirits. After the show, I walked to a pub to catch up with Anna and my workmates. Skindred had left me such a sweaty mess that Anna genuinely thought I'd fallen in the sea on the way. I hadn't even been dancing all that much.

The heat remained very much on ten days later, when 36 Crazyfists and Exit Ten brought their numbers-orientated names to the C2. The latter were the sort of band people tended to enthuse about based on a supposedly unique selling point. In this instance, it was the powerfully melodic vocals of singer Ryan Redman, and the way they contrasted with the band's metalcore sound. (I'm not sure this would be such a big deal these days.) Anyway, on the night in question Redman was suffering from some sort of vocal-restricting condition, which rather blunted their desired effect.

No such issues for 36CF, even if their singer Brock Lindow described the onstage heat to me, in a brief post-gig interview, as "like a blowdryer in your mouth every time you took a breath". Well, they were from Alaska. I had a soft spot for their emo metal, and the crowd received them pretty rapturously. Managed to leave without looking like I'd taken a swim, so that was good.

That weekend, then, saw my first trip to Download alongside the Kerrang! crew, many of whom I was meeting for the first time. I'd go up on and off over the next few years and always had an absolute blast; whatever the quality of the bands you had to review, you could always count on fun, messy times back at the hotel bar afterwards.

Back in the early 90s, when Castle Donington's annual jamboree was a one day, one stage event called Monsters Of Rock, I'd written (to Kerrang!, natch) to complain about the festival's lack of diversity. At that point, it still cleaved to traditional metal and hard rock. Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax had all played in the 80s, but otherwise there was no sign of the changes to the rock landscape; you were more likely to get Thunder or The Black Crowes than anything remotely alternative, and up until '92 even Slayer seemed to have been considered rather too heavy to be invited, so the chances of any death metal or grindcore appearing was remote at the time. I also pointed out that, at that point, the only female artists who'd performed had been Doro Pesch out of Warlock and the woman tied to W.A.S.P's pretend torture rack.

After a year's break, the festival returned in 1994 with at least my earlier points addressed: now a two-stage event, the likes of Sepultura, Therapy?, The Wildhearts and Biohazard all appeared, and the next couple of years saw turns from White Zombie, Machine Head, Corrosion Of Conformity and Paradise Lost. I think Sean Yseult from White Zombie was the only other female to appear, mind. Anyway, 1996 was the last Monsters Of Rock held on Donington's hallowed turf.

By 2008, Download had been going for a few years and was now a three-stage event with oodles of the diversity I'd previously demanded. I suspect the first band I saw that year was Rolo Tomassi, and you can be sure that female-fronted, mathy synthgrind was not on the Monsters Of Rock menu back in the day. In a juxtaposition that sums up the variety on offer at the festival, the next band I watched were Euro power metal types Firewind. 

This was my first outdoor, three-day festival since Glastonbury '99, and it was fun to explore a site I hadn't been to before. Mind you, I barely watched anyone on the main stage (where the headliners were Kiss, The Offspring and - erk - Lostprophets), as all my assignments were on the other two, and by the time I'd written them up and got myself suitably fed and watered, it was late in the day. Of the bands I reviewed playing the third, tent-based stage on the first day, High On Fire were the sublime, revelatory real deal. You will be forgiven for not remembering Blackhole, In Case Of Fire or Beat Union, who were the others. It was then back to the same venue to watch the reliably chaotic Dillinger Escape Plan headline. On the Saturday, I had the early shift on the second stage, which appeared to be essentially in a car park. On reflection, hard tarmac might not have been the most suitable surface on which to be watching Malefice or Annotations Of An Autopsy, whose aggro chunterings were followed by Alesana and The Devil Wears Prada. I think I made it back to that stage later on to watch Amon Amarth, before heading to the smallest stage to round out the day with three very different generations of heavy metal thunder courtesy of Johnny Truant, Saxon and Testament. On Sunday, I watched Invasion and Municipal Waste before going to work with Exit Ten, Canterbury, Ted Maul and Between The Buried & Me on the third stage. Due to the deadlines associated with the last day, I also wound up having to review a solo set from Jonathan Davis, which I was unfathomably kind about.

 

I was back on familar turf around ten days later with probably the only TST gig I attended at the Concorde, and what a joy to see Melt-Banana, Part Chimp and Comanechi on a big stage. A few days on and I was back there on another sweltering day to see ace post-metal types Cult Of Luna and less ace post-metal types Devil Sold His Soul.

Somewhat big news in Brighton (Hove, actually) next: at the beginning of July, Grinderman were playing a festival season warm-up show at the King Alfred, described by Wikipedia as "the largest wet and dry sport centre in the city." Needless to say, this was a venue unfamiliar with rock'n'roll in any form, let alone the peculiar variant played by Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds compadres, so there was a brilliant incongruity about it all that I hadn't experienced since Autechre got Coil and Sunn O))) to play at Pontins. Looking back, I feel incredibly lucky to have got tickets for this rare show, alongside a bunch of my work buddies (Anna was away, and I think is possibly still annoyed about this). Although (obviously) sold out, the number of tickets on offer was small enough that there was plenty of room, so this was as up close and personal to Cave as you're likely to get. And after a set of Grinderman tunes, the likes of Tupelo and The Mercy Seat got wheeled out for the encore, making this a properly special occasion. God knows what the older ladies working at the venue made of it all, though.

My old mucker Jimmy was back in town later in July with his excellent band Teeth Of The Sea, opening up for Wooden Shjips and The Heads. Gotta say, getting to see the latter was the evening's highlight; I'd first heard them on John Peel's show sometime in the 90s, but these legendary slackers rarely toured, so it was a treat indeed to finally experience their superfuzzy stoner freakouts in the flesh. By comparison, Wooden Shjips, though a band I dug on record, were just a tad underwhelming; I was aware that repetition was a large part of their vibe, but that night it just didn't drag me in like it should have.

The week after this, Anna and I moved into our new flat as mentioned way back in the first sentence of this entry, so our next excursion wasn't until a week or so into August. This was for a two-day festival at the Concorde called At Home By The Sea, which to be honest we only went to as they were offering two-for-one tickets. They somehow managed to cram four stages in by using different spaces of indoor and outside space as well as the normal stage, and the eclectic line-up might have been the reason tickets weren't flying. Alongside local types including Jacob's Stories and Peggy Sue, the obvious standout were Chrome Hoof, who had at least eight shiny robed members playing funk-doom-disco-psych, including Cathedral dude Leo Smee on bass. You can never have enough funk-doom-disco-psych in your life, as far as I'm concerned. I also want to say that one of them was on stilts, but that could just be the weird effect they had on me and my longterm memory.

 

Definitely no stilts on offer when A Storm Of Light played the Engine Room a couple of weeks later. Along with Latitudes and The Great Wave, ace Brighton doom duo Old Mayor played; in the year of writing this*, they reunited for the final TST weekender, reminding me just how powerful their ragged noise was all those years ago. A Storm Of Light featured former Neurosis/Red Sparowes type Josh Graham, and at the time I noted that their bleak sound ran the gamut "between sparse dirge and, er, full-on, punk-informed dirge".

*(this sentence, at least.) 

Festival season wasn't done with me yet, and the middle weekend of September found me, Ben and a couple of his mates heading to Larmer Tree Gardens for End Of The Road. We thought this was more or less in Salisbury, though in practice a mixture of heavy traffic and uncertainty around directions meant that it felt like getting to the cathedral city was only about half the journey. Nevertheless, we made it, as did Ben's loose-belted trousers which were in very real danger of falling to his ankles as we walked to the campsite carrying our tents and beer. Someone camped near us kept playing Bon Jovi songs on an acoustic guitar. 

To date, this was the last time I camped at a festival.

The weather had not been kind - if not at the same hellish level as Glastonbury '97, the site was unpleasantly muddy - but the rain did at least cease after Friday evening. The only two bands from that day I can recall both put in brilliant sets which, to some extent, captured what I described to Jimmy via email as "a vibe somewhere between Truck and ATP." The Dirty Three's evocative instrumentals were perfect for an early Autumn evening on the outdoor main stage, while Dead Meadow did their woozy stoner rock thing as headliners in the smallest space, The Tipi Tent. (Actually, I might have also caught a bit of Akron/Family on the Big Top stage, but I'm not sure.) The next day, we went to see folkpop lot Noah & The Whale be perfectly pleasant on the main stage, and I also took in post-rock types Revenge Of Shinobi in the tent. Ben wanted to check out onetime Ash guitarist Charlotte Hatherley play the tent later in the day, but her evident displeasure with playing a small stage at a small festival surrounded by mud meant she was rather hard to warm to. British Sea Power, by contrast, played a blinder on the main stage, with then new tracks Waving Flags and No Lucifer perfect festival anthems. Next up were Low. On the phone to Anna earlier in the day, she'd been dismissive of the prospect, saying "Low shows are always the same." She was proven wrong.

 

OK, renditions of timeless classics like Sunflower, Dinosaur Act etc were as powerful as ever. But something was evidently up with frontman Alan Sparhawk, sharing with the audience between songs an assertion that "All the people I love told me they hated me today." (His wife Mimi Parker replied, "Not all of them.") His fragile mental state didn't improve, and he ended the set by hurling his guitar full pelt into the crowd. Somehow he didn't kill anyone, and somebody in the crowd got an unexpected souvenir to take home. 

 

After that, Mercury Rev's headlining set felt lacklustre. Look, I'm not saying I wanted more instruments thrown in rage and pain, but at this point Jonathan Donahue's stage patter just came across as insincere. "You have such a great scene going here," he maintained. Oh, fuck off. I think I went to see Two Gallants in the Big Top, but they were boring too.

Sunday found me taking in the widest range of entertainment. Brighton folkies Sons Of Noel And Adrian opened the main stage, while House Of Brothers, featuring Andrew Jackson from briefly-hip screamo types The Murder Of Rosa Luxemburg, played more austere tunes in the tent. Kimya Dawson showed up early for her main stage set, playing kid's tunes from the then-current Alphabutt record. Bob Log III did his super-entertaining one man band rock'n'roll ramalama in the Big Top, followed by Wild Billy Childish & The Musicians Of The British Empire. Think this might be the only time I've seen the legendary Mr Childish, and his no frills, back-to-basics tunes were a treat. The biggest treat of the whole weekend, however, were Constantines, whose late evening set in the tent proved a raucous revelation, complete with an unlikely cover of AC/DC's Thunderstruck. Then Brakes headlined the Big Top, tunes like All Night Disco Party helping instill some belated hedonism into proceedings. Avant-weirdos aPAtT and French electro types Zombie Zombie then played after hours sets. Sunday was a party!

Maybe that explains why my memory of a bunch of Brighton shows from that time is so muddy! I've identified from historical documents that I went to see Paint It Black, Boduf Songs, Selfish Cunt and Bela Emerson around this time, while Anna and I saw a few bands as part of Brighton Live - maybe The Drookit Dogs, Thieves By The Code... and surely some others? But apart from enjoying hanging out with Mat, Clive and Wes from Boduf, and support band The Guillotines absolutely smoking Selfish Cunt, details of any of these are not coming readily to mind just now.

September did end with a great show at The Hobgoblin, though. Opening were excellent punk combo The Sceptres, fronted by Bryony Benyon (later of Good Throb and a bunch of other short-lived outfits), alongside, if memory serves, members of The Shitty Limits. The always-enthralling You're Smiling Now... But We'll All Turn Into Demons were the garage-psych meat in the punk rock sandwich, before headliners Lovvers, the second band of the month to feature former Murder Of Rosa Luxemburg personnel, did the reverb punk thing popular at the time.

When somebody asks me which band I've seen live the most, the ...Demons are one of the leading contenders; their biggest rivals to this sought-after accolade are quite possibly Rolo Tomassi, and sure enough I spent another night in the latter's company down the Freebutt in early October. Locals Easy Hips and Throats provided ample support, but the headliners remained comfortably in another league.

Roots Manuva put on a much better hip hop show than Ghostface Killah at the Concorde, before Vessels did their mathrock thing at the Freebutt a couple of days later. Then it was back to the Concorde to see Funeral For A Friend, which I would only have gone to for one of two reasons: either I was reviewing it, or it was because ace Canadians Cancer Bats were supporting. Speaking of Canada, Ramones-style NoMeansNo side project The Hanson Brothers pitched up at the Albert in early November, with The Shitty Limits in tow. 

November found me up in the smoke on two separate occasions to bear witness to Norwegian black metal survivors. Enslaved, by this point well into their proggier era, were excellent at the Scala, while Satyricon lorded it at ULU with what I described as "the direct-yet-grandiose, coldly sexual and knowingly camp sound of late 80s Sisters Of Mercy." And speaking of folk popular with goths, there was still time for one more encounter with Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds when they played soulless seafront space the Centre. The venue seemed a way off full capacity - it was a gloomy Sunday in November and I seem to recall some issues on the railways, which may have kept some potential revellers away - but once they got going, it was another fine set, mixing then-current Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! material with a healthy selection of old favourites - Tupelo, The Weeping Song, Red Right Hand, etc, with the show closing on the mighty Stagger Lee.

Still can't believe he didn't call the tour Gig, Lazarus, Gig!!! though.

You know what? I thought that was it, then I realised I'd been to so many gigs in 2008 that I'd had to write some on the reverse side of my (narrow-ruled!) side of A4 notes. The first of these was a rum do and no mistake. Blessed By A Broken Heart played a dreadful mixture of metalcore and 80s soundtrack rock which I'd call godforsaken if they weren't an actively Christian band. These days they're best known (in this country, at least) for once including future Eurovision star Sam Ryder in their ranks, but he wouldn't join until a few years after they appeared at the Concorde, so I didn't even get an amusing anecdote out of this experience. 

Safer ground came in the shape of the last ever Johnny Truant show at the Engine Room, a sad farewell to a great Brighton band. And then all that was left of my 2008 gigging was two nights in the company of The Ghost Of A Thousand and Rolo Tomassi (told you I've seen them a lot): first at London's Borderline for reviewing purposes, then the following night back at the redoubtable Freebutt. You can take as read that both bands were on fine form; given that I'd already seen both bands play that selfsame venue earlier in the year, I clearly couldn't get enough of them.

Crikey, that took me a while. I might need to consider being slightly less exhaustive from now on, but rest assured that (whenever I actually get to it) 2009 will continue to be soundtracked by an absolute racket...

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Part 5: This Is Hell

 

 

Buffy The Vampire Slayer should have finished at the end of its fifth season.

OK, some might have seen this as something of a downer, given that it climaxed with the eponymous heroine sacrificing herself to save the world. But in its sixth season, everything basically goes to shit.

 

Buffy is dragged out of Heaven by her unwitting friends, then has to literally claw her way out of her grave. Giles leaves town. Xander jilts Anya at the altar. Willow gets addicted to magic in an extended metaphor for drug dependency. Buffy and Spike engage in a secret, self-destructive relationship. Tara dumps Willow. And then things get even worse...

There's nothing wrong, necessarily, with shows taking a darker direction. Arguably, there's even something admirable in the resurrection of Buffy being shown as difficult, painful and with unforeseen repercussions, rather than benefitting from some deus ex machina plot device that restores everything to the way it was by the end of Episode 1. Once again, Sarah Michelle Gellar gets to show her acting chops by portraying revenant Buffy as traumatised and catatonic in the opening couple of episodes.

One of the main problems, though, is that there is so much in Season 6 which is just plain unpleasant. Even before Charisma Carpenter and others went public with their allegations against Joss Whedon, rewatching the last two seasons of Buffy revealed a ramping up of mysogynystic content - always shown as wrong (if, on at least one dangerous occasion, redeemable), but cumulatively contributing to an unwelcome emphasis. I don't think ostensibly fantasy-based artforms should avoid real-world issues; quite the opposite. And a show that's pretty explicitly about female empowerment? Sure, there should be something pretty powerful about it taking on mysogyny.

But the tone is set in the second part of the opener Bargaining, when a demon biker crew, aiming to pillage Sunnydale having learnt of Buffy's death, confront the Scooby Gang. Not only does their leader, Razor, make an explicit rape threat. He then goes on to warn that his crew have "anatomical incompatabilities that tend to tear up little girls."

I'm no prude, but who the fuck let that line through? 

From the off, Buffy had always mixed good-natured snark, swashbuckling action, genuine emotion, character development and quick-witted comedy. But in season 6, the shifting tones finally started to jar against each other. Nowhere was this more evident than in this series' putative Big Bads. The alliance of Warren Mears (Season 5 robot-maker and manufacturer of the Buffybot), longstanding supporting character Jonathan Levinson and Andrew Wells (a new character, but brother of Tucker, the kid who sent demondogs to the prom in Season 3) initially seem to have been brought in as a comic counterpoint to the bleak heaviness of the season's first three episodes. They're geeks! They bicker! They are essentially rubbish at villainy! What larks!

 

However, as if tainted by the moral murkiness elsewhere, things take a turn. In the mid-season episode Dead Things, they create a doohickey which allows them to, er, turn women into sex slaves. Warren uses it on Katrina, his ex from the previous season - who regains control of her senses in time to point out that what they're planning on doing to her is rape. Jonathan and Andrew at least seem shocked by the realisation - though it's pretty fucking obvious - but Warren? Well, Warren kills her by hitting her over the head with a bottle.

This is the episode where it becomes clear that The Trio have gone from being proto-Big Bang Theory irritants to incels avant la lettre, a development which will belatedly give the season a direction which it had previously lacked. Prior to this, there are too many throwaway episodes of a type not seen for a few years, like the one where Dawn falls for a boy who's really a vampire or the one where Buffy gets a job at a burger bar and suspects there's something wrong with the food's special ingredient. There are, however, two really great done-in-ones which reverse the trend.

Once More, With Feeling is probably the single most famous Buffy episode. In some ways a counterpoint to Season 4's Hush, where the characters' voices were silenced, this time round a demon casts a spell which makes Sunnydale residents break into song (and dance!) and reveal their secrets. Before the successes of High School Musical or Glee, this was a high risk strategy, but it was also the one shining moment in Season 6 which recaptured the magic (no pun intended) of earlier efforts. Amber Benson, Emma Caulfield and Anthony Head are all particularly great, with the first-named's Under Your Spell a moving paean to her love for Willow. It's an important episode to the season's narrative, as secrets are revealed that will change the course of nearly every main character's lives, but it's also an impressive creative and technical achievement.

 

The other highlight is a more muted affair. In Normal Again, a demon injects Buffy with a drug that makes her hallucinate a different reality: one where she is a patient in a psychiatric hospital, the events of the last six years a figment of her imagination. As well as giving Gellar another interesting dual role, it allows for some pretty meta dialogue, particularly from the doctor treating her. Of Dawn, he says, "She was introduced last year. It didn't make a lot of sense though, did it?", while this season's rather underwhelming villains are addressed when he questions what this deceleration of threat level says about the state of Buffy's psyche. "You used to create these grand villains to battle against. And now what is it? Just ordinary students you went to high school with. No gods or monsters, just three pathetic little men... who like playing with toys." It's interesting to note the way that some of these statements acknowledge criticisms that the show's fanbase might have had of the ways things have turned out. Buffy eventually resists the idea that her Sunnydale life is a fantasy, but the final shot of the episode is of her as a catatonic mental patient, leaving the rather chilling possibility that nothing we've seen has been real. I mean, obviously it's not real, but... you know what I mean. Weirdly, the thing this all reminds me of the most is the alternative realities experienced by John Simm and Keeley Hawes in Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes.

 

This episode is part of Buffy's principal story arc for the season, exploring her difficulties in dealing with her return to the living after an extended stay in what appears to have been a sort of Heaven. By contrast, life on earth is "hard, and bright, and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch ... this is hell." Unwilling to let her friends know what their actions have done, it's Spike in whom she confides, ultimately leading to a sexual relationship which had almost certainly already been explored on turn-of-the-millennium fanfic forums. In many ways, it made sense. Spike had been a fan favourite who'd gradually become a key part of proceedings over the years, even demonstrating heroism and bravery, particularly in Season 5; Buffy had form with vampire lovin', and was feeling alienated from the rest of the Scooby Gang. And while the scene where their love-making literally makes a house collapse around them is kinda silly, there's also something undeniably sexy about their clandestine relationship. But then, in the episode Seeing Red, Spike attempts to rape Buffy. She manages to fight him off, and he leaves Sunnydale, but both his crime and Buffy's reaction to it are rather pushed aside due to events later in the episode.

We'll get back to that in due course, but first we need to talk about Willow and Tara. There's an argument that the former is the character with by far the most interesting development throughout the entire run of Buffy, from nervous, nerdy best friend to powerful witch while, with first Oz then Tara, being half of the show's two most believable (and sweetest) romantic couplings. In keeping with the darker tone of Season 6, however, the latter relationship is threatened by Willow's increasing use of, and dependency on, magic. If the drug addiction metaphors are laid on pretty thick, Alyson Hannigan does at least do a pretty good job of selling Willow's descent, as she argues with Giles, uses an amnesia spell on Tara, changes Amy back from a rat, gets in with a warlock and endangers Dawn. It seems like a redemptive arc though, and by the end of the episode Entropy, her and Tara seem to be back together. And then: Seeing Red.

But let's not sideline Tara here. Through Season 6, she becomes the heart of the Scooby Gang. She brings Willow back from the precipice of addiction. It's her who Buffy confides in about her relationship with Spike. With Giles back in London and Buffy's mother dead, she almost inhabits the role of the grown-up in the room. She also, by the by, has the best voice in Once More, With Feeling. Amber Benson's performance is brilliant, conveying Tara's sweet but occasionally steely core. And yet, the sense that she's undervalued by the show's creators persists. She doesn't even get her own spot on the opening credits. And then: Seeing Red.

Amber Benson is on the opening credits.

Much of the episode is the sort of standard fare established earlier in the season. The geeks get their hands on magic orbs which bestow the wearer with great strength. Later, Warren uses them to try and steal a load of cash from an armoured car. Jonathan secretly helps Buffy stop him; he and Andrew end up arrested, while Warren gets away. Whatever.

In the final scene of the episode, Warren shows up at Buffy's house, shooting at her and Xander outside before firing random shots in the air. One of these goes through the window where a recently-reconciled Willow and Tara are stood. So, which character do you reckon ends up dying?

The whole thing leaves a nasty taste, particularly coming on the back of Spike's attempted sexual assault of Buffy. Willow and Tara were probably the most visible lesbian couple on US TV at this point, but this turn of events reduces Tara to a victim, and is in danger of casting the vivid portrayal of their relationship as merely a means to an end, its violent end a catalyst to force this season to where it was going all along. For all that Warren Mears was a nasty, sociopathic piece of shit, him and his comedy mates were never really gonna be the Big Bad. The Big Bad was Willow Rosenberg.

 

The idea of the super-powered heroine turning to the dark side is one that found its most famous (and powerful) realisation in the Dark Phoenix Saga that played out in the X-Men comic for most of 1980. It's such an iconic part of X-Men lore that they had two goes at it in the movies, but neither could come close to the original's potency. Marvel themselves would reheat the idea for a story arc involving the Scarlet Witch nearly a decade later (which would also later feed into MCU storylines involving Wanda Maximoff). And speaking of witches...

Part of the success of the Dark Phoenix Saga was due to its slow build towards disaster, and it's clear that Willow's corruption through magic is something which had been patiently explored for some time in order to set up the end of Season 6. Alyson Hannigan had previously shown that she could do the dark side with her two performances as Vamp Willow in earlier seasons, but while those appearances were leavened by a certain humour, the Dark Willow that emerges as a result of Tara's death is terrifying. There's something kinda cool about the powerful way she stops the bus on which she believes Warren is fleeing town. But the torture scene when she finally catches up with him is one of the most hardcore of Buffy's entire run. Slowly forcing a bullet into him, sewing his mouth shut, then instantanteously flaying him (after declaring, "Bored now.") and setting him on fire. God knows Warren deserved his comeuppance, but this was tonally very different from anything else the show had previously shown, and all the more shocking by being delivered at the hands of one of its (previously) gentlest characters. In lieu of a wisecrack, Willow's last words before disappearing are "One down," demonstrating that her desire for vengeance isn't restricted to ringleader Warren. 

The penultimate episode, continuing that thought with its title "Two To Go", is therefore about the rest of the Scooby Gang attempting to protect the bumbling if not blameless Jonathan and Andrew before Willow makes with the flaying another couple times. There's a memorable exchange between Buffy and Willow, with the latter pointing out that the former hasn't exactly been loving the world lately: "I know you were happier when you were in the ground." Willow defeats Buffy in combat, and it becomes clear that she's now a world-threatening power. In some ways, though, the entire episode feels like a set-up for its conclusion; as Willow announces, "There's no one in the world who has the power to stop me now," she's hit by a powerful spell, as Giles unexpectedly emerges to declare, "I'd like to test that theory."

It turns out that some sort of British coven had (temporarily) granted Giles powers, having been alerted psychically to the dangers of Willow's black magic. Their faith in the big man isn't entirely repaid; while he does manage to subdue Willow, she soon gains telepathic control of Anya to escape, defeating Giles and - in a neat parallel to where Buffy started the season - casts her and Dawn into an underground tomb, before heading off to locate a Satanic temple beneath Sunnydale and bring it to the surface. Or something. The exact detail of her plan is irrelevant, but the intended result is literally the end of the world.

Don't worry, it doesn't happen! And, improbably but in a way that ultimately makes perfect sense, it's all thanks to Xander. Confronting Willow right at the end, he takes everything she throws at him, continually assuring her that he loves her. As much as she initially mocks him, his persistence pays off and the rage of Dark Willow gives way to the grief and vulnerability of, er, Regular Willow. The world is saved, and Xander, the creepy man baby who has been in so many ways the weakest link in the Scooby Gang since day one, actually redeems himself.

So, Buffy Season Six, then. Some pretty lacklustre episodes and a few brilliant ones; bad shit happening to pretty much everyone; actively irritating bad guys. For all I kinda wish it had never happened, those last three episodes, with Dark Willow belatedly becoming the proper Big Bad, are remarkable, and I accept that in various ways the rest of the run was necessary to build up to its finale. Let's hope that's all the mysogyny out of the way, though, eh?

Oh...

 

anatomical incompatibilities that, uh, tend to tear up little girls.

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