HW/OFF: Spacehead/Harvey Bainbridge/Bedouin @ The Standard, 24/10/02

[Jonathan Jarrett]

        Dear All,
                  I do like the Standard, as a venue, the staff are nice,
there's plenty of different places to watch from and you don't have to be
involved if you don't want to be, and they even have some sort of real
beer even if it is keg stuff. But it is, for me at least, difficult to get
to and out of in time from Cambridge. They never start early and they
always finish late. The result of this is that I only caught the middle
act entire, arriving some way into Spacehead's set and having to leave
during Bedouin's. But for what it's worth, my thoughts...

        Spacehead, and this may surprise you, I liked. They have added
none other than our very own Keef Barton on second guitar and this fills
out the sound usefully and stops the mid-range being all about monotonal
riffing and nothing else. In fact just generally this line-up was much
more together than the last one I saw which I still maintain was quite
frankly terrible. Having Martin also doing keyboards might seem like a
halfway measure but he seems to understand swoosh and with Keef holding
the guitar noise down he can manage to stop for the odd second here and
there. Dibs also seemed to play out a bit more, perhaps knowing that he
didn't have to hold his band together behind him. So it was rather better
than last time. `Dark Star' was the particular highlight for me, they
really locked into that one and it was quite empirically Good and Rocked
and stuff like that. The slower stuff I'm more ambivalent about; Dibs's
voice doesn't carry it as well, he's in perpetual danger of going flat on
the long drawn-out passages and this can break the otherwise enjoyable
atmosphere. But the fast stuff looked like a practised band doing its
stuff and I enjoyed it. They closed with a cover of `The Right Stuff'
which is a song I've never heard live before, and as far as I was
concerned the only way they could have improved that, for me at least, was
to let me sing it, so I was happy enough with that :-)

        Harvey took some time to get going, in both setting-up and playing
senses. We got ten minutes of atmospherics and understated techno before
anything happened that I either recognised or was much interested in, that
being `Cygnus X-1' with a shorter version of the black hole rant on _Live
2000_. But with that done he opened up rather; I got the idea that up till
then he hadn't really known what he was going to talk about that evening,
but then he found a profitable vein about aliens being our future selves
travelling back in time which got quite authentically Bainbridgian and
kept me well entertained. He did do parts of several other pieces I knew
but I'm still not sure he was at his best. He can hold up a performance
either by massaging the brain with the synths or by stimulating by
spouting weirdness at you, and I think he was doing the latter better than
the former and at first neither at all really. On the other hand Keef
seemed to love every minute of it so I may be being unduly harsh. I
enjoyed it anyway, but it wasn't as good as I'd hoped given the _Live
2000_ CD-R. As with Gong, the environment and audience feedback seems to
make a big difference to Harvey's performance and I'm not sure he had it
tonight.

        Bedouin were on good form. There was even one new song in the set,
that I saw, though it sounded like it might have been a far older solo
number, not really a Bedouin track, had that sort of lightweight bounce of
the Elf stuff. I had to leave during `As Above So Below', which is my
favourite, and in fact given the wait I had at the tube station just over
the road, unless they did a ten-minute version I could have stayed for it,
dammit, but sense won out over risking being stranded in London. Glenn was
more spacey and less stunt-guitar than usual, and for the first time I've
seen had dressed for the gig, and now looked like a goth going to a
wedding before having put on his make-up and frock coat. Alan was the same
as ever, as was Danny. No complaints about any of it, they are workmen
same as Motorhead and do their job well. I seem not to have written a
set-list, but I *think* that we did get the following, maybe roughly in
this order: `LSD', `Say Goodbye da Babylon' (some new words in
the chorus), `Rock Palace', `Demons in Denial', `Queen of the Night' (much
changed around, I suspect a new version of this will be on the next
record, only the chorus seemed recognisable), `Air Space' and the new one,
and `As Above So Below'. How much more there was I don't know: Nick Lee
was there also, and perhaps he can say. But it was good to get that much.

        The other thing of note was getting fliered by Litmus's main-man
again, and having a chat with him about audio generators, apropos of which
he said, "Yeah, I've got three people on audio generator at the moment. I
think that can only be a good thing don't you?" I thoroughly approve of
this attitude (though I wouldn't do it myself I confess) and am looking
forward to seeing them once or possibly twice this winter (supporting the
Ozrics, below Arthur Brown on the bill, and at the Xmas Party). Yours,
                                                                       Jon

ObCD: Sons of Selina - _Fire in the Hole_ (not as good as I'd hoped but
hey, what is these days... Apart from Clutch and Queens of the Stone
Age.)
--
"I recognise that I have transgressed many of the precepts of the divine
law, and that I am subjected by various vices and iniquities, disobedient
to the words of the divine mystery brought unto me and a worshipper of the
delights of this military age." Marquis Borrell of Barcelona, 955 A.D.

             (Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College London)