13:43, 16/02/2005

I smell a rat

We played a gig down at Artrocker last night supporting The Dexateens, an absolutely grin-makingly good punky southern fried rock outfit from down home in Alabama. Chiming, duelling guitars, a smiling bassist, Neil-Young-if-he-could-sing vocals and some garage punk strut accompanied by some huge "big rock" endings orchestrated by a solid as fuck drummer made for a rousing 45 minutes set - you walked away with a smile on your face feeling you'd somehow simultaneously seen Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Replacements. Nice. i bought their new album, Red Dust Rising and am enjoying them again now. Highly recommended. Absolutely super nice people too. Southern Gents. Taylor Hollingsworth, Dexateens' genius guitarist opened up the show with a solo guitar and voice set that was also tinglygood.

Our show was good. We've been doing a lot of writing recently and so a third of our set was brand new untested material. This always puts a wee bit of a frisson on things as the extra concentration you have to put in makes it hard to rock out totally happily. Artrocker is a familar venue for us and we're very au fait with the place's acoustics and PA, so it's an ideal place to try new stuff. Things started badly when something in my chain of three pedals gave in and my amp crackled and suddenly died. Taking out two patch leads and the compression pedal seemed to do the trick. People enjoyed it a lot and came and told us so. We're doing it all again at a Tsunami benefit at The Metro, Oxford Street this Saturday. The new stuff is now bedded in better so it should be a good one - even if not it's all for a good cause.

The cloud on last night's skyline was provided by the fact that the whole venue stank to high heaven. P-yew! It hit me as soon as I arrived for the soundcheck. It was, boys and girls, the high, rank, sweet stench of death. Some creature, rat was the concensus, had crawled into the guts of the subterranean club and shuffled off this mortal coil. It had run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile. It was an ex-rat. It had ceased to be (that's enough - ed). By using nasal radar triangulation, it was possible to determine its position as somewhere directly above or below the artists' backstage area. Nice. Never having sniffed the aroma of expired rodent before, I was unaccustomed to how BIG and pervasive the smell is. Understandably, Buffalo Bar's fine, fine management took the precaution of spraying the area with air freshener. Of course, this made things worse, as the olfactory cocktail of meadow-fresh and decomposing-furball is one I would quite literally not wish on my worst enemy. Like gag me with a spoon. I can still smell it now. Ew. Gross. Ugh. Feh. Ptoo.

And now some tranny algebra:

partially removed makeup + a night's sleep = pinkeye
unshaved leg + opaque tights = itchy hairpull
perishingly cold day + jeans + hold-ups = easy access + warm fuzzy legs
midnight blue nail polish + guitar thrashing = no blue nail polish after a very short time
MAC = the best

You have been reading...

I smell a rat

In /music/shocks