Hackney Empire, 19 July 2007
LMHR/RAR 40th Anniversary
The Set List:
1 Ampersand
2 Cologne Hotel
3 Fisherman’s Blues
4 Happy As Annie
5 Video Dream Girl
6 K Hole
7 Superstar Tradesman
8 Face For The Radio
I got my old school friends Matt Park(guitar) and Spencer Brown(Double Bass) to play Ampersand and Cologne Hotel with Seb and I. I asked Matt to try to emulate the weird squelchy noises on the demos as he’s kind of a mad scientist with effects.
It was the first time we played together so I was happy it actually sounded ok!
For example Seb only listened to each tune once in his car on the way to the gig! Spencer plays double bass for Andy Shepard so he knows how to hold it together on the fly.
To be honest it was exhilarating to play with jazz musicians of their level. Most fun I’ve had in ages.
Spencer stayed with Seb for the Pat tunes, and again those The Man Who Came to Stay and 8 Dead Boys were like pure euphoria for me. I hadn’t seen him for so long but to be honest Pat and I had that closeness before babyshambles when even after a year apart, within a half hour it felt as familiar as if I’d seen him yesterday. The chemistry I feel from him onstage is incredible though, you know why he plays each note. He plays what he feels, then reacts to what he hears from his guitar which makes him feel something else(which makes his guitar react, etc.)- its like he’s talking to himself and the rest of the band at the same time, a kind of frenetic schizophrenia that reflects his personality so accurately.
It was all on the fly for me too therein, I learnt the rest of the tunes in the dressing room just before the set (plus four more The View tunes we never played as we ran out of time).
That’s really fun though caise you get to improvise absent mindedly as you strain to remember the chord sequence and sometimes thats when the good stuff falls out.
Ed was great, he’s such a loveable little kook. And that was Johnny on violin, he’s great too. Earthy folk that seem to resent the fact that they somehow ended up on a stage and not in a treehouse over Newbury Bypass.
The cement mixer drummer guy with braids is an American lad called Bert. He plays with Ali Love and valiantly struggled with Ed’s swung gypsy feel but was at home with Ali’s loping funk.
Ali’s genius, he really doesn’t take himself seriously and his gigs are always a party. He’s the voice on that Chemical Brothers tune, “Do It Again”. His records kinda sound like Prince getting drunk with a New-Rave Bruce Springsteen. Fionn and i often end up drunk with him playing Dylan songs badly at 4 a.m. My neighbours hate me.
What to say about The View? Besides how hypnotising it felt to play double bass with them on “Face For The Radio”, the palpable excitement from the crowd when they were onstage and things of that nature?
