Shows on boats, shows in houses, shows within shows
The best pop shows I've been part of recently ("recently" here means back to 1995) have been multi-band Events in special places, real senses that whatever we saw wasn't just hanging out in a club/bar/pub to see [name of favorite band] but a Night to Remember. The best few recently-- so recently I'm not ready to write about them-- have been in the Greater NYC area, on a summery, rusty boat called the Frying Pan, or in two friends' cool houses. (All three shows, by the way, included the Receptionists, Vassar College's and North America's compleat answer to the early Raincoats.)
I did, though, expect to want to give you, O Reader, a blow-by-blow account of Sarah 100, the farewell-to-Sarah-Records show on a hired boat in Bristol two Augusts ago-- and then I realized I just didn't want to: "and then I left the train station, and then there was Jen Matson and there was Rodney and we got on the bus and rode up to the top of the hill and looked down on Bristol"-- yeah, we did that, and then somebody got thirsty and we found a hotel that could serve us coffee and water and tea and... why don't I just give you the highlights?
Trotting across the Sarah-suburbs to an end of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, looking over the great expanse & the river valley that was there before the city and might be there afterwards, & seeing the Lengths (literally-- it's a suspension bridge) to which people go to install themselves in time... I like the sense I get, looking at objects from the Age of Industry, that here's something grand (we'll remember who made it, & who designed it) that's nevertheless for use (people cross it every day) and for unpredictable uses-- who knows how many assignations, marriages, jobs, cross-country transits by visiting popkids from Singapore, chemistry experiments fruitful & futile, the Suspension Bridge has enabled? ...Sort of like (you knew this was coming) a pop song: people will listen to it, get from point A to point B on it, but who knows where it will let them go afterwards?
Making the one-hour choppy ride around the Channel in an oddly flat boat with other kids from the indiepop-list, trying and failing to get a photograph of the other popkid boat, called Emily, so I could send it to my friend emily in America.
Meeting Chris McFarlane, who had bought tickets here from Dallas, Texas the minute he heard Sarah 100 would take place, & helping Chris find Elsa from Portugal-- they knew each other only through zines & the telephone. My friends who had driven to Bristol from Sutton discovered their car broken-into and the handbag with their tickets stolen. They ended up getting in anyway-- a good reason for you, Gentle Reader, to write down the names of the people you sell tickets to, so you can let them in if they Experience Property Damage.
Drifting around the concrete edge of Bristol Channel in the centre city, where the artsy Arnolfini with its artsy coffee shop sits, watching the bands get there and waiting for the gig itself to open... seeing how many people from how many countries had arrived, & exchanging zines with tons of them.
Seeing Blueboy twice: once acoustic, once electric, in what must have been the last show of their Electric-Mod phase.
Realizing that the ship had two big decks, not counting the middle through which we came on board: the tables at the top for meeting people quietly, the packed bottom deck for the bands.
Watching Boyracer murder-to-dissect Even As We Speak's "One Step Forward"-- I wish they had done more covers, and it's often cool to hear the quiet songs you like made Loud.
Hearing the shimmering Brighter reunion: now I see what their drum machine was doing, & what kinds of fragility all those fireflies-and-no-see-um clouds of guitar notes were wanting to convey.
Batting away the superfluity of Sarah 100 balloons, each reading, in Helvetica bold, "SARAH 100 BALLOON."
SEEING Harvey Williams play his OWN songs after three years of waiting: the best parts of his piano-centric 10" & the Another Sunny Day songs that didn't require him to make it Loud-- preeminently "Rio," with the opening line about "not so long ago" that's a kind of promise of what the song will do, aimed at anyone who used to be in love and isn't now, and which now sounds to me more hopeful than what the song actually means is depressing... ditto for "Don't Shout at Me," which I didn't really want to know was aimed at Huggy Bear, but can still pretend is about Being A Quieter Person instead... the boat was packed-- the Big Boat was Packed with Sarah Devotees! how odd in itself-- but, from the fourth row, I could at least see Harvey's blond head, watching the bow move on the strings, and absorb the melodies over the not-quite-hushed-up crowd.
Heavenly closed out the evening-- as usual, they seemed convinced they were doing a not-quite-up-to-what-we-expected job while the audience agreed to love them-- & true to however many years of requests, they would not play "Shallow" no matter how many people shouted for it. I took in that set from above the crowd, atop some sort of metal shelf whose nautical use I couldn't fathom-- I liked seeing and hearing, not only the great new songs they played (this was before Operation: Heavenly), but the way the crowd really did like them. Some bands deserve to be stars in the sense that we hear them and (like it or not) expect their names on marquees; Heavenly deserved to be stars in the sense that future listeners to anything that resembles rock music ought to look up at the night sky and remember them-- their four-and-a-half albums, not to mention "So Little Deserve," already are for me a kind of constellation.
We drove home under the real constellations, on what looked to me like the broadest highway in Britain, with the most lanes and lights: I was so happy for most of the trip-- with the bands, with the scene they'd helped create, with the friends I had there-- that I could have fallen asleep content with the headache the non-headrest would have given me in the morning, and so happy that I didn't mind getting no sleep at all instead. Two days later I had to move back to America: the train-station goodbyes, half-packed boxes' sadness, and hurry to give your unshippable things away would take too long to explain for a zine that's ostensibly and mostly about music-- but they were experiences the bands I'd just seen had shown me they knew all about.
