Live music listings: June 2006

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Wed 14th

Complete Control presents
SCARLET'S WELL
+ The Jazz Butcher
+ Gerry Mitchell & Little Sparta

Doors 8.00
£6

Scarlet's Well: Descended from a long line of Indian kings ("It's still, technically, an offence for the British Queen to step on his shadow."), Bid began his musical career while a teenager in giddy Punk Rock London. He played in The B-Sides before they became Adam and The Ants, and then founded The Monochrome Set in 1978 with early Ants refugees Lester Square and Andy Warren. Their first singles appeared on the original Rough Trade label. Since 1998 he has curated Scarlet's Well, less a pop band than an exotic secret world, a walled garden whose ivy-covered door implores the curious to try its handle.
Attempts to pigeon-hole Scarlet's Well musically are ultimately frustrated, though the desperate might invoke comparisons with upstarts like The Divine Comedy (fop-pop crooning), Tindersticks (exotic, atmospheric arrangements) and The Magnetic Fields (eccentric, but accessible songwriting, a multitude of styles and genres). Other names that spring to mind are The Tiger Lillies (the band from the stage show 'Shockheaded Peter'), Kurt Weill, Kate Bush, Tom Waits covered by girls and girlish men, as well as Sondheim's Sweeney Todd and Into The Woods (non-ironic, Gothic fantasy songs laced with metaphor, wordplay, symbolism, soul, and love).
Main support from The Jazz Butcher: "Pat Fish/The Jazz Butcher is one of the most brilliant incisive pop writers Britain has produced since the glory days of Ray Davies and Pete Townsend. Criminally overlooked by a media obsessed by the next big thing instead of what is actually good. A truly great songwriter." [Alan McGee]
First on are Gerry Mitchell & Little Sparta.
Recalling slightly perhaps the ambience of Lambchop, maybe Tom Waits, Ivor Cutler. Even Mike Skinner's more reflective moments, Gerry's gritty wordplay partnered with the purity and etheral beauty of Little Sparta's music creates something all of it's own. They'll certainly challenge everything you think you know about spoken word and music. Their previous performances and Scalpel Slice album on Fire Records certainly have for these reviewers:
“Little Sparta weaves some of the most powerful, moving pieces of music for Gerry Mitchell to unleash his prose against. Mitchell twists every word and syllable to gain maximum affect." [GigWise.com, 4/5]
"Bittersweet & unpretentious ...these collaborators feed off of each other in strange ways, with an edge that keeps this from just poetry set to music." [PitchforkMedia, 7/10]

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