The Mekano Set

First off, thank you so much to everyone that turned out to see us @ Brixton Telegraph. Such fun! Totally brilliant night. And a strange night, in that we failed, for the first time, to talk about our usual array of weighty philosophical subjects {soup, cake, body parts}. Also, we were supposed to be bottom of the bill to a night of three other bands. We were the only band to make an appearance.

The venue itself turned out to be absolutely superb - a nice size, excellent sound system, sizeable stage, loads of monitors, and an attentive soundman who did us some tasty delay on the vocals. Excellent.

The headliners' van broke down apparently. God know how the promoter felt. He didn't introduce himself - but then his bands all cancelled so it's understandable. Funny how the only people in the venue were there to see us. I think the least they can do is have us back.

We did feel a bit bad about everyone having to pay full price just to see us - and we only had enough beats for half an hour or thereabouts.

But it felt really good to have the stage to ourselves, with no superfluous drum kits and amps taking up space. Warming up the speakers with whatever came to hand {some Kate Bush and the odd 60's - 00's pop tunes}

A quick trip to a brilliant nearby Jamaican 'curries and birthday cakes' Bakery and we up and ready.

I think that's possibly the 'best' we've sounded. At least from where I was standing.

Beth had loads of room to groove around in, Saint's bass made the stage vibrate, my guitar sounded really crisp and hopefully didn't cloud the sound. I'm really starting to enjoy gigs recently.

As soon as it looked like we'd have the night to ourselves I really got very carried away. I seemed to spend the night hollering away from the mic, adding a few more 'licks' than usual to proceedings, leaving more space, and fucking around with the laptop far more than was necessary.

Wonderful. I cannot wait for the time when we get to play for longer than an hour. We have more than a sets worth of tunes and I can't imagine how much fun we'd have once we're warmed up.

Free-wheeling.

We dragged all the furnite around to encircle the dance floor and I muttered nonsense into the mic for the first three minutes - no idea what I said. What can I say - we're gifted at blowing our own cool and if you think otherwise you ain't been paying enough attention!

That's probably the most confident I've felt, even with the seriously false start instigated by the soundcheck - in which everything sounded superb until my foghorn like singing came in and drowned out everything else. 'erm, by the way, you have to turn Milk down... loads...' As soon as I hear what I'm doing louder than everything else I totally bottle it.

It was nice to hang around afterwards too.



The Mekano Set

On friday I helped Mekano Beth beat up a couch. We kicked and ripped it to shreds. It put up quite a fight, but now it is dust, ribbons of floral fabrics and splinters of wood. It can no longer be described as a couch in any real sense.

It was a mercy killing. It wasn't wanted by its owners any more, and it was a fire risk. To try to sell it on or give it away would have been crueller.

So Beth put it out of its misery. I wish we'd have recorded the sounds now.

On a slightly more constructive note, we're playing live at The Brixton Telegraph on thursday. See the gigs page for details. There's a new box flyer for the night too.

I've been working on three new ideas. I hope that at least one of these will turn into a Mekano Set song. I have not played them to Beth and Saint yet. So far they consist of the usual dirty bass and wah-filtered feedback guitar noodling but no gated / cut up / random frill type things yet. On all three I think I've thrown caution to the wind and not worried about what the chords are {usually I try to work out what the chords are, and then do my best not to play them in the song}.

I find it kind of interesting that ideas tend to come in batches of three. Invisible Girl was one of three songs from a session {Invisible Girl, Something Wicked and Blue Eyed Christ: three songs based around relatively melodic basslines, more subdued / introspective / intimate vocals from Beth, and my first concentrated attempts at more abstract / liquified guitar sounds. Oddly, I really like all three songs, but feel that the beats on all three aren't my best at all}.

I will try to write more soon.

Thank you to the people who came to see us strut our stuff @ Engine Room again last eve. Hope you all enjoyed yourselves. Did you like the intro music?

Hopefully it was filmed. Thank you to the nice young lass that filmed it for us! Everything seemed to run smoothly. It'll be interesting to have a look at the 'evidence'.

I'm listening to music. The TV is off.

Sadly we couldn't hang around after the set as Saint had a 'Post Rock Sub Bass' masterclass to host in London first thing in the AM. But once we'd dissentagled and disposed of all the kit Me and Camel ventured down to the Arc where we found our rain-drenched selves dancing to some really ace early 90's / Brasiliana era drum and bass stuff. Nice to hear some of that stuff again. Made me want to dig out my old World Wide / Giles Peterson tapes. They're behind the sofa somwhere. I may have imagined it I seem to remember they played an Imongen Heap / Frou Frou remix?

The Mekano Set

The Mekano Set request the pleasure of your company on Tuesday 18th October at the Engine Room at the bottom of Preston Street. It is being filmed and there is a party afterwards at The Arc on the seafront. Blue LED's look cooler than red ones. Music from 8.30 & £4 on the door.

Bye now!




The Mekano Set

You've probably heard all this before. If you read it, it may make you angry. So you may not wish to read it.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a young boy living in a slummy, rat infested part of London caught meningitis. He survived, but was left with a twisted spine, epilepsy and dodgy eyes amongst other things.

On my cracked and fuzzy computer screen, the boy with a twisted spine, funny eyes and misshapen face is throwing himself around amongst prettier boys playing clanky rock music.

The boy's name is John. The band look anachronistic, pedantic and posey, and sound rather chaotic, but the boy called John looks and sounds like an escaped mental patient. He looks like he means it. He is strangely beautiful in his Iggy Pop Meets Doctor Who ugliness, with his inability to stand up straight, his randomly, badly cut hair, pasty complexion, scrawny limbs and rubbish attire, perhaps because he seems to be celebrating all of his quirks rather than attempting to hide them.

His performance of this song inspired a generation of other boys and girls to have a go - some meant it, a few of them simply tried to copy what John was doing. Some people even copied the way his sick little body made him spit a lot. The song is called "Anarchy in the UK". The band is called The Sex Pistols.

John wasn't exactly doing much that was original, certainly not musically, but there is something 'real' about his performance, at least in this early footage. Perhaps inadvertantly he introduced a large number of British people to things they otherwise might not have discovered, or considered: Garage Rock, Reggae, Krautrock, Disco, wearing something other than flares and hooded tops.

He isn't a grown-up, over-educated, upper class pretty boy Thom York 'doing' John Lydon twenty years later, he really is a mishapen, angry little boy who, rather than earn millions of pounds, dollars and hearts for 'portraying tragedy, anger and confusion', earned himself stabbings, arrests, death threats and beatings for simply commenting on how exciting it can be to try something new, how useless the royal family are, how corrupt politicians are, how mental life seems, how injust, how unfair it is that the 'beautiful / rich people get all the breaks' , ideas that we now take largely as common sense.

To this day that boy is still perceived as some kind of ugly, angry, egotistical southern art student. Ugly, yes. Angry, yes. But he wasn't an art student, he grew up in the rat-infested, impoverished slum that was 1950's Finsbury Park, and you have to put the boy in context to understand that to look and behave in that way in Britain during the mid 1970's was pretty much a death wish. Virtually everybody in Britain from 6 to 66 wore flares. Everybody had bad mod haircuts. Everybody thought the Beatles were great and The Queen was lovely.

John earned the nickname Rotten, because his teeth were rotting in his head, because he dressed in rags, and lived in a squat. Not by choice, not to make a statement, just because that was the hand he'd been dealt.

John wasn't a punk, because there was no such thing when John was growing up. He lived for Reggae, Hawkwind and Kate Bush, folk music, Iggy Pop, Can and The Kinks - regardless of whether they were considered cool or not.

Now of course, everyone can have slightly unconventional hair, and in many ways it's considered quite 'cool' to be working class. Certainly, being a technically proficient musician is seen as a bit naff these days.

On monday I spent about £15 I didn't really have on a new DVD compiling some audio visual highlights from the odd career of that odd young John. He's a grown up now. He's learned to walk a little bit straighter, but his hair, and his stare, still manage to look somehow wonderfully 'wrong'. Nowadays no one takes him seriously, which is ironic considering he's always been a joyous, funny character at heart. He's grown up to resemble a scruffy, surrealist Kenneth Williams: very British, very entertaining, anachronistic in the sort camp, music-hall way he probably always aspired to.

I'm fairly sure I'll be repeating a similar process soon with the new releases by a certain woman called Kate.

The Mekano Set