Bagblog 3: the Green Door Store, Brighton

Awlright?! Today I'm writing in a very positive frame of mind. You see this weekend NIFE played a gig in Brighton, our first one in fact, and the whole weekend turned out to be a fulfilling and very inspiring one. Here's why.

The promoter of this night had done a great job, booking 3 bands fronted by girl-guitarist-singers, which gave the night a good identity and consistency.Also he'd done some actual promotion (the same could not be said of many gig promoters I could name), so we had a decent crowd of strangers to play to.


The venue (The Green Door Store) is fantastic, really it is. Sound-wise it's tough - quite a small room with lots of exposed brick and a cobbled floor makes for some harsh acoustics, but also makes for a great vibe (Which is more important? Discuss.) So when we got on stage we decided to keep the temperature down - not playing a half-arsed set with no intensity, but just keeping certain sections more spacey rather than animal and ear-destroying.


We have parts of our set that never stay the same, and I love playing in such intimate venues 'cos you can really take it down, and everyone can hear the actual acoustic stage noise, not just what's coming through the microphones. Our last gig in Hoxton (the Workshop) had a similar vibe, and we love taking the dynamics to extremes at these gigs. I think that's the best thing about playing drums - there are some sounds you can get in those quiet places that the other electricity-reliant guys on stage just can't compete with.

It was also great that the stuff that went down best at the gig was perhaps our craziest - shows that the Brighton crowd is an open-minded one! That's the stuff we're most proud of and where we feel we're being most original, and it's great to see people diggin' that, 'cos it seems like that's where we're headed at the moment.


So enough about the gig - just make sure you get down to our next one there if you're anywhere near Brighton in the future. We stayed on and partied in Brighton (thanks to my brother Loz for a bed and a dry loaf of bread), which was buzzing due to the Pride festival that weekend. The city had an amazing vibe and a fantastic lack of fighting for a Saturday too! Nothing better than drinking wine on the beach with loads of other people at 3am after a great show.


So hungover and happy we awoke too early on Sunday morning and moved our exhausted, dehydrated shells around town until we felt alive enough to attempt the M4. With the help of Janis Joplin, the Seeds, many espressos, James Gurley's incredible filth, wine gums and reduced co-op sandwiches we made it back alive, inspired and tired.

Moral of the story: none really, except don't promote at a venue unless you know how to promote gigs, don't drink lots of lager and expect a peanut butter sandwich to avoid a hangover and ALWAYS be open minded, whether at a gig or just on the beach.

Oh and go to the Green Door Store - a proper music venue, which we love.

Bagblog 2: commitment

My last blog, far from clearing my head of unwanted thoughts, just encouraged others to creep out. It's like the last time I tried to sort out my wardrobe - you take out a couple of shirts that have been lying neglected at the bottom and suddenly loads of others fall out and you have to take 'em all out and start from scratch. On the plus side there's always a sneaky little hoody or t-shirt or something that you'd forgotten you owned, so I hope my head-tidying might bring out something of value too, who knows...

Today's blog is inspired by a rather interesting gig I played at Moles with Nife a couple of Fridays ago. We were playing in support of Vintage Trouble, a hip blues / soul band from LA, who'd recently been building a following in the UK off the back of some great gigs, not least a Jools Holland performance. They were really nice guys, incredibly energetic and clearly in love with gigging all the time. Also interesting was the fact that they didn't have a record label, just some great management - kerching!

Nevertheless, this gig was to be far from the bangin' Moles shows we've been used to recently, but all the more inspiring for it. You see normally we play at Moles on a Friday or Saturday, it's free entry and it's a wicked night, a few come down to see us and we all party and do silly things til they kick us out at 4 and we try our luck with Bodrum kebabs (never wise, but we're ever forgetful).

This night however, the event was ticketed (£7) and a little suprisingly sold out, so none of our mates could come down! The end result of this was a pumped Nife getting up on stage and rocking out to a couple of hundred 30-50 year olds who wanted to hear some 'vintage' blues-soul. Nife does not play blues soul, in fact Nife does not like the word vintage.

It seems that many (especially the more bourgeois among us) are in love with the term:

adjective /ˈvintij/

   1. Of, relating to, or denoting wine of high quality
          * - vintage claret

   2. Denoting something of high quality, esp. something from the past or characteristic of the best period of a person's work
          * - a vintage Sherlock Holmes adventure

Assuming that vintage trouble doesn't reference a problem in working out how old a bottle of wine is, vintage must be referring to the high and / or old quality of their music. Most of society seems to have embraced the latter definition, with shops selling things that are deliberately 'aged', but which are usually just new products that have been scratched up, etc. How weird it must be to paint something, then mess it up, then sell it!

Anyway, it seems i'm not angry at the word, just its misuse today. Back to the gig, and we were playing our hearts out, goin mental, closing our eyes, shouting, screaming, sweating, and the audience were just stood there, politely clapping at the alotted points and generally looking a bit non-plussed by the whole thing.

Undeterred, we carried on putting out unrequited energy to 'em, and they just kept sucking it up, for the whole 40 minutes! This makes it sound like a terrible gig - it wasn't; they didn't leave, they didn't boo or talk loudly in the quiet bits, it was just a little bit like playing to a bunch of Marks and Spencer mannequins.

This brings me onto a bit of gig philosophy I've been pondering for a while. It's as if when you play a gig you put out energy to a crowd. Ideally the crowd bounces this energy back to you, perhaps adding a bit of their own in terms of movement, sound, enjoyment, fulfilment, whatever, and so the snowball continues, ace! Basically therefore what you want is an audience of 'reflectors', not the absorptive one we had at Moles.


The energy doesn't necessarily have to come from crazy running around and shouting though - it can come just as well and strongly from a really understated, gentle performance. It's a very unquantifiable thing, but to me it's about emotional intensity and sincerity, not just jumping around for the sake of it. If you've been at a gig when this emotional energy's really taken it up a notch you'll know what I mean.

So at Moles we felt like we'd put in a whole lot of energy, but the snowball really wasn't happening. The difference was that for the first time we really didn't care! On the surface the show wasn't great, but to us it meant a great deal, we'd finally fully committed to what we were playing, and if the crowd didn't dig it, well that was their problem. It's very easy to pander to an audience; see what they're into and try and tailor your set to please them a little better. Recently we've realised that there's nothing worse than going out of your way to please your audience at the expense of your own integrity - your set is and comes across as half-baked. It only ever works if you're fully committed.

Vintage Trouble went on after us and (not surpisingly) rocked the joint! But then their crowd had absorbed all our energy, so it was kind of cheating (joking, joking!) They were pulling out all the stops, jumping around, doing all that crowd participation stuff (which I do so despise), maybe there was even a bass solo chucked in somewhere, and the crowd were loving it. To me though, it was lacking a little in emotional sincerity, instead full of lots of those devices made to artificially manufacture the energy that makes gigs go off.

But don't get me wrong, it was a great gig, they're fantastic musicians, and they really do get that authentic 60s sound out live, which is not easy by any means. They played an epic 90 minute set and could have gone on for double that, (respect to their stamina!) and by all accounts it was a really great show, and exactly what the majority of the punters had come for, just a shame I was not one of them.

Waking up the next day I felt great spiritually (if a little hungover physically) knowing that even though those punters hadn't loved our set, we hadn't given them an inch! We gave them our emotions with sincerity whether they liked it or not. And as far as I'm concerned that's a musicians goal - to bring out and explore those uncharted things we have that separate us from the binary. After all, that is what we (humans) are good for, isn't it?

Bag Blog #1 - Currency

My head's been getting rather full of thoughts recently, such is the problem with the periods of bulk contemplation in which I find myself every now and again. So what better to do than release some of them to this lovely binary page eh?! (After all, it does have a lovely background.) As a result, here is the first installation in a series of my thoughts / learnings regarding music, art, life and whatever else strikes me as interesting, I hope you enjoy it! 

This week's chat concerns current vs. old music. Yesterday I went to see a band called Warpaint at the O2 academy, Bristol. They put on a great, if a little one-dimensional show, a beautiful cloud of delay, reverb, haunting vocals and some fat dance influenced grooves underneath. If you haven't checked them out I'd recommend doing so - their track 'Elephants' is so so good. But enough reviewing for now, I was just so refreshed and happy to be enjoying some current music for a change.

You see for the past few months as our band's music has evolved so have our tastes in music, and whenever I'm chatting about what I'm listening to at the moment I end up talking about bands from the 80s at the latest; I'm a posthumous appreciator it seems.

At this point I find it appropriate to address a common failing in our language, the use of 'old-school'. I hate this phrase, it's as if using 'old' simply isn't good enough any more. "Man, that band sounded sssooo old-school!" No they didn't, they sounded old. Unless literally talking about the place we used to learn subjects such as Mathematics and Food Technology I will simply use the phrase 'old'.

Anyway, these old bands have dominated my music player, recently the most-played has been 'Cut' by The Slits. Buy it now. They're a British girl band from the late 70s - early 80s, and they will change your conception of what a song has to be. As they put it; they couldn't play the 12 bar blues stuff, so they just did what the f**k they wanted, and the freedom, attitude and comedy in their songwriting - the lack of convention at every level - blew my mind.

It's also quite funny that, though they were a girl band when they played live, the drummer on the album was a guy. Yeah, take that feminists! But you can see why, Budgie (Peter Clarke) was a damn revolutionary! He's best known for drumming with Siouxsie and the Banshees (I'll get to them some other time.) With the rest of the Slits on the edge, Budgie's drumming holds it together but still manages to feel like it's pushing everything over, or at least falling down with it. He's my drummer of the moment, and I hope my playing can reflect some of his influence, that has to be a great thing. 

So coming back to Warpaint, my main inspiration this week has been to look harder for some great current artists instead of falling back on the safe obvious ones of the past, and they're out there; in fact since discovering Warpaint I've found out about a band called Suuns. Granted, they didn't win the 'least pretentious name of the year' award, and it must be a right bugger to try and describe to people at a gig, but their music more than makes up for it. They ride the fine line between dance and rock so well - they'll start up like a dance band and drop some huge guitar riff right into it!

It would also be rude to mention the Warpaint gig without talking about the support - Connan Mockasin, who I also dug. He was really minimalist up there (he was wearing a polo neck - which I don't endorse by the way - and he wasn't even sweating)  and his vocals were crazy and light, but for some reason his set really pleased me - I think he just set out to be strangely ominous up there, but it came across, and in fact he's inspired me to try something new out with a new tune NIFE's working on. 

I've actually been listening to a rehearsal recording of the scaffold of that new tune on loop while I write this, and am feeling well up for trying some stuff over it, it's a shame I live in a flat with tracing paper for walls and neighbours with ear trumpets placed right next to them, but that's Bath Life!

Oh wow, when I started this blog starting the first sentence took ages, now it feels like I could write a thousand more. But I won't, so until next time, adieu.

Howie Gill