02 ABC, Glasgow
Celtic Connections
Saturday January 18th
Four stars
It may have been
thirty-three years since Mark Stewart and Gareth Sager's gang of
punk-funk avant-provocateurs last played Glasgow, but it was more
than worth the wait at this unlikely but inspired Celtic Connections
show that laid bare the roots of Bristol's influential post-punk
melting pot of free jazz, funk and dub.
The night also formed
part of the twentieth anniversary of the similarly maverick Creeping
Bent record label, hence the appearance of The Sexual Objects, the
band formed by ex Fire Engine Davy Henderson following on from his
previous band, The Nectarine No 9, with whom Pop Group guitarist
Sager played and recorded.
While all bar one of
The Sexual Objects are time-served Nectarines, the SOBs opening
gambit goes back even further, to Henderson and guitarist Simon
Smeeton's post Fire Engines project, Win, with a cover of that band's
heroic 'You've Got The Power'. Stripped of 1980s studio gloss, here
the song more resembles the Velvet Underground on 'Live '69'
breathing extra edge into a song that matches bassist and Creeping
Bent supremo Douglas MacIntyre's Warhol-striped and be-shaded
ensemble to boot.
This is followed by
recent single, 'Feels Like Me' and a groovetastically louche preview
of material from the SOBs' long-awaited second album. Songs like 'CC
Blooms' casts Auld Reekie as its own self-mythologised Big Apple,
while a prog-tastic instrumental wig-out reveals the SOBs as rock and
roll animals at their glam-tastic peak.
With the opening squall
of a synthesiser played by Sager with libertine abandon, The Pop
Group launch into the opening 'We Are All Prostitutes' with the sort
of deranged commitment that would scare most younger groups to death.
Clutching his lyric sheets to his chest, Stewart looms righteously as
he shrieks a form of warped Brechtian agit-prop into the microphone.
Sager's slash and burn guitar-work and electronically treated
clarinet playing are equally incendiary, no more so than on the
band's still dangerous debut single, She Is Beyond Good and Evil.
For all the fervent
soothsaying there's a warmth there too, which musically comes through
the skewed fourth world rhythms of drummer Bruce Smith and bassist Dan
Catsis, while a young second guitarist puts further flesh on the
bones of necessary dissent. Stewart pays tribute to fellow travellers
The Slits, whose late singer Ari Up's own last Glasgow appearance was
on the same ABC 2 stage, and dedicates Colour Blind to Joy Division
vocalist Ian Curtis, another fallen contemporary.
Sager shows off some
neat foot as well as fretwork on the warped Chicisms of 'Where
There's A Will', while the closing 'We Are Time' possesses the
urgency of a 1960s cop show theme before veering off somewhere darker
to close a set designed to inspire a very visible form of
insurrection.
The List, January 2014
ends
Comments