HW: Litmus - The Cartoon, Croydon - June 22nd

[Jon Jarrett]

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, Colin J Allen wrote:

> Litmus are headlining at the Cartoon in Croydon tomorrow night
> (Tuesday 22nd June). Come along for a slab of space rock to make
> your ears rattle (the Cartoon has a 10K rig!!!!).

        That was also a very fine gig. The Cartoon's rig appears to be
expensive in the sense of `high quality' rather than `louder than death
(tm)' but it took me a while to discover this. The whole thing was very
nearly a personal gig-going disaster in fact. I got to Croydon, found the
right street having correctly found it was quicker to walk there than get
a bus to West Croydon, and then tried to find the venue.

        By the time I'd walked far enough up the road (it's a long
road) to be verging on the `leafy suburbia' kind of effect I thought I
might have missed it. So back I went and eventually found myself back at
West Croydon station none the wiser. At this point I did what I ought to
have done forty minutes earlier and asked someone. They told me it was
next-door to a club I'd definitely noticed, so back I went again and
looked harder. One door up, finally, I found that there were a pair of
doors under the inspiring and switched-off neon legend "The ". There were
also some gig posters in the windows which told me I'd finally found it,
but I'd been on the wrong side of the road and couldn't read them from
there. I discovered once I got in that the sign had been taken down for
repair that weekend and no-one had yet thought to put it back up. Hardly
the bands' fault but I bloody nearly didn't make it for that little
oversight.

        So I was there about nine thirty after all this, and some fairly
dreary indie pop band were only just setting up. I thought they were
taking down, but when they played a bog-standard jangly set and were then
succeeded on the stage at just before ten by another conspicuously normal
band I began to worry if I'd managed to get the right place but the wrong
night. There was a fairly familiar set of synths in a corner but no sign
of anyone I reocgnised from Litmus and mine was the longest male hair in
the place by some way. Asking at the bar revealed that yes, Litmus were on
tonight, probably at half-ten and they were currently in the noodle bar
across the road. At this point things started to come together, but if I'd
been heading back to Cambridge, I'd have caught about two bars of Litmus's
set before having to head home in order to arrive even at three a. m. Gods
bless the British railways. Happily I was going to Brighton instead so
everything was fine.

        The second support were some slightly more interesting indie
outfit whose sound was in a kind of more tuneful Radiohead or Muse area,
but they only had a couple of songs where this showed up to advantage, and
though I did feel they'd deserved a clap I didn't really put my heart into
it.

        Eventually, Litmus. Setting up seemed to take very little time but
getting going did, that's OK, it's part of the show. Only two synthmen
tonight (unless the third was exceptionally well-hidden) but lots of good
noises, and glissando and random sonar-pinging guitar noise swirled the
relatively unsuspecting audience into a dark nebulous space where
eventually the rumbling of Martin's bass threatened, and then promised
definition, which emerged quite suddenly in the form of, I think, the
album opener as it has now been revealed, `Infinity Drive', and I think
they followed that with `Sonic Light' so as to leave no space for
breathing at all. Maximum force and energy; by the end of the second song
they'd acquired two girls dancing with each other to their male
companions' bemusement and all was really quite together, fierce and
impressive. My recollections dim after this point. I didn't take a
tracklist down because at this point I knew the names of only two Litmus
tracks and one of those (`Invader') they didn't play. But I think they let
the pressure off slightly after the first two, possibly it was `Dreams of
Space', and was there another one in there before `(Theta Wave) Inductor'?
That one, even nameless as it then was to me, I had been waiting for, it's
fantastic and was no disappointment. I later managed to more or less
convey the riff to Sherman and she said, "isn't that that Gong song,
`Master Builder'?" which took a little of my enthusiasm away but not very
much, and at the actual gig I was well away on it, sweat running off me
before they were halfway done. Fabulous high-speed mantric harmonised
shouty number, exactly what this band do best. More converts on the floor
before the end, and not a crowd that seemed at all likely to provide them
either (and a fair few left, I choose to believe simply because of the
hour rather than that they couldn't handle the weird obviously).

        It was perhaps not the best move, in retrospect, to follow this
with a number that will apparently be on the second album, already under
some kind of work. Not because of a need to stick to standards, because
who apart from me knew any of the songs, but because, well, it was slow,
sounded worryingly EMO or lumbering prog, and was sung by the drummer,
whose voice carries more strain via fewer notes than Martin or Simon's. It
went on for too long, wasn't really finished (I hope) and rather bled the
intensity out of the audience. The sweat I'd soaked my shirt with became
uncomfortably cold. Now that I have the album, I've heard `Stone
Oscillator' and realise that like that this song, in the right place and
with the right finishing touches, may well be a monster, but tonight I
think Dr Frankenstein would have taken the bits back to the mortuary and
waited for more and bigger lightning strikes.

        They finished up with `Twinstar', mind, which is a good way to
recover, and the new fans were buzzing with it again before they'd
done. Martin and Colin Allen were both good enough to have a long chat
with me, and the new fans, who turned out to be friends of the drummer but
dazzled anyway, were impressed by my dedication, not realising that a
Croydon gig was more or less en route for me. As Martin said, it was a
good example of what hppens when you lock a band in a room for most of a
year and then let them out, but I hope the creative process keeps up and
running at this kind of speed.[1] I haven't been able to make it to the
two subsequent gigs to see but I shall give the next Croydon one a
shot because it's always been worth seeing Litmus so far. Every gig I see
them at they make new converts (and also drive people off for being too
loud but hey, omelettes, eggs), and until Tommy Grenas finally reforms
Farflung they're the only band going making the music I crave. Yours,

Jonathan

ObCD: Bedouin - _As Above So Below_[2]

[1] And given that there's, what, at least five good-to-excellent songs
they had before they recorded the first one but still didn't use, I don't
see why the second one should take that long :-)

[2] Do you suppose that if the Hawkwind album ever comes out we'll see
something else happen on the Bedouin front or is that a closed book now?
--
                Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College, London
    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk/ejarr01 at students.bbk.ac.uk
  "As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising sun,
       So too does the intelligence of the fool after good advice."
       (Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, late-eight/early-ninth century)