Having been to only one gig so far this year, by the end of this evening, I’ll have been to a couple (and if I’d been better organised, have a ticket to a third). So tonight I’m off to see Richmond Fontaine in Oxford, but in a rare moment of “getting my shit together”, I thought I’d be well advised to post this early, rather than, you know, late.
Ought
These drives over to Bristol are becoming much simpler affairs these days (Easter’s pan-tastrophe excepted, of course), so I was completely unprepared for the closure of the Lodge St entrance to my go-to Colston Hall carpark. A half hour of trying to navigate my way round to the other entrance followed and lacked only a round of the Benny Hill music in the background and a man cleaning windows on a wobbly ladder to complete full-on comic ridiculousness.
Got there, eventually, a little flustered and didn’t really make the most of support band Milo’s Planes, a three-piece who actually looked quite fun with loads of different ideas bulging out all over the place. It was also my first visit to Colston Hall’s number two hall, The Lantern and I like it a lot, especially its typically Colston Hall deep carpet.
Ought are a Canadian band I’d been enthusiastically turned on to by a friend at Christmas and since picking up what is I think their second long player, Sun Coming Down, I’ve become rather fond of their tight, clanky sound, especially singer Tim Darcy’s languid, sardonic delivery.
Darcy, live, is if anything more languid and foppish than I imagined, and in my fancy quickly became some sort of dark-clad, slightly baleful Uriah Heep-type figure (I’m talking Dickens here not the Seventies hard rockers of Demons and Wizards fame – I looked that up I should add)
He did seem to be in some sort of poor health, (which allowed to me to add “consumptive” to my mental pen-picture of him) and spoke of being “tired” clutching some sort of Sport drink for much of the set.
Ably supported by a tight rhythm section and the imaginative colourings of Matt May on keyboards, Darcy gave us most of the record I knew plus enough from the first one to make me want to get hold of it. The touchstone I’ve tried to avoid when describing the Darcy style is of course Mark E Smith, but seeing him and listening back to the recordings, David Byrne might work better. He jerked and fidgeted around the Lantern’s small stage with self-conscious gawkiness. His guitar work was by turns awkward then intricate and between chords there was a vigorous amount of pointing and finger waggling. He also spoke in pretty much the same stylised, back-of-the-throat manner as he sings, which was a little disturbing. But overall it was hard not to like the feller.
In the end, it was quite a short set. I didn’t actually mind this, to be honest, and in the same way as Sun Coming Down is quite a brief but nicely put together outing, playing under the hour seemed quite appropriate. I enjoyed the version of my favourite song, the wonderfully existential “Big Beautiful Blue Sky” with hearty audience participation all round (Warplane! Condo!). The Lantern turns out to have a really clear sound, so the recordings are more than fine.
I commend them and Ought to you.
Partly Porpoise 