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You can have your sanitised, purpose built from the
ground up, shiny new various-sized Ocean venues in Hackney.
And while you’re at it you can certainly keep your quadruple
figured, re-launched and re-branded, gourmet-restaurant
affiliated, Dave- Bleedin’-Stewart-owned, shopping-centre-situated
Marquee club in Islington. Sometimes it’s best to just
make do, it really is. So down a dark back-street in
far from affluent Bethnal Green in London’s East End,
in a genuine older than your dad’s dad working men’s
club, Simian have a setting better than they probably
ever intended. Because somewhere with a little more
sheen would – you imagine – appropriately house their
polished, electronically laced, psychedelic melody stacked,
bob-along outings. Or maybe just serve to extenuate
the all too clear averageness they’d been known to deal
in with their first album instead?
But tonight is slightly different. And not only because
they have an occasionally excellent forthcoming album
to pull a few new surprises from now. The carpet is
awful, for a start. The walls are wooden, but far from
the trendy, treated West End wine bar type. There are
chairs and tables pushed aside to aid creation of a
‘dancefloor’. They enter and leave the stage via the
fire escape. There’s stuffy air and shit ale on tap.
And hey, it’s kind of wonderful, bringing back that
intimacy that you never quite got after upgrading from
just seeing your mate’s band in the local village hall
on a Thursday night, standing on your toes to look taller
at the makeshift bar. Those nights when anything in
front of you seemed like the best thing in the world,
merely because it was there in front of you. And tonight
with Simian just there in front of us, what else is
there to do but lap them up.
Well aside from the fact that they really do benefit
from this atmosphere, coaxing the audience into their
lo-fi creative womb with naivety and beaming faces,
there are still a few small niggles. We wish there weren’t,
they do practically feel like our mates up there, ready
to take on the world with a shake of their heads and
a bounce in their bad dancing step, but expectation
is a sod capable of ruining a good idea. When we’re
expect a frontier pushing, asteroid-belt weaving, psychedelic
umbrella (or even just a raincoat) of sound, now and
then we do just get funk on a budget, after a valet.
If that’s where they fall down though they can end picking
up enough pace to sound like Daft Punk pushing Jane’s
Addiction down the Alps in a tin bath, which was enough
to get us interested again. And it’s these constant
to’s and fro’s that characterise, make and break the
Simian live experience. On album he gives passion drenched
vocal, live he sounds like an indie singer and has dull
hair. But he’s on a small stage in a genuine older than
your dad’s dad working men’s club, so right now we love
him.
James Berry for Crud Magazine© 2002
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12/02 Kickrollers
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January 2001
July - August 2001
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January - March 2002
April - July 2002
August - December 2002 | |
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