Lightning Bolt at The Scala
So, to The Scala last Thursday to see Lightning Bolt, supported by the archly-named Sly & The Family Drone. The latter were neither especially droney or indeed funky, but I enjoyed their multivalent shtick: three drummers, a baritone sax, two keyboards and a guy mostly shouting and making moves. For some strange reason, they called the late 90s band, Add N to (X) to my mind. All good, noisy fun, and it reminded me that I haven’t attended a ‘rock’ event since (I think) Swans at Brixton circa 2014/15. Or Maybe Current 93 also around that time. Whatever, it made me feel my age: rather than the mixed age range of your average free improv event (including many of my contemporaries), we must have been 30 years older than any of the rest of the audience. Oh well, carpe diem and all that, I suppose.
The Scala was, of course, the site of the infamous Iggy/Stooges gig of exactly 50 years ago. It’s far less scuzzy now (I haven’t been there since a 29th Saxophone performance sometime in the late 80s) and the sound was good, and the audience vibe pretty chilled, given the music on offer. There were mild attempts at crowd surfing, easily curtailed by security, but it was all very good-humoured (having seen Woodstock '99 recently, I was very pleased by this). Lightning Bolt were awesome. Brian Appledale (his’ gimp mask’ triggering a colossal amount of samples) must have shed a stone or two in weight in just one hour, given the temperature both inside and out, and Brian 2.0, born Gibson, nailed down Appleyard’s excesses with a Bill Wyman-type froideur.
I’ve only seen LB once before, supporting the rather tedious Om, but their performance the other night easily topped that one. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any band being happy to follow these two, so immersive is their act. Album’s don’t and can’t really give a true representation of their live sound, which is perhaps why there are relatively few of them, for a band that has been in existence for more than 20 years.
It’s also great to see an American band over here, by the way, in our 'hostile environment’.
One thing that I noticed, beyond the bag searches and pat-downs by a professionally friendly security team (maybe we were given a 'senior citizen’ exception?), was that ALL of them, and all of the bar staff, seemed to be black. I’m not going to extrapolate especially much from this snap shot, but all I can say is that “it wasn’t like that in my day”. (Please don’t misread this, it’s an observation, not a judgement.) Cafe Oto, in comparison, is replete with young white staff, mostly volunteers. I was reminded of just how skilled bar and security work is in these situations (not especially at Cafe Oto), but I’m sure that, in Priti Patel’s mind, they would come under the 'unskilled’ banner.