Review of BEAK> and Snapped Ankles at SWX, Bristol, 20/05/19
12 min read
“Fancy taking a spare guest list place for BEAK> this coming Monday?”
It was my good pal Cliché-Head on the old apparatus (so named on account of his sporting a beard with a bald head and looking like every other bugger on the planet).
I’d heard the recent BEAK> single, ‘Brean Down‘, on 6 Music and liked it a lot – a noir and squalid atmosphere rendered invigorating by delicious choppy drums, with vocals that sounded like they were recorded in a bus shelter between gasps of butane. All I knew was BEAK> was Geoff Barrow of Portishead’s new outfit, although they’d actually been around ten years.
So it was an easy decision to see them live, instead of staying in, as usual, to do the slo-mo hop-scotch around the creaky floorboards outside our toddler’s bedroom. But, because of that volatile homunculus, I was threadbare and needed to awaken to the evening’s possibilities. So I took a single drop of psilocybin mushroom juice, which seems to be the “in” thing in Bristol at the moment. That I have called it the “in” thing shows just how “out” I am and, also, it’s been around a while now. I have found that one drop gives me an almost imperceptible spark of interest in things when jaded; two drops and you’re giggling with a mate who’s done likewise, but faintly exiled from someone who hasn’t; three to five drops becomes a coherence lottery; 6 and beyond and you find yourself trying to change a duvet cover at 4am whilst standing on the actual duvet and, vitally, filming it for social media with a face that’s collapsed in on itself. Or so I’m told…
Soon I found myself outside SWX waiting for Cliché-Head, feeling worryingly withdrawn and edgy. I saw a fella come out to hand a pass to a woman and recognised him as Geoff Barrow. A quick google revealed I was right. I read a little. It seemed he’d started out as a drummer in the town he’d made famous and that he was born two years after me. ‘So, hang on,’ I thought, ‘That means the bastard was only 23 when he was having all that success in the mid-nineties!’ Whilst I was getting wasted with my older girlfriend (a fan who was as fragile as Beth Gibbon’s voice) stuck in her measly flat with perpetual cat sick on a patchwork quilt. Indeed, that’s what Portishead’s music was for me: it was cat-sick-on-a-patchwork-quilt music, intermingled with the warbling of a rightly-insecure older girlfriend. Later I realised just what a clever turn it was - that melange of Morricone film-score with hip hop beats and an imploring voice from the come-down bad-lands of the “joyous” 90s.
Incidentally, I once met Portishead’s guitarist, Adrian Utley, and when I realised who he was, moronically gushed, “Oh Portishead! Who doesn’t like Portishead?”
“Well, quite a few people actually,“ he replied.
‘Yeah,’ I thought with a rush of self-loathing, ‘Like me.’
Anyway, so Geoff Barrow is a prick because he was successful as a nipper when I was cleaning cat-sick off a quilt and disappointing an unsuitable older girlfriend. Right, let’s enjoy this night!
I was soon inside SWX with Cliché-Head. SWX has a capacity of about a thousand and blah, blah, blah, it’s quite a decent venue actually. But what it also has is the confusing sideshow of the haughtiest and most unwilling cloakroom attendant ever. The young lad was so monosyllabic, aloof and reluctant to do his job that I guess we were dealing with someone who’d been a Pharaoh in a previous existence – and knew it – and this was his great karmic come-down life. At one point he walked away with our coats, head aloft, as though through treacle, without explaining anything.
“Will we get any tickets?” I called after him, to silence.
“What’s he doing?” I wondered aloud.
“He’s just taking them round the corner to douse them in kerosene and set light to them.” Offered Cliché.
We soon bumped into Cliché-Head’s friend who had got us in by dint of being Geoff Barrow’s film soundtrack partner. I still felt horribly muddled and withdrawn and couldn’t seem to latch onto anyone’s conversation. Was it the single drop? Surely not. Was it the wooliness of parenting all day and having nil life outside of a sort of gurgle-like wonder at things? Perhaps it was both but, suddenly, I was uncharacteristically socially hamstrung, and found myself having an Adrian Utley-style duff convo with Ben …
Me: “So what soundtracks have you done?”
He: (shyly) “Oh, er, Annihilation and Ex-Machina and …others.”
Me: (remembering I’d already been told that) “Oh yeah? Excellent. Ace.”
He: “It’s actually pretty hard work.”
Me: “I bet it is.”
He: “It’s not just me, I collaborate.”
Me: “Oh? Who with?” (fully knowing it’s with Geoff Barrow. For some reason I’m pretending not to have been fully debriefed about this guy).
He: “Him – Geoff.” (he gestures weakly towards Barrow who’s talking on the edge of our group).
Me: “Oh excellent!” (I hear my stupid voice pipe up like a lunatic schoolboy who’s impressed by anything but has zero vocabulary. I make a mental note not to go anywhere near Geoff Barrow).
At the death-knell of that chat Ben turned quickly to Cliché-Head for rescue. The two then began a sparkling and vivacious discussion about what they’d both been up to. Stymied by my interactive incompetence I just stood like a plank next to them, triangulating them like a single audience member at an ‘In conversation with’ event. Every so often I’d witness their glee at something I could barely follow and say, “Wow”, “Excellent” or force a laugh out. What the hell was wrong with me?
Mercifully released from that agonising triangle, Cliché-Head and I went to watch some Snapped Ankles.
A muddy, insistent groove was being pumped forth from the stage and, as we sidled to the right to watch from the raised section, I saw what looked to be four creatures with grey-white dreadlocked hair growing out from all over their bodies, like trustafarian yetis.
“Oh yeah,“ said Cliché, “they’ve got the tree thing going on.”
I didn’t know about this. So they were sporting arboreal body costumes, complete with branch-like mic-stands cunningly whittled to house mics and toy synths.
I wondered how the name related to the tree conceit: were the ankles of these “mentrees” effectively the roots that had snapped allowing them to become mobile? Also, did they dare to dream this look could take off? I imagine a parent shouting after their sapling:
“Oi, where do you think you’re going dressed like a common cedar?”
The singer was hectoring through a thin distortion module as a compelling, motorik rhythm slammed out, underpinned by drone bass grooves, peppered with circuit-bending bleeps and rasps. When a trad. four-piece jams in their rehearsal room, stoned, they usually get stuck on a one-chord, one-track rut that goes on and on, very much in danger of boring an audience. Snapped Ankles seem to play that stuff but of the very highest calibre. Several songs later and I felt a little claustrophobia as things got a bit samey, but they had a lot of charm and a jovial aspect redolent of Devo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edLWLDguJa4
Right at the front of the crowd, tall as a tree himself, stood the Bristol gig-going legend Big Jeff - his bushy curls like a fecund maple. For those that don’t know, this towering yet shy character is a staple of the Bristol gig circuit – always bang in the centre at the front, engaged in Operation Air-Punch Ultra. Tonight, we were amused to see he appeared to be drawing Snapped Ankles in an artist’s sketch-pad. Seeing him made me feel suddenly warmer towards the night.
Soon we were squeezing near to the front left of the stage for the arrival of BEAK>. I wondered if BEAK> were backstage busily pecking away at Snapped Ankles for titbits. Oddly, the DJ was playing The Pet Shop Boys as BEAK> ambled unceremoniously out. I couldn’t see the link, except there can be beaks inside pet shops…? No, that might be the mushroom drop. BEAK> were utilising a trio in parallel formation: to the left a slender young lad stood side-on at a rack of keyboards, in the middle an older bassist sat casually, and to the right Geoff Barrow, older still and dressed in a simple dark T-shirt, sat down behind the drums. Neil Tennant’s nasal voice still filled the room.
“Can we get rid of the Pet Shop Boys?” Geoff intoned. “Nothing against them but…”
Some titters from the crowd. There was obviously no pomp in the arrival of this lot. It was immediately apparent that BEAK>’s stage demeanour was that of three chums in a rehearsal room, quipping and ribbing one other. After some messing, they suddenly broke into the first number…
I was instantly excited – the music was rich with intent and nefarious purpose – but it was Geoff’s drumming that gripped me from the off. The beats were whip-smart and entrancing and, visually, he had a poise at that kit that left you in no doubt who was stoking the coals of this operation. Immediately I saw the join with Portishead and recalled reading years ago that Barrow made his own loops by drumming, sampling them and dipping them in crunchy filth. This was artful, engrossing drumming that could illicit serious head-nodding, even from someone in a neck-brace.
In fact, there was something about the majestic flow of his playing that reminded me of a buddha. I half-expected extra arms to appear and thwack a tom or splish a cymbal. It was like a beautiful seated dance. Actually, it wasn’t just the beats he played, it was the ones he withheld that really did it for me. Sometimes he even raised a stick to crack a snare that never landed, effectively doing a dummy (no Portishead pun intended).
After one particularly spectacular early song, my chum spun his Cliché-Head round to me and said ”Phone-cunt!”
I nodded with enthusiasm. “Phone-Cunt’s great.”
“No,” he laughed, ”Phone-Cunt!” gesturing towards one lone offender with his phone aloft, filming.
That was my only moment of dismay in their set – that they didn’t have a song called ‘Phone-Cunt’. And, yes, it boded well of the audience that it was short on, er, them.
The first few songs, including the aforementioned single, were conducted under plain lighting; and those songs were undeniably strong and seemed to grab the crowd and drag them along willingly. Then, before they plunged off into some more abstract territories, there was a bit of staged humour.
“Oh blimey, we forget to put our special lights on!”
“Oh come on, get ‘em on, they cost 70 quid on Ebay!”
The bassist then pretended to plug them in and they were set off. Certainly pricier, these patterned light-boxes evoked an entirely new and captivating atmosphere. It was a neat trick that completely refreshed the direction of the gig. I often find after about 6 songs, a live band starts to lose its novelty unless something drastically alters. It’s perhaps something Snapped Ankles could learn from because there’s only so long you can spend in a wood with some trees into Krautrock.
Somehow, BEAK> remained compelling throughout. Their music contains qualities that are pretty de rigueur, I’d say: there’s touches of post-punk (notably Joy Division), motifs that’d be at home in an art-house horror movie; obviously the darker side of hip hop and a general sense of being chased around a subterranean complex of bleak tunnels by a shady adversary. There’s definite emotion here and, though I say ‘de rigueur’, there’s no sense of them contriving this, it seems to come naturally and elegantly from them. Geoff Barrow’s voice often sounds as if it’s reverberating down a ventilation shaft - an instrument mixed alongside the very deft playing of the bass and synth. The synth (and occasional guitar) lad seems to favour wavering, low-fi, analogue sounds or sinister organ chords. The bass-man was the sturdy lynchpin centre-stage.
However, what elevated this show into a stronger and more fulfilling form of entertainment was the between-song patter which was among the funniest I’ve heard. After one song, in which Geoff had asked for the house lights to be up, he mocked the crowd:
“Christ! It’s like a boiled egg convention in here!”
“You’re such a bunch of old cunts… oh god, just remembered my mum’s here… er, NOT YOU, MUM!”
Peals of laughter.
The general quipping between the three, based on their different ages, nicely off-set the solemnity of some of the music.
After another song, the bassist pointed out someone in the middle of the crowd who’d been wildly bouncing up and down.
“Hey mate, are you on a pinger?!”
The bloke replied that he was - to much laughter.
“Bloody hell, man, it’s Monday night and you’re on a pinger!”
Then Geoff got involved, “Wait, where are you from, mate? You’re not from Bristol are you?”
He replied he was a Geordie.
“I knew it!” Said Geoff, “There’s no way you were from Bristol – Bristol audiences are fucking sh… “ before realising what he was saying and comically back-tracking, “except of course this audience, you are absolutely great and we love you.”
Certainly the audience did love BEAK>. Ok, it was kind of a home crowd but, nevertheless, BEAK> were hugely enjoyable both musically and comedically. Later, Geoff sincerely thanked us, confessing that their manager was worried they wouldn’t fill anything other than a small venue.
As for me, BEAK> and, ok, beer had transformed me from a socially barren spod into a babbling socialite. I did later see Ben the soundtracks man clock me near the cloakroom and quickly angle himself away. He’d obviously had his fill of ‘Excellent’ and ‘Ace’, but it was his loss as I was now afire with vocabulary and insights. So much so, that Cliché-Head, and several friends we bumped into, repaired rowdily to the charming Bank Tavern to sup and scream into the night.