Photo: WENN
Panicking punters – held up the queues at the door – are still spilling in when Thurston, accompanied by long term band mate, Steve Shelley; ex-MBVer, Debbie Googe and all-round improvised noise virtuoso, James Sedwards take the stage.
It’s testament to the esteem these musicians are held in that, even though they spend the first five minutes just subtly scratching their instruments, everyone falls silent the second they’re in. This initial jam, which has a cold lunar quality, gives way to ‘Forevermore’. On record, it’s a song that marshals its forces around metronomic chiming, winning you over by polite – albeit relentless – pleading. Not so here. It’s still plenty relentless, but it’s not asking for anything.
The rhythm section stand out, and it’s clear they’ve both spent their careers anchoring huge, unpinnable sounds. By the end of the next song, ‘Speak to the Wild’, we’ve already been through almost half an hour of hypnotic, sprawling beauty. So when the more compact, “song-like” numbers come out, it’s a bit jarring. James’ guitar solo on ‘The Best Day’ sounds like something Jimmy Page might do. It’s even got, y’know, notes and stuff.
‘Germ Burns’ and ‘Detonate’, which both sound like they could’ve been lifted from side one of ‘Rather Ripped’, carry really well. Especially the former, on which Thurston and James double each other’s parts to blissful effect. But ‘Grace Lake’ turns out to be the highlight of the evening. Googe’s refreshingly bouncy bassline (most of the time she’s thundering) sets up the guitarists’ lush Murray Street-esque meanderings, which wind and build until Moore finally gives us some unabashed, eardrum-perforating racquet abuse.
As he launches down the fret-board, we're convinced the woman next to us is screaming in excitement. But when we turn round, though wide-eyed, her mouth is closed. It turns out the noise is coming from James’ amp. Next we're convinced we can hear some sort of colossal unscrewing, that the Meccano kit of the world is being packed away. But this time it’s just Googe tightening and slackening her strings as she plays.
Hallucinogenic riffs that I’ve got no empirical evidence for seem to be bouncing off the walls of the hall. People are looking to each other in awed bemusement, loving what they’re hearing and knowing that, whatever it is, they may well be the only one hearing it.
Then, in a blink, everything is subdued – the amped instruments so suddenly obedient to Shelley’s jazzy cymbals that you wonder if any of it even happened. The band come back for two encores, including the jaw clenchingly heavy ‘Ono’ - a throwback to 1995’s Psychic Hearts LP – as if to reassure us that it did happen, and it was only a gig after all, then disappear for good.
