Alex Tudor takes us through his highlights of Friday at The Great Escape Festival...

Marnie Stern @ The HoneyClub

The most eagerly anticipated live-act of 2009 for your humble correspondent, Marnie Stern is… a victim of circumstances. Not a “disappointment”, by any stretch, but the whole audience-experience suffers from a slightly muddy sound, and barriers that may have been put in backwards (there are a pair of steps in front of the stage entirely occupied by skater-types with rucksacks, who seem to be enjoying themselves, but block the view for almost everyone else). Meh!

Earnest, endearing, and a little bit geeky as an interviewee, Marnie-the-performer seems determined to shake off her persona, or show off some contradictions. Between the bursts of shred guitar and cryptic-but-motivational choruses ( “I’ll...! draw…! A pyra-mid…!”), Marnie questions her female bassist about the effect of all this insalubrious weather on her, um, lady-parts. Later, she asks the crowd if anyone… well, you know… happened to have lately had the pleasure of fellatio. (Actually, this shouldn’t be shocking – Marnie’s version of “The Aristocrats”, as seen on PitchforkTV – is a scat-frenzied masterpiece.)

Still, the fun and frenzy come across, even if the soul-searching, spirituality, and extended metaphors about perfection only existing in the abstract realm of numbers… kinda gets lost. The hard-riffing of ‘The Crippled Jazzer’ smashes into the audience in mighty waves, then retreats in a shrill four-note figure. In the past, there’s occasionally been the sense of Marnie’s fretwork as a kind of exhibition-piece, but her bassist provides an undulating foundation, and surprising countermelodies, as well as giving her someone to have fun with: hopping about and waving their guitars. You’d hope that at least a few people present are having a private epiphany that ‘Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling’ is an homage to music itself, and to the guitar, as a means to literally create an idealized world: live, it’s impressive, and funny, and frighteningly surreal as Pepperland when she plays the various motifs (“look down now, glass slippers are on your feet; this is their sound as they meet…” [chnk! Chnk!] “now walk in the self-eaters…” [Grr-nuh! Grr-nuh!] “now walk in the latecomers; they back-shuffle forwards; their sound is weird…”). It’s all over far too soon, but Marnie has a grin as she talks to the fans, that makes it look like her head’s about to fall off. All as it should be…

Times New Viking @ Providence

The string-of-pearls that is the promenade-lighting clanks and rattles with a jazzy percussiveness. A bottle is literally picked up by the wind, bounced across the road, and smashes on the metal railings, as I march at 45 degrees to the wind, to check out Times New Viking, way off in Hove. Floodlit and towering, the seafront hotels look palatial and warm inside, exactly like the social-aquarium Proust describes: when the peasantry are watching the aristocracy in the dining rooms, secretly, from the outer darkness. The sea looks awful black if a freak wind does manage to pick me up, and throw me into it. This band better be worth the hike…

In spite of the soullessness and remoteness of the venue, penultimate-band-of-the-evening Telegraphs are playing their guts out. Through thin brown curtains, cars zip past the floor-to-ceiling windows. On the other side of the street, kebabs are being whittled for bleary punters. This band has heart: the female singer/guitarist lives up to her leopard-skin, and the male vocalist bends over backwards with biceps and neck-muscles straining. “Telegraphs” as in “telegraphs-his-punches”? Somehow, the UK’s take on Grunge never seems to have died out.

Still, in the grand scheme of things, Telegraphs serve best to underscore how much CLOSER to the primal essence of rock’n’roll Times New Viking actually are. To say they make trashy, minimal, organ & guitar-led garage rock is to make them sound almost generic. TNV sound like nothing, they represent nothing, they suggest nothing other than the impulse to make the most economically rocking music possible… and then kill their melody the second you think it might get a repetition, or turn into a groove. All TNV evoke are the four concrete walls of a garage, or an anonymous drinking joint that can’t even be bothered with kitsch, or some kind of shtick. In the best possible way, the guitarist looks like the frontman of Part Chimp, and the girl playing a tiny organ mounted on a barstool looks like Emmy the Great… if she’d been roughsleeping (that would be the surly expression, and much-ripped plaid workshirt, over a crumpled dress shirt). The drummer starts the set with a gnomic motto: “Let the bitch off the chain…”

Why this kind of minimal aesthetic is so compelling preoccupied Lester Bangs most of his career – why The Stooges and not a thousand other bands? The only song with a discernible chorus is introduced with a mindbending koan: “This song is NOT about drugs. It’s about being ON drugs.” Get your head round that one! The chorus goes: “I need more money, cos I need more drugs…!” Where this all takes them, who knows: TNV show no bitterness, reporting that this is the second year they’ve played the same venue. No promotion, eh? This is the music they make though, and they probably wouldn’t have it any other way. The best they can hope to be is a grunge Young Marble Giants… or Jonathan Fire-Eater without the private school theatrics. Sounds good to me…

Photo by Lucy Johnston