I 'n' Gigs 9: Fence Collective (West London, 2001)

I was meant to be going to see Nick Cave and his merry bunch of Bad Seeds this week. Since I'm not, and gigs are something which I'm sure a lot of people are missing, I thought I'd write a little about 10 gigs I went to. Not my favourites per se, just memorable ones from down the years.

These are not reviews. I wouldn't do that very well. They're just memories. I have called the segment "I 'n' Gigs"  (a pointless pun on the name Ryan Giggs)... that is a good indicator of the quality writing to come ...

I mean, Notting Hill, of all places. I was at university in St Andrew for four years, complaining about the lack of live music, literally living for two of those years a few yards from Kenny Anderson’s CD store, going in there every week to buy music, talking to him, asking him if he had the new Beta Band record in, looking at posters on the wall and over town for gigs at the Cellar Bar for the likes of Pip Dylan, The Lone Pigeon and King Creosote, and I didn’t really put two and two together. Or, at least, not until 4^th year, when they weren’t doing so many gigs in St Andrews anymore.

What do I blame? Two things – 1. The monikers … King Creosote sounded like it would be a silly student band, all the names did. I’ve seen Kenny Anderson now playing in all kinds of places, on the main stages of big festivals, at the Royal Festival Hall, the Assembly Rooms, at my local church, I’ve seen him nominated for the Mercury Prize, and I still reckon he’d have twice as many fans if he had a different pseudonym. 2. I think early in first year someone had told me The Cellar Bar was a bit of an old man pub … in St Andrews there were great old man pubs and rubbish old man pubs and I’d foolishly categorised it as the latter … a big mistake – it was only in 4^th year I realised it was one of the better pubs in town.

So, anyway, Notting Hill, some new club called the Cherry Tree or something, there was a Fence Records Night in December of 2001.

By then, I was a Fence fan – the legend of the Lone Pigeon had spread. There were Fence samplers you could buy – one of them, Fence Sampler 3, https://www.discogs.com/Various-Fence-Sampler-3/release/5546546 contains some pure genius. If you don’t know ‘Amsterdam’ by UNPOC, I’m telling you that is one of the best pop songs ever written and you can believe me or not.

We’d bought a Lone Pigeon EP called ‘Touched by Tomoko’ and then there was a joint single that got a bit of play on late night radio, and that’s when I first heard ‘St Patrick’ by James Yorkston, which remains one of my all-time favourite songs. I think that was just a few days before the show at Cherry Tree.

I went along, I think with my friend Jamie, it was a pretty disorganised affair, but there was music all night – I think they’d play in three song bursts. Lou Barlow was there, and I think some other American indie hero, though I can’t remember which one – Barlow played a couple of songs, included ‘Flame’, which I like a lot,  and then some guy was nagging him and I gave him a knowing sympathetic look which was probably as annoying as the guy nagging him. Yorkston played ‘St Patrick’ and ‘Sweet Jesus’, I reckon, King Creosote played, maybe, ‘What a Klutz I Was’, something like that, was Pictish Trail there, maybe, I was most interesting in the Lone Pigeon, who played a few songs, I bumped into him giving himself a pep talk in the toilet.

Jamie left earlyish and I think it went on a fair bit, later than gigs usually do, and I stayed getting progressively drunker on my own – when I left I went up to Kenny Anderson and thanked him, which was a) weird because he was the star of the show but b) not weird because I’d bought CDs off him for four years. But probably weird.

Anyway, around this time, and really all the time between 2001 and 2011ish, I really did go to a lot of gigs in London, just, gig gig gig, whatever came up. For better or worse. Some of them I have little memory of, some of them were somehow a bit magical.