MUSIC preview
BACARDI Rum/The List Unsigned Scottish Band Search
They think it's all over . . .
it is now. Ears have been caressed, tears spilt, judges have debated fiercely and BACARDI Rum has been guzzled. The result: we have a winner.
Words: Jonathan Trew
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, well the smiles on The Goldenhour's fizzogs are worth a thousand pounds. And recording time in Parklane Studios. And a Tascam recording unit from Sound Control. And 500 CD singles. And advrce on PR, marketing and the murky world of music biz law. A tidy little package that would put a grin on most folks’ mugs.
Endowed with a hefty chunk of self- confidence (Glasgow heat. Ewan Macleod compering: 'How do you want to be introduced?’ The Goldenhour: 'Just say “Here’s tonight’s wrnners.”’), the guys put on a set that was as polished as it was punchy. It’s easy to imagine their final song, ’When The Weekend Comes’, belting out of radios and your granny liking it just as much as the kids down the sticky indie disco. lmagine an updated version of a bouncy Kinks number bashed out by The Who and you’re in the right kind of area. The Goldenhour have only been together for a couple of years but the different members all have previous entanglements with the Glasgow music scene and the experience shows. Hearty congratulations.
Bosley took second prize of £250 and enough BACARDI Rum to swim in. A cool blend of kitsch Sixties influences, intercut samples, dubby beats and a bass gmtar all provrded the background for some well-timed male/female rapping. Again for easy reference points, try playing a Tricky album at the same time as a Stereo MCs one and you’ve got a ballpark figure. Charlies’ angels would have
44 THE usr 16—29 May i997
The Goldenhour get slap happy
been proud.
The other finalists all put up a helluva struggle but were pipped at the post. Again, Volley impressed With that all too elusive sense of fun about their songs but alas even their blatant attempts at sooking up to the BACARDI Rum Judge (’l’m Posh Spice, the bassist is Scary Spice and the guitarist over here is Bacardi Spice’) couldn’t swmg the vote for them. Babacool seemed to have Sprouted an extra drgeridoo player Since Winning the Edinburgh heat and although yOU can never have too many drgeridoo players (some would disagree) their powerful atmospherics couldn't quite cut the mustard in the same way as the Winners. Which leaves us With Aberdonians The Dawntreaders, a splendid bunch, armed wrth a wealth of Star Wars triVia, who once again sounded, to these ears anyway, pleasantly American in the same vein as a perky Buffalo Tom. Good, very good even but no cigar.
Still, there’s always next year.
Hopefully by then, things might have started to happen to some of the bands who have appeared in the heats and With any luck some of them Will be ineligible to enter because they’ve been 4!— signed up by a label. 1' Fingers crossed for the future -' ' and good luck to everyone who sent in a demo tape and played at one of the heats.
Finally, it’s time for a huge pile of thank you notes. First up, it's a big thank you to BACARDI Rum who put up the folding stuff for this proiect, cheers! Thanks also to Parklane Studios and Sound Control for the donation of goodies A huge round of applause goes to the Biggart Donald team who worked like demons behind the scenes organising everything and everybody. Thanks to the venues who hosted the various rounds and a pat on the back for all the Judges from other media who donated their time. The biggest hand goes to all the bands who took part — it’s been fun
CONTEMPORARY
Ground Zero Stirling: Tollbooth, Thurs 22.
Otomo Yoshihide is, in the parlance, a noise terrorist. A guerilla improviser. A thief who mutilates his swag, sculpting and hacking the pieces he lifts from others until they force fit into his own obscure design, his oblique sonic masterplan. And he’s coming to Stirling. And he’s bringing his mates.
Yoshihide’s sample/destroy collective, Ground Zero (noun. a point on the surface of land or water at or directly above or below the centre of a nuclear explosion — Collins English Dictionary) are currently en route from Tokyo, with a stop-over to play a festival in Italy, where The List misses them when we try to get them on the phone.
The Japanese musrcian grew up in the provincial town of Fukushima where he was exposed to the twin corrupting influences of the free Jazz he heard on cafe tape-decks, as anti- played by Albert Ayler; and the twisting ViSions of the indigenous comics, then back in the days before anyone on this side of the world had heard the word ’lvlanga’. His music is in a sense a melding of the outer reaches of such improvrsational music and the bio-cyber, metal scrence Vision of those comic strips.
Yoshihide's raw material in creating Ground Zero’s nOise consists of CD players, record decks, tape recorders, samplers and, that hoary old stand-by, the electric gudar. Last year’s Revolutionary Pekinese Opera album was a remixed version of an album
Yoshihide: terrorising the Tollbooth shortly
he'd already sampled from Heiner Goebbels and Alfred Harth’s own cut- up work from the previous decade, Peking Oper, itself a reworked sampling of a Chinese radio broadcast. Confused? Ground Zero threw in a bunch of noise into the mix, everything from the scratch of turntables and the slaps and screams of martial arts movies through to clips of adverts, with a collosal abstract roar of guitar feeding upon itself within.
Whatever Ground Zero come up with during their one night Scottish stand two things are for certain: l) the beats will be punishing and 2) it's going to be the most interesting night in Stirling since . . well, since the last avant- garde Japanese noise outfit played. Which was last month. (Damien Love)
ROCK Prolapse
Prolapse: collapsing into chaos near you soon
You know how it is when you can’t really get a handle on a band, or yOu JUSI plain don't like their sound, but you don't want to appear negative, so you say something like 'well, they look/sound like they had fun domg that'7 Prolapse are that band. Except that they are actually really good, it’s JUSi that they don’t forget to combine being a cool group With amUSlng themselves.
Although compared most freguently to Stereolab (for their hypnotic minimalist numbers) and The Fall (for their chaos theory moments when vocalists Linda and Scottish Mick rant over guitar cac0phony), Prolapse have
neither the former’s iceberg detachment or the latter's truculence. Their indie cabaret is far more personable and entertaining.
’Mick is still a champion of the made- up-on-the-spot lyric,’ says Linda, ’partly because he can never remember what he’s done before and partly because he gets bored domg the same thing again. That's why we don't stand still when we’re playing We've got to do unpredictable things to make it interesting for us.
'l can’t say we’ve ever been a band to practise loads. We don't all start after "three" and finish on the same note. One of the reasons there’s so much going on is because everyone's clamouring to be heard. There's six songwriters in the band and everybody's got an indiVidual song Within a song.’
Somehow, despite the band’s different ages, towns of origin and Current whereabouts, they all, perversely, seem to gel. Their newest material spans angular punk lunacy, angelic vocals, possessed monologues and Morris danCing soundtracks, probably none of which Will keep their original shape when performed on t0ur. Their next album The Italian Flag, although finished, won't be put ’t:! later in the Summer, however.
'Our record label said the time wasn't right to release it, which obvrouslv means not enough peOple like us,’ says Linda, ’but I don't give a monkey's when they release stuff as long as we get to record what we want ' (Fiona Shepherd)