Skip to main content

The Pop Group/The Sexual Objects

02 ABC, Glasgow
Four stars
Mark Stewart and Gareth Sager's reformed crew of original punk-funk provocateurs aren't an obvious choice for Celtic Connections. Then again, anyone who can mix up a multi-cultural stew of free jazz, dub and anti-capitalist agit-prop is more connected than most, as the Pop Group prove in their first Glasgow show for thirty-three years.

Tonight is also about celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the similarly eclectic Creeping Bent record label, and the evening begins with a set from The Sexual Objects, former Fire Engine Davy Henderson's latest groove-laden vehicle. Selections from their forthcoming second album are preceded by a magnificently audacious cover of You've Got The Power by Henderson's former band Win. Stripped of its 1980s production gloss, tonight it more resembles the Live 1969 version of the Velvet Underground's What Goes On.

The Pop Group go one better with their opening clarion call of We Are All Prostitutes, as Stewart shrieks out his proclamations, towering over the crowd like a sniper, clutching his lyric sheets to his chest. Sager stabs out piercing guitar shards that take no prisoners, or else blows a strangled clarinet on the equally damning Thief of Fire. The sound is fleshed out by a youthful recruit on second guitar, with drummer Bruce Smith and bassist Dan Catsis providing the funk.

Stewart's prophecies of doom are nowhere better encapsulated than on the band's defining statement, She Is Beyond Good and Evil, which still sounds like the most dangerous song ever written. With Sager shimmying his way through a closing Where There's A Will and We Are Time, the end result is an incendiary call to arms and a soundtrack to a revolution you can dance to.

The Herald, January 20th 2014


ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
Post a Comment
Read more

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more