Just back from a visit to one cold, filthy, hellhole of a place full of people who dress oddly and look a bit vacant, known as the North of England*, and straight to another in the form of The Old Blue Last in Hoxton.   The occasion was a Last FM-sponsored start-of-tour event featuring the hairy Japanese psych-rockers in their current incarnation as Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO. When I entered the venue the band themselves were sitting behind their merchandise stall, and a couple of them behind their massive overgrown barnets.  A quick look through the CDs on offer showed three labelled as “NEW!”, which is testament to the band’s oppressive release schedule.

Such prolificness may be partly due to the fact that the AMT formula isn’t exactly a difficult one, particularly in a live setting: finding a bass and drum groove over which Kawabata Makoto can make merry hell, playing his wah-wahed-to-the-moon guitar above his head and under his feet.  Occasionally, the sounds of synth-twiddling from the silver-haired Higashi Hiroshi permeated this metallic fog, and there was definitely an outbreak of chanting at one point, but this was Makoto’s show, and he was determined to enjoy it, even if it did lead him to run close to breaching the “don’t break our venue!” rules taped to the wall.  Even a half-hour long number which had hitherto evolved at about the same rate it took monkey to become man was finally punctured at the end by an impatient and ferocious white noise assault.

I think I spent most of last year moaning about the poor standard of toilets in venues, while this year my chief complaint has very much been the volume.  Did it really need to be quite so loud?  Imagine if the sun could play guitar – that was about how loud it was; ear-blistering waves of white-hot air pummelling from the giant amps at the back (yes, the clues were all there from the outset, I’ll never learn).  Twelve hours later, and I’m still feel like I’m stuck in a washing machine on a gentle cycle, with the world a whirling, watery buzz.

The highlight came at the end when the legendary krautrock troubadour Damo Suzuki clambered on stage (monkeyman had to give him a bit of a hand) to recruit AMT as his backing band.  They inevitably worked themselves up into a Can-like tizzy, with Damo muttering something which sounded typically Damo-esque like “I wonder why.  ‘Cos I don’t know why”, ad nauseum.  The tempo built and built, and the heads in the crowd nodded gleefully as one, with everyone aware that they were watching something pretty special.  This humble man was carried from the stage on a wave of reverence.  Worried about any further damage which would be caused by a high-decibel encore, I headed home.

More photos on the flickr.

*Just kidding monkeyman, just kidding.

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