In which The Wire’s series of 25th anniversary gigs rumbled to a close – that would be rumbled in the noisy sense but also, perhaps more surprisingly, in the fighty sense of the word.  More on that later.  I suppose the omens were there – walking down a dark and rain-lashed Great Eastern Road, while once again (again!) getting lost and managing not to find Cargo.

When I arrived, Birds Of Delay were in full flight.  Three very serious looking young men with keyboards and dials piled on layers of resonant drone until I felt the vibrations began to detach the membrane from my brain.  Voices strained to rise above the waves, but were sucked back under to be lashed by the electronic tide.  A magnificent start.

Natalie Mering of tonight’s headliners Jackie O Motherfucker played a set in her Weyes Bluhd guise.  It shaped up to be more interesting than it was, with her hiding under tables fiddling with pedals and then standing behind some sort of Long Stringed Instrument.  Shame she didn’t do anything terribly interesting with them; I found the metal riffs she starting toying with at the end to be the most enjoyable part.

The Polly Shang Kuan Band are an oddly-named all-girl noise group.  They spent half an hour shuffling degraded tapes through a number of Walkmen (necessitating much  peering at faded tape labels in the half-light trying to find the right one), further messing with the sound as they went.  Bird song drifted in and out, as did a melancholic vocal sample about “a friend who died some time before this recording was made”.  A curious, yet quite powerful performance.

Talibam came on like a couple of dumb coked-up American arseholes telling us how psyched they were to be here  fucking-A going to play their big hit fucking-A so psyched to be here AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!  The longer it went on though, the more it became a fairly amusing stage act, almost cabaret in fact.  It helped that they had the brilliant Kevin Shea on drums, a giant spasmodic tic on speed, who smashed his way through with a performance that would have scared the shit out of even Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt.

Ved Ov Ard then performed the Sounds Of The Exquisite Corpse, which was very much an all-hands-on-floor Double Leopards crouchy-pedal fiddler.  With guitar, keyboards, bowed three string bass and muttered vocals all corralled into a gorgeous swirling collage by Maya-Victoria Kjellstrand, they were very much one of the evening’s highlights.

I popped out to the bar for some liquid refreshment (in the form of some fine Bavarian wheat beer) at a particularly opportune moment, catching one of Kevin Shea’s other projects, the even-more-cabaret Putting  On The Ritz, which features him kicking lounge classics such as New York, New York and Girl From Ipanema into crazy free-drumming shapes, by the end collapsing all over the drums with riotous zeal.  Maybe instead of the beer I should have gotten me some of whatever drugs he is on.

I’d been looking forward to Axolotyl – classically trained violinist Karl Bauer since converted to the black arts.  However, due to some severe technical problems he never really got going – amps didn’t work, pedals malfunctioned, and the violin he endeavoured to add to the carpet of looped mulch was pretty much inaudible.  Think I’d best judge him on his records – I’m going to seek them out.

I’d seen JOMF live once before – at ATP a few years ago, when they took so long to set up all their equipment that they left themselves about ten minutes to play.  A real let-down then, and it seems they haven’t learned any lessons in the intervening years – if anything, they have got worse.  Tom Greenwood had spent most of the evening wandering around the venue with a glazed look on his face being told to stop smoking by staff/security/roadies/whoever, but he seemed to have caused a further fracas back stage.  Which may or may not have been the cause of Natalie Mering packing up the equipment she had just finished setting up and leaving.  Thus they played their two tracks as a mere three piece, the second a long folk raga which became pleasingly doused in feedback by the end. 

As they finished, Greenwood became embroiled in two further arguments simultaneously – one predictable with a security guard attempting to wrestle a cigarette from his hand, and the other (even more unforgivably) with a member of Birds Of Delay, who accused him of having smashed his keyboard in aforementioned fracas whilst in a rage having misplaced his guitar (notoriously easy to lose, those little things).  Greenwood’s arrogance was nauseating – he called the bearded and behatted Bird “Badly Drawn Boy”, and tried to buy him off.  But it was over, he looked a fool, and probably lost a few fans tonight.  A really disappointing end to what had been an extremely enjoyable evening.