This year’s Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival is blessed with contrary acts. I was thinking about this as I watched The Fall in the festival marquee. A 56 year old guy in an off-white shirt, barking with attitude. When Mark E Smith wasn’t resting on a chair behind the guitar amp, he was facing down his audience, his back twisted, the face a defiant rictus. The entire set became one long, irrefutable riff, a cockroach rumble, a spew of outsider disgust.
Many people were there out of curiosity, so see how the Salford boy was able to sustain this cussed routine. There was no glamour and seemingly no sense of victory, just the feeling of brutal endurance, a mission to be true to his internal circuitry. Like Bo Diddley or Link Wray or Captain Beefheart, he has been compelled to roar and twang, regardless of public interest or the pressure to diversify.
British Sea Power have yet to earn that mantle, but they have dressed the Black Box stage like a twinkling glade. They are in the middle of this shrubbery when they play the reckless charge of ‘K Hole’ and the refrain of “staring down the canon”. There will surely be casualties, but their collective derring do has not wilted over six albums.
We may think we have the measure of them and we enjoy the familiar jolt of ‘Remember Me’. They are singing about perceptible decay but they don't manifest any of that. And with contrary cool they introduces us to the Bi-Polar bear, a giant creature that appears in the audience, white, fluffy and seemingly benign. The band plays, the bear waltzes, and audience members take it in turns to rest in his safe paws. Another moment, then.
