Post by neilcrud on Feb 23, 2007 21:04:26 GMT
Transmission
Keith
Cargo, Shoreditch, London,
16/02/07
Keith
Cargo, Shoreditch, London,
16/02/07
(Reviewed by Guy Salvador)
Can’t beat late night clubs on a Friday night. Gives you plenty of time to get home from your place of toil, travel to where your chosen event is taking place and freshen up ready for a fun packed evening! So it was that we arrived @ the CARGO club just off Shoreditch High Street. An impressive place it is as well. Innocuous from the outside an “Underneath the Arches” (all sing along) good old London town type place from the outside which opens into an impressive space inside, plenty of space with the “venue” part, where the bands play at the back with a couple of other bars / lounges as you walk through. Great sound system supplying some pretty tidy mixes to what was obviously not a usual type of gig go’er. This is a club where people come to firstly dance and secondly pull, or is it the other way around, well both those anyway.
Support band “Keith” were leaving the stage when I got there to a healthy applause. I had consciously made a decision to miss them as I always veered away from anyone called Keith as it demonstrates questionable parentage to be given such a name so, to name your band it…..? They obviously had quite a following so maybe it was the wrong decision to be “Keithist” it’s something I’ll have to work on, we all have our prejudices…….
Tonight we have come along to see Transmission . A band featuring “Big” Paul Ferguson (Drums) Youth (bass) Simon Tong (guitar) & Tim Bran (keys) They released their album “Beyond Light” in August 2006 on the superb Malicious Damage label of which, I have played regularly to much enjoyment. The band bravely describe themselves as sounding like at one point “The dawning of the Universe” and at another “The sound of a dying planet”, not really sure about that but, the album is an instrumental dreamscape sound, no vocals required as the very Peter Hook (Joy Division, New Order) style bass employed by Youth across many of the tracks brings it’s own melody across the “great to see playing again” drums of “Big” Paul Ferguson (original Killing Joke member along with Youth), in fact, great to see them both on stage again, fucking great blokes who should never stop playing! Mr’s Tong & Bran offer some dreamy but full sound to the proceedings. On CD this all works very well, how was it live? Well, firstly for some reason Youth decided he needed to mouth some sort of vocal over some of it which, didn’t really work. Secondly I was totally distracted by the almost total disregard by a large amount of the audience for the band on stage. As I mentioned earlier, this was very much a “night club” and not a venue and the crowd were not really here to watch a band. For me Transmission did nothing wrong, I’m already a fan. It just didn’t really work for them in this venue at this time. As far as I know it was only the second gig the band have played, having played a very low key support a couple of days before in Brixton so, it is a real rarity to see them live and, with the excellent back stage projections it was a great show and I was really glad I went along. The band obviously enjoyed themselves as well, which is always great to see. I just get the feeling that maybe in a festival tent, in the summer, with most of the crowd stoned in some way, shape or form this just might work……..
www.southerndownrecords.co.uk/