Swarf, Incite, Scarlet Soho — Being Boiled, Notting Hill Arts Club, Tue 8 Aug 2006

Being Boiled is an electrified indie pop night at the Notting Hill Arts Club second Tuesdays. The venue is a weird basement with crap line of sight and no air, but fine as one of those. I came for Swarf.

The first act is laptop karaoke. Really. He mimes to Nine Inch Nails, he rolls around the floor screaming over an instrumental version of some current pop hit, I think he sang a bit. I have in fact shat a better show than this.

Being me, I got pics of the purty people (please help with names). I shoulda figured they'd be the Swarf fans, because indie poppers may have the tunes but they're ugly and badly-dressed. (Note that going from the second to the first gets the chicks.)

Scarlet Soho is at least a band. Like any modern band destined for the top, their sound is susceptible to facile comparisons to a single band (and frequently a single album) from twenty years ago. In this case, Depeche Mode. Mostly Speak and Spell, though it goes a bit Ultra when they get the guitars on. And the last song belonged on Construction Time Again except the lyrics weren't shit.

I can't say a tune stuck in my head, but they really weren't bad at all, particularly given the psychotically awful London gig scene, wherein the venues are ludicrous toilets by Melbourne standards and everyone is doing live music specifically to get a record deal and never have to play at this level ever again. And that's not just relief they weren't the first idiot. It pains me to think he got any of my money.

The toilet has a fucking toilet attendant who expects to be fucking tipped for giving you fucking soap. What the fucking fuck.

Incite are two people with laptops making wanky atmosphering bleep fart grunt noises. At least they weren't demanding attention, unlike the first idiot. I was sitting at the far end talking old pop records with a couple of thirtyish gay indie nerds and was happy to leave Incite wanking away to the people watching them, uh, stand there pressing buttons on their laptops.

At last Swarf come on. These days they do swirly bleep with melodies and stomping bits with Liz's soulful proper-singer vocals over the top. (The guys I was talking to said "Alison Moyet", which is plausible even if wrong.) The band started doing homemade EBM in the UK goth-industrial scene and have grown into what they do now. You can pick that "Vision", for instance, is an old one. You can also hear how they got some notice in the UK electroclash scene (such as it may be). I fear their mainstream popularity will actually be hampered by them not having lifted their entire sound from one band or record from twenty years ago, and no-one goes into music journalism because they want to work.

I bought the T-shirt and the record. And got it signed by the whole band. And by Alexys from the record company. I must say that I find this going out on school nights thing extremely cheering and there must be more of it.