Reviews

Friday evening and it's off to the Koffee Pot in the rain for Sausage and Mash and their ever entertaining Teatime Sessions.

First act, The Good Hurt - clad in the type of outfits only ever seen on decorators and the Beastie Boys, rather charitably describe themselves as being "raw." Hmm. You can't fault these boys for effort, managing to pack out their performance with the kind of energy many other bands would sell their synths for. And you can be sure that in their heads, they sound like the best band Futuresonic's got to offer.

It's a pity then in such an environment as the Koffee Pot, they manage to sound like an overenthusiastic jam session that just got a little out of hand. They don't actually appear to be all that sure of who they want to be and just throw in every possible influence they can think of, hoping that sooner or later, it will all come together.

GeekGirl, however, are just what the doctor ordered. Clad all in black and red cowboy outfits, and blessed with a front-woman possessed with a set of lungs that could blast even the fiercest storm cloud out of the sky, they manage to whip up a riotous storm of pop tinged country punk (or should that be punk tinged country pop?) so good, it could raise the hairs on the backs of the necks of the dead. Definitely a band to keep an eye on.

Here’s a random fact for you. Apparently, Richard Branson put seminal Krautrock band Faust’s first album out on Virgin records for the low low price of 48p back in the 1970s. Not sure you’d find him treading in such dangerous musical waters nowadays mind, but then again maybe he’s secretly got a thing for standing in the middle of the Academy 2 on a Friday night watching a bunch of mental middle aged German men running around a stage contravening some serious Health and Safety legislation. 

This is a gig where the visual experience is just as key to the overall performance as the auditory. When it’s actually possible to concentrate on the music, it deviates between the low rumbling drone rock that bands such as the Spacemen 3 attempted to recreate in the early 1990s with varying degrees of success, and the downright ear splitting, filled with skittering guitar lines and beats completely devoid of any discernable time signature-conservative estimates would state that it must have brought on the onset of deafness in at least half of the assembled audience by a good ten years or so.

But, despite this being a truly one-in-a-kind performance, you rapidly find your attention being drawn away from the music and onto the antics of the men on stage. It’s like that mental uncle you keep locked in your shed finally escaping with a bucket load of masonry.  A woman comes on to read a rather pretentious poem about sonic cathedrals and so the band decide that this would be the right time to get out an ironing board and smooth out the creases in an audience member’s t-shirt (amidst lots of shouts from the crowd of “You need to turn it inside out mate!” and “Make sure you’ve put it on cotton!”) 

At one point, they pull out a load of metal buckets and start handing out bananas.  During one song, the drummer decides that it would be a really great idea if he pulled out a sander and started grinding away at an immense mill saw located behind him, whilst a concrete mixer filled with rocks churned away merrily in the background.

For the finale, various items are set on fire, leading the audience to pull jumpers over the mouths to avoid coughing their lungs out, whilst a random man dances to the beat one can only get from dropping a chainsaw into an old oil drum. Walking out of the Academy 2 into the cold Mancunian night is like walking out into another world. A good 90% of the people there will probably be unable to remember a single note of what they heard, but they’ll all recount it forever as a truly unforgettable-if deafening-experience.

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