Isabel Sörling of Soil Collectors, playing at Match and Fuse Festival this month
15–16 October,Hackney Wonderland@ Oval Space, The Laundry, London Fields Brewery, Sebright Arms, The Pickle Factory
Five venues play host to a line-up of established bands such as Mystery Jets and We Are Scientists as well as up-and-coming acts like singer Sonia Stein and NGod.
21–23 October –Stoke Newington Music Festival @ various venues including Mascara Bar, St Pauls Church West Hackney, The Waiting Room, Haunt, Stereo92, The Lion, The Lacy Nook, Green Room Café, The Haberdashery
Three-day multi-venue event across Stoke Newington will see DJ sets and live music from the likes of Thurston Moore, Sterling Roswell, Pink Cigar and The Pacers
One of the nation’s best loved comic creations Super Hans from Peepshow (aka Australian comic Matt King) takes to the decks for his debut London DJ set.
Organisers boast this will be a “knees up like no other”, bringing together musicians from 14 European countries. Highlights include Portuguese trumpeter Susana Santos Silva and the Native American/Scandinavian pop improvisers the Soil Collectors.
29 October – Mirrors festival @ St John at Hackney, Moth Club, Oslo, Round Chapel
Eyes will be on the Mercury Prize-nominated Bat for Lashes, who is set to headline this one-day indoor festival. Also on the line-up are Allah-Las, Bill Ryder Jones and the curiously-named garage punk six-piece Diarrhea Planet.
Dean Rodney, the charismatic singer of The Fish Police. Photograph: The Fish Police
‘It’s gonna be a big one,” warns Dean Rodney, lead singer of the Fish Police – and although size is always relative, he isn’t wrong.
Within minutes of taking my seat at Café Oto, the five-piece launches into a song that has the venue on its feet. ‘Coco Butter’ nods to the quirky alternative hip-hop of De La Soul with its blaring 80s funk keyboards, but as a paean to the pale-yellow, edible vegetable fat extracted from the cocoa bean, this is music that inhabits its own unique world.
“Just a little cream, raise your hands up to the skies, it will moisturise,” Rodney implores. Won over, the crowd obeys. Before I know it the chairs are folded away – I’m in danger of becoming an island in a sea of revellers.
There’s no raised stage so audience and band blur into one as the dirty fuzz bass and spoken-word intro to ‘Black Scissors’ kicks in, calling to mind the silliest (and most fun) excesses of George Clinton.
The Fish Police play catchy and uplifting pop songs informed by singer Dean Rodney and guitarist Matt Howe’s autism. The band is part of a nascent music scene, where learning-disabled acts share bills and audiences with those unaffected, that includes Ravioli Me Away, a post-pop-punk trio with a penchant for costume who are the evening’s excellent support act.
Listening to the Fish Police takes you away from the drudgery of the real world into a joyful realm inhabited by cartoons.
Through the course of the night we hear about a Japanese girl who is “always reading and falling asleep in the classroom” and Monica 300, whose defining feature is her blue hair.
Watching the band is pure escapism from everyday drudgery, with Rodney’s deadpan delivery balanced by soulful backing vocals and some very capable musicianship from bassist Charles Stuart and drummer Andrew McClean (both of whom have played in Grace Jones’s backing band, no less).
The biggest crowd pleaser of the night is ‘Chicken Nuggets for Me’, in which Rodney whips the crowd into a frenzy promising “I’m gonna tell you how I like my chicken” before doing just that in the chorus (no spoilers).
Jumping up and down about chicken nuggets is an oddly liberating experience, and one that – like the rest of this band’s extraordinary output – comes highly recommended.
Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi. Photograph: Cafe Oto
In his 1980s heyday he was practically unbeatable, but now snooker legend Steve Davis is cueing up in a very different way.
The six-time world champion has swapped the snooker table for the turntable, and on 6 May will be in Dalston to DJ at Café Oto alongside psychedelic musician Kavus Torabi.
Although the most successful player of his day, Davis was given the nickname ‘Interesting’ for his playing style, which makes his foray into DJing all the more surprising.
The 59-year-old lives in Brentwood, Essex, where he presents a weekly radio show alongside Torabi on PhoenixFM.
“They all think I’m fucking mad,” said Davis, talking about his love of Frank Zappa to the Guardian.
Davis is known to be a fan of the French collective Magma, whom he brought to London for a series of shows in the late 1980s.
His tastes range from 1970s prog, Canterbury and Zeuhl to modern day Rock in Opposition, Avant-Progressive and even left-field electronica and Intelligent Dance Music.
This month Davis is to join the likes of Thom Yorke and Four Tet on the bill of Bloc festival in Minehead, with his DJ name rumoured to be either DJ Thundermuscle or Rocky Flame.
Do some free association on Yoko Ono and what do you get? John Lennon, New York, the Beatles’ split, world peace, dark glasses, bed-ins, Fluxus/performance art. Looming over all of these is John’s shadow, and the fact she may be viewed by many as an appendage to his latent messianic complex. Yoko herself may well be aware of this, as much of the evening involved a febrile self-explanation that at times boiled over into self-justification.
This started explicitly – not just in the sense of the opening video close up of some ambulant buttocks with interstitial vulva in evidence – but with a collaged biopic accompanied by a succinct narration: “Yoko is provocative, confrontational and human”. We saw Yoko playing piano aged around five, the bed-in with swarming press photographers, Yoko the flâneur in New York, and then her naked body being traipsed over by a fly.
Just as the fly was preening itself over her mons pubis, the real Yoko appeared to rapturous applause, a sprightly 4′ 10” in trainers and dark glasses. The expounding then continued, with brief descriptions of her views on fracking and an obligatory nod to some perennial world peace obfuscation, interspersed with instructions on “not to try” when hugging, dancing and making love. In something of a knight’s move, there was a stern word about not taking photos during the show.
Then the music started. Stellar names get stellar backup, and tonight Yoko was joined by Thurston Moore (guitar) and Steve Shelley (drums); both members of recently disbanded Sonic Youth.
Something other than self-explanation next supervened: the fact that Yoko is 81 and in her dotage. This was born out by a ticking wrist watch held to Moore’s neck pickup, to which Yoko plangently listed all the things she might one day miss, “clouds, mountains, trees, snow, city lights”. Shelley joined the throng with rich cymbal swells, before Yoko deflated everything with a long sigh.
This sigh together with her vocal delivery – bridging the gap between narration and music – combined the fly-on-the-pudenda film, led me to the possibly facile idea that in inhabiting the liminal zone between music, performance art and – on this occasion at least – short film, appraisal through the prism of one of these was impossible. It did however allow Yoko to exploit their intersections to maximum effect.
This was exemplified by the next piece. It started with a fragile call and response between Yoko’s octogenarian pulmonary reserve and a tremulous metallic sliver from Moore’s Fender. Both were mirrored physically with Yoko exhorting Moore with outstretched arms, just as his body contorted with every stuttered response. This then built up as the fly decamped to Yoko’s areola, whilst she began to unfurl a spectrum of abstract ‘ahhh’s’ ranging from sarcastic hyena snicker to paroxysmal post-lacrimal gasping. The emerging cacophony plus its associated delivery neatly mirrored what was being projected. The buzz of the fly, Yoko’s scissors cutting black cloth and a purple bra being unclasped were all obliquely recreated by the band.
Things then swirled around on this frenetic inter-disciplinary level before the denouement really sealed things. Yoko and Moore prowled around each other – both wearing but not playing guitars – in a fashion combining some kind of mating ritual with hunching Japanese deference, before they suddenly came together clashing strings with the ensuing feedback abruptly bringing things to a close.
Yoko has been through a lot (bereaved; estranged from a child; never viewed outside prism of John; mauled by popular press), and it is inspiring that at 81 she’s still going for it. If not exactly liberated from this historical baggage herself, seeing her deal with it in her cross-disciplinary way was in itself liberating. Would Yoko Ono be who she is without John Lennon? An answer in the negative would be a truism, not a criticism. After all she’s human – and provocative and confrontational.
Yoko Ono played Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL on 23 March 2014.
