East End Review

Tag: Scott Docherty

  • Vinyl fantasy – The Record Deck casts anchor on the banks of the Lea

    Vinyl fantasy – The Record Deck casts anchor on the banks of the Lea

    The Record Deck moored in its usual location. Photograph: Luke Guilford
    The Record Deck moored in its usual location. Photograph: Luke Guilford

    The banks of the River Lea used to be a place where recovering vinyl junkies could feel safe from relapse, but that is no longer the case.

    For taking a stroll down the canal towpath on any sunny weekend, you may well come across Luke Guilford and his floating record shop, The Record Deck.

    The former librarian uses his barge as a de facto stock room, keeping everything from ‘the classics’ to jazz, blues and reggae – which can sometimes prove problematic for some.

    “People like stumbling upon it, but some get a bit upset they found it because they were trying to not buy any records,” says Guilford.

    “But I’ve found that record addicts will always find them wherever they are. I am one myself.”

    Thumbing through the racks of reasonably priced records (usually priced between £5 and £10) stored underneath his bed and around his boat, he takes out a sample of his stock.

    The Black Keys, Tom Waits and David Bowie sit neatly beside Django Reindhart, The Incredible String Band and an African jazz compilation.

    Given the diverse nature of his clientele, trying to organise the front of the shop, which he hangs from the side of the boat, has become something of an art form.

    “One day I decided to put a load of really trendy records out, then the first things I sold were The Shadows and Dire Straits. You can’t predict who is going to come along,” he says.

    Guilford started the shop as an exit strategy from the rat race. With the pressures of his 9 to 5 job growing, he decided to put his life-long love of vinyl and his modest dwelling together to join the growing ranks of Hackney’s riverboat traders.

    Currently moored alongside Springfield Park, The Record Deck can count a floating bookshop, a bar and even a hairdresser’s amongst its neighbours.

    The Record Deck is based in Hackney on most weekends, but using the grass bank as his shop floor means opening hours are rather dependent on the weather.

    However, Guildford keeps a box of records in the basement of Pages of Hackney on Lower Clapton Road for rainy days, and informs his Twitter followers of his location.

    One of the advantages of the transient nature of the shop premises is that Guilford has become a regular feature at canal festivals around the country. This year he will be floating downstream to Field Day in Victoria Park and the Angel Canal festival in Islington.

    Having lived on a barge for 16 years, Guilford’s love for life on the water has extinguished any desire to expand his enterprise or turn to the murky waters of online selling.

    “A lot of people sell on the internet but to me that just sounds really boring,” he says. “But I don’t have any major plans for expansion apart from buying a load of nice records and passing them on to people.”

    Follow @therecorddeckuk to keep updated on the shop’s location.

  • ‘If it’s weird and wonderful we’ll play it’ – Cave Club comes to Hackney Central

    Rhys Webb 620
    Founder of Cave Club Rhys Webb

    As the last tune rang out and sweat hung in the air of the room where the final Cave Club of 2014 had run its course, Rhys Webb felt it was the end of an era.

    For the last seven years his aptly named night had been a monthly feature at Highbury and Islington’s Buffalo Bar, which was set to close to make way for flats at the end of that year.

    The night showcased some of the finest psychedelia ever made from around the globe, all of which was from the extensive record collection of Webb, otherwise known as the Horrors’ bass player.

    Soon the same psychedelic sound reared its kaleidoscopic head at Oxford Street’s 100 Club. But although Cave Club still drew big crowds, the more ample space of the legendary venue absorbed the atmosphere of one of London’s key underground gatherings.

    Seeing an opportunity at the newly opened Moth Club off Mare Street, Webb seized the chance to find a new home for his “party.”

    “The party at the Moth, the first one there [in September 2015] was just electric and fantastic and so reminiscent of the feeling and atmosphere of the original night,” Webb recalls.

    The word psychedelia tends to evoke whimsical images, Lewis Carroll poems and the heavy use of a harpsichord, and it’s no secret that many of the discs spun have been produced in the late Sixties. But Cave Club takes account of how the genre has developed since then.

    “The inspiration for the night is mind expanding psychedelia, and has a heavy focus on the lost and obscure groups of the late Sixties.

    “There are no rules. If it’s weird and wonderful we’ll play it. I want the club to be an experience and an adventure,” he says.

    Webb, along with The Voyeurs’ Sam Davies, is on a mission to harvest the world for the rarest, trippiest 45s, along with some more familiar sounds and others that have become “Cave Club classics”.

    To his memory, Webb’s vinyl-only policy has only been broken once (“probably to play a demo from The Horrors or one of our friend’s bands like TOY,” he says).

    The night attracts the cream of the East London music scene as well as music lovers of all ages, many of whom dressed in technicolour cast-offs, and all gathered to hear psychedelic rarities from a collection which Webb jokes, has cost him “about a decade in pocket money”.

    Each month, a band is picked to open the night, which has seen TOY, Telegram, The Wytches, Connan Mockasin and Temples’ drummer Samuel Tom’s shoegaze warriors Secret Fix do the honours.

    This month will see Riddles, a lysergic space metal band, take to the stage of the former working men’s club, in which the ceiling has been completely adorned with gold glitter.

    Even when Webb is out on the road with his acclaimed band, who are currently in the studio working on new material, he says the night is never far from his thoughts.

    “I’ve been as far away as Mexico or Tokyo and sitting on the end of a hotel bed and sending texts to people who are there, just wanting to know what’s going on.”

    Cave Club is at Moth Club, Old Trades Hall, Valette Street, E9 6NU
    mothclub.co.uk

  • Musician creates the first ever 3D-printed melodica

    Daren Barnarse
    Daren Barnarse

    As the old saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But if you haven’t got anything to fix in the first place, then why not make something yourself?

    That’s exactly the mode of thinking that led Daren Banarsë to become the first person to 3D print a melodica, originally a child’s instrument that looks like a cross between a harmonica and a piano.

    Banarsë took up the melodica when he became disenchanted with the piano, realising its design wasn’t exactly complementary to the human form. He found it more comfortable to play a hand-held instrument.

    “Eventually I wanted to play something that works well with the human body, so the melodica was the one,” the 42-year-old says.
    With a penchant for Irish music, Banarsë had concerns about turning up to the pub with something that looked as though it had been prised from the hands of a toddler.

    “We’d sit around a table and play the old tunes, but the image just isn’t right and also it’s slightly shrill sounding,” he says. “So I thought that I just had to build one and it’s got to be my next project.”

    His tenacity meant that he couldn’t give up until he’d realised his dream, he had no choice but to make one and after a journey lasting six months he finally unveiled his labour of love.

    The keys are coated in ivory and the wood is recovered from an old piano. And as he brings it to his lips to give it a blast, it’s clear he hasn’t sacrificed substance for style. Sitting at his kitchen table and closing my eyes, I could almost be in a Dublin boozer sitting next to The Pogues.

    Attempts at buying a 3D printer and taking a complete DIY approach failed, and he eventually had to digitally render each component and send it off to a company in the Midlands.

    Banarsë recalls: “Even just printing out one of the keys on the cheaper printer was just a mess, there were technical things that just didn’t work with it and it would always be slightly off. I didn’t realise how exact a melodica had to be. “It needs to be airtight and there’s so many points that need to fit perfectly.”

    The finished article makes the piles of shop-bought melodicas that lie in his flat, a converted shipping container in Poplar’s Trinity Wharf, look like they might have been purchased at the Early Learning Centre.

    Banarsë’s instrument is the product of months of painstaking research and a passion to make the perfect instrument. Having proved it can be done, he feels it won’t be long until 3D printing will be in regular use.

    “It’s definitely the future,” he adds. “We’ll all soon have our own printing rooms, the technology is there.”

  • The Baby Blues by Daryl Waller: album review

    The Baby Blues. Photograph: Katie Toms
    The Baby Blues. Photograph: Katie Toms

    Put together from scraps of cassette tapes and sound collages, you’d expect Daryl Waller’s debut to be one for the avant-garde. The 37-year-old decamped from Cornwall to Hackney to put the finishing touches to The Baby Blues, and in the process the eleven tracks took on their own lives. By producing the record he confesses his sound became “more song-like” and there’s no doubt the arrangements now take centre stage.

    Spoken word still intermittently features in the haunting folk cuts, carried along with Waller’s hushed vocals. Employing double tracking in places, he evokes Elliott Smith, if only he’d swapped Portland, Oregon, for a damp woodland.

    Themes of forestry recall places far away from the city, coming as no surprise that the album was partly made inside a wooden hut and despite being billed as lo-fi, the crystal clear production brings moments of beauty as string parts slowly burn over picked guitar lines.

    Beginning life with stitched-up lines from film, ‘Gene Wilder’ develops into a hypnotic waves of psychedelic vocals crashing in between poetic lines before ending with a spoken word coda set over bird song.

    Waller isn’t keen on spending too long on an idea, and opener ‘Take Me Anywhere’ proves that it’s of no artistic detriment. As he exhales his vocal delivery, it’s easy to become lost in the hypnotic orchestrations that throw the poetry into the background.

    At just over two minutes long, ‘Shoad’ achieves much more than its length suggests. Starting life with a cascade of finger-picked notes, the later addition of dissonant stabs of strings, evoking the sound of sawing wood, serve to reinforce the rural themes of the record.

    It quickly becomes clear that The Baby Blues is the result of a collection of abstract aural sketches developed into a gorgeously fully-formed record.

    soundcloud.com/darylwaller

    The Baby Blues-Credit-Katie-Toms

  • The Voyeurs embrace equal opportunities for new album

    Portrait of The Voyeurs by David Wala
    Portrait of The Voyeurs by David Wala

    Sly and the Family Stone, Buddy Holly and The Crickets – the idea of lead artist and backing band is age old. But the hierarchy implicit in the naming convention is arguably at odds with the romantic ideal of people getting together to create music worth more than the sum of their individual talents.

    East London vocalist and guitar player Charlie Boyer decided that with his group Charlie Boyer and The Voyeurs, internal democracy was the way to go. Now called The Voyeurs, the band has recently released Rhubarb Rhubarb, the follow up to their debut album Clarietta.

    “It kind of made sense really, we all agreed that’s what we should do because it reflects what we’re doing,” says Boyer. “It’s not me and a band now.”

    Instead of the back-of-a-napkin approach employed on their debut disc, The Voyeurs have been able to spend a month in their East London studio with producer Oli Bayston – as opposed to the week they spent recording their debut.

    And with each member of the band involved in the composition process, the 10 tracks of Rhubarb Rhubarb boast increased depth and a revolutionised sound.

    “Things take longer now we have to fight and argue, prove our points and try and make it as good as everyone thinks it should be,” says Boyer. “We’ve got very good at arguing with each other, trying to carve out what the best possible thing is between us.”

    Instantly recognisable is the involvement of keyboard player Ross Kristian, although now gone is the distorted organ that characterised their first release. On ‘Say You Love Me (And Choke)’ The Voyeurs prove democracy hasn’t blunted the group’s dynamism. The group’s trademark bouncy disposition segues into a synth-led chaotic coda, giving the song the feeling of being trapped in a lysergic snow globe.

    Foot-stomping is never far from the fore, such as on opener ‘Train to Minsk’, which begins with slap-back delayed drums bequeathed from early seventies glam, and features an utterly infectious hook.

    Kitchen-sink style observations are the order of the day thematically. As Ray Davies of The Kinks framed life on the ‘village green’, Boyer’s inspiration emanates from ideas of the domestic, sourced from the commonplace hubbub of everyday life but nevertheless “dark, cold, true stories”.

    The idea that a more even-handed approach to music-making leads only to compromise is blown apart by The Voyeurs, who have organically become a unit, shattering their original mould with a success that’s measured in the delight of their latest offering.

    Rhubarb Rhubarb is released on 10 November on Heavenly Records and The Voyeurs perform live at Red Gallery, 1-3 Rivington Sreet, EC2A 3DT on 19 November www.facebook.com/TheVoyeursOfficial

  • Album review: Banks of the Lea by Stiv Cantarelli and the Silent Strangers

    Stiv
    Stiv Cantarelli and the Silent Strangers

    Having recorded their debut in an abandoned church beside Italy’s Romagna Hills, Stiv Cantarelli and the Silent Strangers have decamped alongside East London’s most revered expanse of water to give us their second offering, Banks Of The Lea.

    It seems that on their journey to Hackney Wick’s Gizzard Studio, the Florence-based four-piece has taken a detour through the 1970s New York club scene via Mississippi before arriving in East London to produce these 10 whisky-fuelled tracks that innovatively weave together punk and blues.

    Cantarelli’s vocal delivery evokes a sense of early Stooges as he scrawls “Take me up where the lights are flashing” over sandpaper guitars on ‘Jason Hit The City’. The track then breaks off into a Roxy Music atonal sax break, with lyrics about strutting down Wardour Street in a pair of Cuban heels.

    “I’ve got no time for compassion,” Cantarelli’s slack-jawed Jagger-esque yawn dictates on ‘Arrogance Blues’, leaving no question from where the band draws its inspiration, while ‘Soul Seller’ arrives in a storm of sleazy slide guitar and wild interspersions of attitude, aptly showcasing the band’s amalgamation of styles.

    These styles range beyond American punk rock, with the band particularly drawing on Britpop. As the chords of opener ‘The Streets’ ring out, you could easily be listening to a sneering bootleg ripped from a live show performed over a decade ago.

    Great moments see poetic backing vocals hang in the space of the raw-sounding, analogue production, headed up by Stoke Newington’s Peter Bennett (founder of Monkey Island, The Dublo and Morning Bride), which extenuate the record’s twilight themes of insecurity and self-loathing.

    Wearing its influences on its sleeve, Banks of the Lea is a record that is no more than the sum of its parts, but nevertheless one in which authenticity can’t be questioned, from a band that will no doubt continue to roam, framing their output within the locations they find themselves.

    Stiv Cantarelli and the Silent Strangers play at Oslo 1a Amhurst Road, E8 1LL on 16 October

  • Album review: Zygmunt Day and Echo Pressure – On Streets That Know

    True troubadour: Zygmunt Day
    True troubadour: Zygmunt Day

    The starting point for Zygmunt Day’s debut full-length record On Streets That Know was his decision to cover Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’, and the album extrapolates from this the idea that behind a less than appealing exterior lies a place with strong emotional bonds.

    By exploring the experience of East London in terms of work and struggle, Day paints a picture by recalling scenes that are mostly melancholic but shrouded in a subtle sense of fondness for the location that inspired these songs.

    Two years in the making, this record was written by Day and arranged with his band Echo Pressure. Clocking in at just under an hour, the eclectic instrumentation of folk-tinged pop songs makes for an intriguing listen.

    On track ‘Hailstones’, a bleak picture of life recalling “streets of metal, streets of rain” is juxtaposed with a lively sonic backdrop; the song starting with gently fingerpicked guitar before melding into a three-minute funky disco coda which declines into a dissonant swell of brass and woodwind.

    Elsewhere, on opening track ‘Everyone I Know’, the harmonies feel at times baggy as Day recites the mantra “still they try, still they try” against indie-pop guitar stabs. Despite the largely consistent vocal delivery, there are times where cracks begin to appear.

    Echo Pressure turn the tales recalled on their head. There is a great of sense of optimism conveyed by the arrangements, bouncy bass lines and innovative instrumentation – all of which prevent this record from becoming a one dimensional attack on modern life.

    Together the ten-strong group – most of them multi-instrumentalists – make great use of a variety of different timbres that weave in and out of each track, reimagining Day’s grey picture of England in glorious technicolor.

    The album’s spoken-word closing number recalls a tale that will resonate with many East London residents, with Day wishing he “had the tools to make it here”, as well as referencing scenes along the River Lea (“skeleton of the gasworks down by the canal”).

    Rooted in folk, the poetic landscape of Day’s East London environment, told with the help of Echo Pressure, results in an engaging take on the romanticism of decay and struggle, and with a sonic texture that guides the interpretation of the songs throughout.

    www.soundcloud.com/zygmunt-day