"Like getting locked in at the museum or palace and your little sister finds a guitar and starts largin’ it up and you realize she’s a genius."
Scout Niblett, Caroline’s Room, Royal Theatre
"Like getting locked in at the museum or palace and your little sister finds a guitar and starts largin’ it up and you realize she’s a genius."
Scout Niblett, Caroline’s Room, Royal Theatre
So there I am, sitting on a plush red velvet chair with brass riveting. Above me there’s a 6-foot high chandelier in the centre of a moulded plaster ceiling and all around the wall pictures of kings, queens and dignitaries including one, I swear, of Nancy Reagan.
Incongruous surroundings for Rock n’ Roll, I’m thinking, as this 12 year old girl in blonde wig, navy blue pleated gym skirt, brown woolly tights, chipped black nail varnish and a stolen highway maintenance day-glo waistcoat slips onto the tiny stage from behind a curtain. Trailing a guitar, she plugs it in to a chrome plated amp that looks like a 50’s toaster and, as the lights stay up leaving her starkly revealed and awkward, she breaks into a ‘Uptown Top Rankin” – the stripped to bare essentials version; one voice, one guitar – and my first thought is "how f**king brave".
This is shortly followed by "she can really play" and then, "she’s blushing, how sweet". Sweet she is but musically she kicks arse. Scout, alias Emma Louise, Niblett followed up 2001’s debut LP Sweet Heart Fever with last year’s I Am. If I say this was recorded by noise-meister Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio Studio and then throw comparisons like PJ Harvey or Tanya Donnelly into the mix then you’re probably starting to get the idea. She’s a paradox; soft and menacing, tender and harsh, a sugar coated suicide pill, a little pink ballerina emerging from the music box wrapped in razor wire. Like Polly and Tanya before her, she stands there sweet and demure with a voice that chimes like lead crystal and a guitar that sounds like the very essence of guitar, whether ringing clear or warped by the fuzz-box, and she moves and she shakes you. Her sound is clear and pure, stripped to the basics like sandblasted steel, and like that metal she has a hard, sometimes menacing, edge.
An external calm and confidence belies an inner world of turmoil and heartache, of nihilism – "We’re all gonna die/ you’ll be kissed by death" and of despair. And also love; of walking into town with your boyfriend – "We woke up late again/ And walked into town/ Hand in hand/ And who was prouder to be with the other?/ I think it was me/ I think it was me." In other words, her songs run the full gamut of emotions.
Bearing in mind the venue we are in, with its svelte surroundings, it suddenly feels like you’re a kid again, sharing forbidden pleasures, larking around someplace you shouldn’t be. Like getting locked in at the museum or palace and your little sister finds a guitar and starts largin’ it up and you realize she’s a genius. Then suddenly she switches to drums, her voice and an upbeat 4 by 4 rhythm, and you know she’d make the coolest one woman band ever. Then she starts hammering away and acting scary and your stomach flips as you realise she’s forgotten to take her medicine and this is about to get out of hand. It’s like that.
Scout is a captivating performer, passionate and intense. Her songs are powerful and disjointed, disjointed to the extent where sometimes, briefly, just for a flicker, you think she’s forgotten the next chord. But she hasn’t, it’s just her style.
With her name written in chalk on her bass drum in a school child’s curly joined up hand (she’s really in her twenties), you know that she plays up on this image of awkwardness and naivete. But you know she’s sincere and you know she deserves to be massive.
It’s the beauty of these kind of broad spectrum, mixed media events that – "like a box of choc-ker-lets, you never knoh whart your gonna get." (fill in the accent for yourself). Like strolling accidentally into Ani DiFranco two years ago at the Music in My Head festival, the surprising, unexpected acts are the best. Scout made my night.
dEUS, Royal Room, Royal Theatre
Following Ian MacKaye’s quirky but sincere Q&A session it’s time to make a dash for the main stage via the bar. Then, with a glass of red wine in hand, (we are soooh sophisticated, dahling! Actually that’s a lie and I’ll admit it now; the wine’s better value than the frothy beer), it’s into the Royal Room to find out it’s jam packed; all seats sat upon, all side aisles stuffed. A quick glance round reveals an empty balcony high up on the left. Brilliant, that’ll be an interesting place to watch the band from, a bit of luxury and sophistication after all. A swift circumnavigation of the auditorium and three flights of stairs later, sprinting past would-be balcony stealers, we arrive at our chosen cranny to find we have a bird’s eye view of the stage.
It’s a terrible choice! I would not recommend it. When the band walk on you’re completely out of their line of sight. I feel like some kind of voyeur, especially after Helen Walsh’s compelling reading from ‘Brass’, recounting Millie’s (her alter ego) visit to a Liverpool prostitute.
This is like spying on a band. I should have a camera on a tripod, a box of sandwiches and a walkie-talkie:
"Kwrrrgh [burst of static], Control this is Captain Bird’s Eye, over".
"Come in Bird’s Eye. Kwrrgh".
"Control, the targets have come on stage and I can see that they’ve changed their modus operandi since my last report in August. The guitarist, Craig Ward, is missing and so is bassist Danny Mommens, over".
"Kwrrgh, Bird’s Eye, Intel confirms that Mommens is now full time with Vive La Fete and Ward has quit. The Replacement Players are Alan Gevaert of Arno fame on bass and Mauro Pawloski from The Evil Superstars, over. Kwrrgh".
However, even from up here I can see dEUS make a grand opening with one of their new tracks that’ll no doubt be on the album that’s due out in spring next year. Cool and sombre, smoking jacket elegant, whatever it’s called triggers an outbreak of synchronised nodding which looks great from this vantage point – the whole Royal Room doing the Funky Pigeon.
They’ve got a good lighting set up too. I know this, as a large portion of it is suspended about a metre from my head. All in all it looks like they’ve got the ambience just right.
The band move smoothly into the gentle Magdalena from 1999’s Ideal Crash, and then on into another new song, called 7 days, 7 weeks, I think, which picks up the tempo. Suddenly there’s a burst of light and the whole auditorium is filled with discs of ultra violet. I feel like I’m swimming on another planet – looking down into a teeming rock pool as an alien sun sparkles on the water. Cool.
This love affair with the lights is short lived though, as a minute later I’m nailed through the forehead by a stage mounted spotlight, which leaves me flipping around like a shark on a spear. This can’t go on.
As the band launch into the magnificent Instant Street, a faster and more urgent version than on the album, a sensation compounded by the strobe lighting, Tom Barman utters his first spoken words to the audience, an extra lyric fitted into one of the verses – "Go on. Stand up". En masse, instantly, the crowd rise to their feet and I’m again reminded of bird like behaviour – a flock of starlings taking to the wing. As the infinite riff that closes the song kicks in (you know, one of those riffs that is so perfect, so self contained it winds back on itself and could go on forever and you, hearing it, would listen to it forever, caught eternally in an auditory loop. (Note to self, and others; Frank Black does it briefly in Ole Mulholland on Teenager of the Year. See also Contact by Stereolab and Dirge by Death in Vegas) I take Ondrea by the hand and we run back downstairs. A swift dummy to the right and a dart to the left and we’re down at the front by the speakers inspecting the mosh pit that’s opened up in the metre between the front row and the stage.
Unfortunately the title track from Worst Case Scenario has just started with its heavy lounge bass and twisters of feedback and the speakers are putting out a sonic holocaust. A quickstep and sidekick remedies this and we’re now in a good position to enjoy the rest of the show.
Which is electric, ‘cos they’re on fire tonight. I fuckin’ love dEUS. This is the third time I’ve seen them and this evening they are smokin’. Unlike earlier in the year when they played the open air festival, Route du Rock, near St. Malo in France and spent a lot of time talking and introducing the songs, engaging the audience and generally coming on all matey, tonight they are focused and getting down to business. The sound’s perfect, the lights are too and this has all the intensity of the first time I saw them at the LVC, Leiden in 1994.
That was the summer they first appeared on the scene, prior to their debut LP Worst Case Scenario, riding high on the acclaim for the single Suds & Soda and a fantastic four track session for MTV. Shit! Do you remember that? When MTV had an inkling of a musical purpose and wasn’t 110% dedicated to shite with its substandard musical dross, so called reality shows (fuck you, Ozzy) and visits to celebrity fucking cribs. I don’t give a flying fuck about the drummer or whoever the fuck he was from No Doubt’s house. He’s a fucking philistine twat with his "Books are for sissies" rap. And if Big Boi isn’t smart enough to stop feeding tropical fish to his miniature shark "So far this mutha’s eaten about $10,000 worth" – screw him. Perhaps he should keep it out in the garage in one of his 5000 fucking cars! Goddamn it all makes me so angry! And my anger’s being fuelled by the energy blowing from the stage.
I couldn’t believe Worst Case Scenario when I first heard it – posted to me in Australia by a friend who’s long since gone. I hadn’t heard anything that intense, melodramatic, melancholic or just plain freaky since the Butthole Surfers. And like the Butthole Surfers you just didn’t know where the album was going next. Unlike the Buttholes, (whose musical deviations are always underpinned by Paul Leary’s distinctive electric guitar), dEUS are capable of absolutely anything, a change into absolutely any gear. A song can lurch from lounge lizard cool, to sickly sweet pop to abstract film soundtrack and on into a blistering wall of feedback prior to a career as some good old rock ‘n roll.
If anything, Ideal Crash was even better, warmer and more consolidated, although lacking the threatening variations of its kid brother. It’s all on display tonight and the new material is continuing in this great dEUS tradition of rock, pop and weirdness.
Damn my ears if Theme from Turnpike from 1996’s In A Bar, Under The Sea doesn’t sound like Foetus. They close the set with this as Tom Barman twists and growls like JG Thirwell himself, in his brown tweed suit looking, for all the world like Mickey Rourke circa "Angelheart". The music is insistent and insane, the lights pound, (if that’s possible), and it all provides a cathartic release to those boiling with inner tensions.
A brief interlude ensues, only for dEUS to return to soothe the crowd with The Magic Hour which twists and glides along sublimely. I lose the next song, eyes closed and dreaming, and then they wrap up the evening with that ultimate feel good song Suds & Soda. Klaas Janzoons gets to do what he does best on the violin – always an essential part of the dEUS mix, the audience raise up in song and then, it’s over.
We file out, chatting and happy, to find a hurricane blowing outside. But that’s alright because inside I’ve got a Silent Night – all is calm, all is quiet.