The Measures Taken

In 2002, myself and a few friends put on a regular night at the Amersham Arms in New Cross. One of us had made some money from various degrading TV appearances in Oxo adverts or in Doctors, making enough to survive massive losses at practically every turn. Sometimes the results were amazing- I have fond memories of subjecting a quarter filled room to the physical extremis of Oxbow, Eugene Robinson purring and rooting around in his underwear.

The point where we gave up was in August 2002 (not a good date, depriving us of the 10 or so bewildered students who would usually accidentally turn up) putting on the Hohodza Band. 12 or so singers, players and dancers from Zimbabwe. We put 'live music from Zimbabwe!' at the top of our posters and crossed our fingers. The band nearly outnumbered the audience. Incredibly, they still played for an hour, with ful dance routines and costume changes. Before their last song, the manager walked on stage, glared at us and proclaimed 'what a great band! what a tiny audience!' When we realised that we now had to explain to them that we couldn't pay them in full, it was obvious that we weren't cut out for this.

Something of what we were trying to do- essentially a diletantish attempt to convert hip hop fans to the virtues of The Pastels (and vice versa), ravers to field recordings, and the fun of playing Oxide and Neutrino to a room full of people there to see British frigging Sea Power, lives on in The Glue Rooms, who had their second birthday on Wednesday. With two stages, like a malevolent inverse of 'Later...', and a packed out and frankly, aesthetically pleasing crowd, I felt positively spoilt. The DJs whack on 'Geht's Noch'; Britch provide a wonderfully perverse hybrid of Rodney Jerkins, Ernst Busch and Cher (with lyrics seemingly generated by a homoerotic pun-making database); some hippies put on an audiovisual anti-war show; a man plays rave riffs on a Dulcimer; and Richard Thomas announces he'll be playing the records of Anton Webern and Rush (which translates into crushing them through some effects pedals). There's a feeling of chaos and possibility that seems oddly precious in a London still hidebound by drear garage rock and studenty electronica. Monster Bobby- the aforementioned star of Oxo- headlines with his Sample driven Tin Pan Alleyisms, and it all feels like something of a vindication.