Quite Like A Bit Of Drizzle

So it’s the first time I’ve really felt able to sit down and write something informal since coming back from a break in the nice hamlet of Combe Martin a couple of weeks ago, and I’m putting it down to the interminably dull weather, which is turning a lot of people I know into either robots or zombies, my friends the robots going about their every day working lives with a little less will to live every day, and the zombies going about their creative lives with a monumental kind of stammer. Of coarse Half Man Half Biscuit have the line “I quite like a bit of drizzle”, but I think it’s one of Nigel Blackwell’s more off-hand lyrics, and it was in the context of an agreeable tirade against weathermen!

Anyway you come back from a week away and a further two weeks of mental constipation and it’s all going off like fireworks at a pop factory. Someone pretty smart in my book is putting on this gig …

…the Pop Miwsig Disco finds itself playing at the marvellous Indietracks, after the living legend that is Darren Hayman, and there’s a regular night at Newport TJs in the offing (where we’ll be able to put on our favourite bands and music in a cracking venue). Now we didn’t start Miwsig as anything more than a place to cover underground happenings, and fundamentally it’ll always be just that, a detached independent commentary on the really interesting things going on despite us, but if we can propagate them by putting on our favourite bands as well then that’ll be just great.

About the bands for our O’Neill’s gig by the way and I wasn’t as familiar with The Besties as I am with A Smile and a Ribbon, but they've sort of sneaked up on me with some magical tunes jumping out of my I-pod to be my favourite band of the moment. If we’re looking for reference points, I’d say The Besties are a more lo-fi and consistently upbeat Au Revoir Simone, all coy keyboard lines and immense Pop shimmer, and I’ve no worries about putting their ‘Besties Theme Song’ down as the best self-announcing tune of recent times, oh yes, better even than Lucky Lucky Pigeons' ‘Lucky Song’, in which they of coarse name-check drum-machine Artie. Yep, it's that good.

Onto Gothenburg's A Smile and a Ribbon, who are due to get their debut LP released by the resurrected Shelflife label, and they're coming over to pay at the aforementioned Indietracks, so we've snapped them up on the back of it, and what a snap! I’ve put them down in some outlets as a modern Swedish Hefner (Rebecca's lyrics are awash in that same kind of hopelessness in love, poetic outlandishness, honesty, lustfulness, and, well, … f**king romantic brilliance as Hayman’s), and it would also have been hard to get two better local bands than Silence at Sea and Liz from The Loves’ The School to support, both of whom are currently paving new Cardiff paths of genuine indiepop magic.

We’ll hopefully put something on afterwards too, maybe get Ian of legendary London club night Spiral Scratch to play some records if we can persuade him that money is overrated, but whatever, it should be a great night. There are 40 tickets available after bands (60 capacity venue), so get in touch and get your name on the list type thing which we’ll have instead of tickets. Or just show up on the door of course. Sure you'll get in.

A word for Combe Martin by the way, which is a superbly quiet and picturesque place (rather disappointed that it didn’t hammer down with rain so we could have seen the seafront pub The Fo’scle being buffeted by the sea), and hello to the pool players and barman of The Royal Marine, apologies for taking your ｣20 at killer! We’ll do it again some day no doubt. The Devonshire coast has a certain way of extinguishing working tension (especially with that little extra wadge in your pocket) and I always feel we’re going the wrong way when heading out of there, witnessing faces and demeanours change as we head back inland. A lot of people will share this feeling I’m sure, going away from the natural beauty and back into a world of harsh industry, uneasy smiles and kids lighting cigarettes out of the corners of their mouths in passenger seats of cars.

Oh well, you can't win them all. All systems go for Threatmantics and The Victorian English Gentleman’s Club tonight at Clwb, with a little bit of Twisted by Design after (moved from it’s usual haunt at Dempsey’s for one night only). And there, I suppose, is the benefit of the city.

© Miwsig