Young In Summer

First impressions can mean a lot, and my first impressions on the bands in the line-up for this O’Neill’s gig made for vivid memories. With Flipron, darkness had fallen at the incredibly crazy Secret Garden Party festival in Huntingdon, and Scott and myself had wandered into a teeming tent swaying to the most surreal and tropical music you’ve ever heard. At the centre of it all was a wiry-haired fella who’d created his own little world in the middle of his band’s, holding the central space and the crowd’s attention like an old poet reincarnate with between-song monologues, blindingly funny lyrics and an amazing instrumental flexibility. His band were strewn around at fittingly strange angles, I remember the keyboardist floating nearby on what must have been a collection of wooden crates, etching the spookiest, funkiest organ rhythms which made the songs shimmer and shine even more, and the whole stage was decorated with garlands, just to add to the sheer bizarre affect. Scott and myself came out that night totally in love with snippets of the most outlandish songs and the craziest rhythms, and were delighted to find a short time later that Flipron could do the seemingly impossible, and re-create this strangest of magic just as well on record. Jesse Budd and his band were, and are, our new heroes. With Silence at Sea, Pop Miwsig’s Paul G and myself were still new to Cardiff, it was a mid-week Clwb Ifor Bach gig, and the city’s hitherto unknown Pop underground came to life right in front of us. Little My opened that night, and were brilliant themselves, melodies just for the sake of melodies, just like we knew we wanted, and the girl with the melodica and the sweet voice stuck around to play in the next band, who were Silence at Sea, and just perfect. “Young lovers like gun runners,” the opening lines from ‘DeadCowboyTown’, the typewriter rhythms in ‘Typewriter Song’, and the band’s unabashed/abashed Popness (with a touch of comedy and noir), it all made the hairs stand on end. Cardiff had its own Talulah Gosh, and the realisation of this was really something. With Lucky Delucci, it was in the rather less romantic setting of my friend Jonny’s car, coming home from Tylorstown sports centre, a song came on the stereo that had this quirky kind of magic. The opening lines of “pretty as can be, fell out of a dream” grabbed me, the fact it reminded me of Flipron was also good of course. And then Jonny said the band were from Ton Pentre and Treorchy, right near where I come from, and I double checked. Pop just didn’t sound like this up there. Shimmering, poetic cartoon nuggets like ‘Fire’, 'Voodoo', 'Young in Summer' and ‘Bubblegum Milkshake’ have since conquered my Lastfm charts, and Lucky Delucci on any given day are likely to be in my ever revolving top three bands list. First impressions can mean so much, and therefore for me this gig will be pretty hard to beat. I can’t wait. Cheers to Rich Chitty, the Lucky Delucci drummer, for his excellent Burton-esque poster work.

© Miwsig