British Music That’s Better Than Anything We Sent To SXSW In 2008

By far the worst hour I had at SXSW was at the Latitude bar, the venue repainted as the home of the British Music Embassy. We saw the end of one band, the whole of another and the beginning of a third before escaping. They may as well have all been the same one: identi-haired, A-level concentration on their incurious faces, grinding out the new British rock sound for an audience of UK journalists. Any of them could have been the next big thing and none of them should be. Horrid horrid horrid.

I’ve often toyed with the idea of an mp3 blog. I like some of the ones I’ve discovered through narcissistic blog searches and I can’t see anything I like without wanting to appropriate it – I have a lot in common with Madonna that way. The fact is, though, I really don’t like music very much and, when I do fancy hearing some, I mainly listen to country and western. Instead of an ongoing project then, here are five musical production units that I do like and that you might not know already:

1. The Flesh Happening
You know how glam flirted with gayness but got coy before it got too dirty, the forces of straight acceptability moving in and turning it into a minor facet of the bloke-ish personality? Well The Flesh Happening take it back for the queers, drag it into an alley behind a really scary bar and rape it back to life. They are the answer to the big men at Morrissey gigs who fancy a quick weep before their next fight. Angry, squealy, arresting and the only band that has made me uncomfortable in the twenty-first century. Come and see them play at our album launch – they are one of very few Brighton bands more interesting than having a cigarette outside.
myspace.com/thefleshhappening

2. Lily Rae
First seen at Nambucca elevating an already above average teenage new wave band called Bottle Rocket with sneery banter (“there’s more people in than for that last band – I wonder why that is?”) and good singing. Lily Rae has resurrected herself as a solo artist with a Blondie-esque catchiness and a lyrical audacity that sticks her firmly in the category where Lily Allen isn’t. For some reason, the use of the word ‘nob’ in a chorus rings with the clarion note of truth where the word ‘dickhead’ sounds fake and stageschool. She’s tiny and she drips with attitude and she plays shows in shit pubs as though they were arenas. And her dad is in her band and she stares you down and dares you to make something of it. She’s ace.
myspace.com/ohnolilyrae

3. Red Zebra
One of the weirder gigs we’ve played was a flood relief benefit in Worcester, headlining an alldayer at a school. The rest of the bill was made up of local kids – all of whom were impressive – and we ended up playing to a half-empty hall because, by the time we got on, everyone was outside throwing up litre bottles of cheap cider and shouting ‘leave it’ at each other. Earlier in the day, Red Zebra had been gobsmackingly fab. There are loads of them, they have a brass section, they’re shambolic, loud and joyous and, during their set, pretty much everyone in the audience was onstage daring the parents-cum-bouncers to try and get them off. It was like watching the Happy Mondays must have felt like. We keep trying to get people in London to book them, but they don’t believe us. They should.
myspace.com/redzebrafunk

4. Philip Jeays
I really shouldn’t need to talk about Phil Jeays. In the world I wish I lived in, he is beloved of his nation and sells out yearly 5-day runs of gigs at the Royal Albert Hall where he is assaulted with bouquets and is able to score crescendos of rapturous applause into his live instrumentation. Sadly, this is not the case – though he does sell out yearly christmas gigs on the battersea barge – and I am all too often forced to watch him in pubs with a fat drunk businessman heckling. Still though, his Bowie-d up Jaques Brel-ian ballads are bitter, cruel, genuinely funny and genuinely, achingly heartbreaking. Buy all his albums – you can’t fit him into myspace.
myspace.com/philipjeays

5. Jim Bob
The only other contender for a British Jaques Brel. You probably have half-baked, poorly thought out opinions about Carter USM – the number one album, glastonbury headlining, NME cover fronting band that the idiots forgot – and you should reassess them. A good place to start would be with Jim Bob’s last two Solo albums (‘school’ and ‘a humpty dumpty day’) which are just fantastically good. Lyrically dazzling, musically focussed, conceptually coherent – no one does this stuff better, as you should have known ever since he rhymed ‘Balkans’, ‘Falklands’ and ‘Waltons’ and got away with it in the late nineties. You should listen to Abdoujaparov (fruitbat’s band) too, especially ‘Hit Her With The Pig’: it is about exactly what it says it is.
myspace.com/jimbobm
myspace.com/idou2