gigs of the year pt1

...well, the ones i dd anyway. these are unlikely to be written about anywhere else so i'm doing everyone a public service by bringing them to your attention.

well, that's my excuse.

anyway, one of my faves of 2008 was the set with the treecreepers at club moist in june. playng wth pete flood (of the fashionable folk types bellowhead) and me old mucker ian is always a joy. pete did ridiculously brilliant things involving a bunch of old keys, a plank of wood, a cutlery strainer thing from ikea, a toy megaphone, a vacuum powered melodica and various drums of all provenances. he has to be one of the best drummers n the country (really) - daring, sensitive, stupidly proficient, imaginative, assure and (to coin a phrase) funky as fuck. i'm sounding like some awful press release hack here all of a sudden, but honest, he's good.

though the treecreepers stuff is all improvised, there's pulse and melody as well as funny noises.
sometimes this kind of thing can upset people. when pete, ian and i played at free improv night back in your town as part of a larger group a couple of years back, some bloke (now i'm assuming gender here but it's a pretty safe bet) complained on a forum that we were playng "pop music". he also referred to pete's playng as 'ham-fisted'. this is the kind of thing that can keep me awake at night.

whoops...i may be about to start a rant about the unwritten but apparently inviolable laws of free improvisation but that would be off topic. ahem. ian features in two of me other favourites, so i won't bang on about him just yet. but this gig felt to me like one of those nights where all the usual crap about playing an instrument in front of people (some of whom may even have paid to get in) sort of falls away and finally some actual music happens. i remember that though we all seemed to enjoy ourselves (and the audience were unusually positive) i was scared to tell the others just how much i loved it just in case they weren't qute as enthusiastic. maybe they thought it was ham-fsted pop music. so i still haven't.