Modern city dwellers are used to the constant presence, here and there, of gaps in the architecture as old buildings are torn down and new ones are built. Still, when the building in question harbours potent (if hoary) memories of formative experiences, turning the corner to see air, nothing, in its place is an unusual ontological shock.

I got that the other day when I walked from Holborn to Oxford Street and, just passing Centre Point near Tottenham Court Road, stopped sharply in astonishment to see that the London Astoria—and the whole block of buildings it was part of, including the Dionysus chip shop I was heading for—was gone. At first it seemed to just register as something taken-for-granted and familiar suddenly vanished, a simple upsetting of the habitual norm. Then, as I stood looking incredulously at the empty space that filled what was once a living place, all those old gigs started bubbling up…

After I passed my driving test, I would fill my red Mini with friends and we’d pile down the A1 to London to see bands.

Bad Brains, 29/9/89

The first was Bad Brains, the legendary Washington DC hardcore punk rastas. They were past their heyday of course, but it was stupidly exciting. We bunked off school on the Friday afternoon and hit London rush hour around 5.30pm. This was about a week after I’d passed my driving test, and I’d never driven in a city before. Ha! That rush very much set me up for the gig. Before the band even came on, a knife fight rolled past us like one of those cartoon clouds of dust with arms and legs sticking out. The band were stunning, and the mosh pit was the entire venue (or so it seemed). They did a curt set, and when they refused to come on for an encore, the audience started tearing the stage apart. YouTube has a snippet of them doing Re-Ignition at the gig.

Red Hot Chili Peppers, 11/2/90

I’d missed the tour of the Chili Peppers album that got me into them, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, so I sadly missed guitarist Hillel Slovak, who died soon after. But his eventual replacement for the Mother’s Milk tour was a fresh-faced 19 year old called John Frusciante. It’s odd looking back now they’re a stadium band and he’s (rightly) regarded as one of the best guitarists in the world (I wholeheartedly recommend his recent solo stuff). I remember him gyrating with insane grace all the way through Nevermind, his feet rooted to the spot and his hips tracing a blur of a circle and his guitar spinning us all around.

Jane’s Addiction, 5/10/90

Another band I’d missed before, on the Nothing’s Shocking tour. By all accounts Perry Farrell was less smack-addled and the band tensions were creatively frictious then, whereas this tour saw some shambolic playing and mundane chaos creeping in. Still, it was a frenzied spectacle, with a fantastically diverse, druggy and vibrant crowd. I think it was only when I caught them at Brixton Academy in 1991 that they had their full Ritual de lo Habitual stage set, with Farrell’s sculpture of him in bed with his two ladies, adorned with Santerian paraphernalia. But the epic centrepieces of this album, Three Days and Then She Did, conjured up enough exotic and sensual riots of energy on their own at the Astoria that night.

I’ve only been to the Astoria sporadically in the years since these early gigs, but they were more than enough. I’m sure I’ll think of them every time I walk past that space, even as it transforms into a Crossrail station…

In the wake of his splendid Black Sheep album, inspired by the Clash’s 1986 busking tour, Julian Cope’s undertaking a brief, bold tour around England this week. Starting at 10am tomorrow, Monday 27th October, at the ancient law hill Swanborough Tump in the Vale of Pewsey, it sweeps through a fascinating array of landmarks in the history of British protest, ending at the C.G. Jung statue in Liverpool at the end of Wednesday.

There’s a list of days and locations; times for each performance are being left rough, ready and open. Pull a sickie and catch one.

Dreamflesh Journal cover artist Amodali is building momentum with her visionary music. She’ll be showcasing tracks from her forthcoming release Incarnadine on the 11th & 12th of May in Leipzig in Germany as part of the WGT Festival. On the 11th she’s the headline act at The Pagan Village; the 12th sees here sharing the bill at the Kuppelhalle with Psychic TV, Voxus Imp and Barditus.

Checking in on Genesis P-Orridge’s site, I came across this recent interview with him—worth checking out as an in-depth intro if you’re not familiar with him, or a reminder of his fascinating career.

Last night me and Mark Pilkington went along to The Synergy Project, a psychedelic festie-vibe club under the arches near London Bridge. I’d been invited along to be present at the psychedelic panel discussion (albeit not as part of the panel itself, which included Shroom author Andy Letcher and rave stalwart Fraser Clark). Seemed like a good idea to take some Dreamflesh / Strange Attractor wares along as well…

As it turned out, I missed the discussion. It was in the next room to our stall, but I felt like I was communicating more talking to one person for twenty minutes than twenty people for one minute. We didn’t sell much stuff of course—who wants to carry books around all night?—but it was great meeting and talking to people who were interested in and/or enthused about our publications.

It didn’t exactly feel like a consciousness revolution was about to kick off there and then, but it’s hugely energizing to connect again with this cultural flame that’s being tended to and fuelled by people like the Synergy Project. There’s a great vibe there, a technicolour eclecticism and cultured bacchanalia that’s infectiously wide-eyed. Music ranged from hard trance to funk, live bands playing heavy ska and flamenco, with DJs dropping in suddenly-congruous anomalies like ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Political and environmental charities and NGOs had a heavy presence, and while there’s a strong contingent of purely party people who glance occasionally with bemused saucer-eyes at the stalls, the crowd as a whole was encouragingly sensitive and free from the usual blinkered attitude I associate with such vast, packed London club spaces. And where else will you find a couple of dozen clubbers engrossed in a portrait drawing class at 3am?

The next one’s on February 8th, and I think there’ll be a discussion panel there on sacred sites. Mark and I should be doing another stall—come and say hello!

The Brian Jonestown Massacre played in Islington, and their music utterly soared. The audience baited Anton of course, and Anton failed to wholly rise above them, of course. But despite some fraught technical difficulties, gems such as Hide & Seek, Nevertheless and Swallowtail were launched into the stratosphere with drunken aplomb. Joel Gion was in full nonchalance mode, the Taoist ringleader holding the vibe by doing nothing. And Anton, besides performing some crazy mid-encore rewiring of the band’s amps, managed to tell us boozy Brits that if it weren’t for his countrymen, we’d all be speaking German now. Then he started slagging off football. Respect.

Sunday night, Finnish psych-metal wonders Pharaoh Overlord rocked Corsica Studios, and probably shifted the Earth’s axis a few degrees, too. Bassist Jussi Lehtisalo, guitarist Janne Westerlund, and drummer Tomi Leppänen are all members of Circle, too; it’s no coincidence that both bands are among the best live performers I’ve seen in recent years. Pharaoh are more vocal-free and heavily fuzzy with their riffs than Circle, but the essence of both is an ultra-repetitive slow, slow, slow build of oozing mantric sex-metal. Three guitars crunch, buzz and interweave over tight, sinuous bass and drums that give a thrillingly danceable edge to this titanically stoned, ever-growing wall of noise.

Get their records and never miss a chance to see them.

I can’t believe it’s been nearly a week since the Guitar Wolf gig and I’ve not posted to rave about it.

I only heard of them when a friend asked me if I wanted to go to the gig at 93 Feet East in London. From his description of them, I bought their “best of”, Golden Black, and they sounded like a blast. Ferocious, unhinged Japanese noise rock, taking garage punk and turning the absurd coolness (as well as the amp) up to 11.

They coined their own genre – “Jett Rock ‘n’ Roll” – named to honour Joan Jett. Her irrepressible single ‘I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll’ – the first single I remember buying – was honoured with a spin by the DJ before the gig.

They came onstage to wild cheering. The guitarist/singer struck a pose and downed a bottle of beer in one while the drummer thumped away a tension-raising pulse. Then the first song kicked in, and chaos ensued without many pauses for the next hour or so.

A new track, ‘Sex Napoleon’, is accompanied by a guy dressed as Napaleon waving a big placard saying “SEX!”. The drummer frequently takes the opportunity of things breaking down to just the bass drum to comb his quiff. An audience member makes it up onstage, and suddenly a big hug with the singer turns into the audience guy holding the guitar. He starts playing, but the singer stops him, making him pause to hold a fist in the air as the rhythm builds, and builds, and builds, until eventually he’s signalled to crash away at the strings. He’s not appalling, but the playing hardly matters next to his blatantly astonished exhilaration at playing with Guitar Wolf.

Then there’s a general stage invasion, 20 or so people going mad, eventually being herded by the singer into a human pyramid. It collapses, of course, but it’s just too insane for anything to matter. The singer enters the crowd with his guitar, the lead dutifully fed out by their unflappable roadie, so that he can mount the bar, and wait for the song to erupt again as he leaps to the floor…

Just a fantastic night of extreme rock pushed waaaayyy past irony. If they visit your town, go see ‘em.

Of course also it’s the start of the educational year, and the Celtic year too. The former gives us an overflow of rambunctiousness as all that youthful energy converges (especially evident when I was living in the student-saturated Hyde Park area of Leeds), and the latter gives us Samhain/Halloween, arguably the funnest popular seasonal celebration of the year. I think being at university kick-started a real feeling of excitement about autumn, there being some concentration of good gigs to break the freshers in. Then, moving to the university area of Leeds after graduation, with the student’s union hall being the site of many great autumnal gigs, fuelled by fresh Liberty Caps, the whole thing got consolidated.

I remember one October week in ’95 seeing trance techno hippies Astralasia, global rhythm freaks Loop Guru, and the just-nascent Chemical Brothers. All three were astonishing gigs, the latter being one of my favourite Dionysian freak-outs I’ve ever been to.

Last year there was a similarly good trio, this time three nights in a row seeing Julian Cope, Jane’s Addiction (their Halloween bash at Brixton Academy), and the marvellous Legendary Pink Dots. 2001 I remember being especially great, too, with Diamanda Galas doing her voodoo blues bit, La Serpenta Canta, at the Royal Festival Hall, Laurie Anderson (not the best gig but it was great to finally see her), Spiritualized, and a fantastically inspiring Lydia Lunch.

And this year’s shaped up to be a real humdinger (and wallet-destroyer): the latest incarnation of Psychic TV at the Forum (which could go either way in terms of greatness), Primal Scream and Spiritualized together at Brixton, and The Polyphonic Spree at the Astoria.

Then along comes Tom Waits, playing his first UK gig since 1987 (a good few years before I got into him). He’s always been on my "have to see" list, so even the fucking silly door price of £55 (before those pesky fees) couldn’t put me off. Trying to get through to the Ticketmaster servers at 9am this morning as most boozy bohemians in the UK tried to do likewise nearly scuppered my chances. But despite the craziness that saw the gig selling out within half an hour, I managed to grab tickets. I’m looking forward to it like you wouldn’t believe.

But for now, looks like I’m breaking my post-a-day habit for a little sojourn in Cambridge to visit a friend, and share a much-needed, if alarmingly brief, holiday for us both. I’ll leave you with a commemorative home page, and catch you in a couple of days.

a review by Gyrus

• Event date: 18th September 2003
• Venue: Heaven, Charing Cross, London

I sat near the entrance to start with, positive that someone I knew would have made it to this gig. Those friends who didn’t get tickets before it sold out and said they’d "try to get in" seemed a little beyond hope as soon as I was approached outside Heaven by punters looking for tickets before the touts got to me. Then someone who looked uncannily like a friend/girlfriend-in-passing from way back in Leeds came in—the same eyes, but much slimmer and dark instead of blonde hair. I was wavering on my decision that it wasn’t her when she caught my eye and instantly recognised me. So, drinks all round and some hasty catching up on 6 or 7 years…

I mention this by way of explaining that I totally missed supports Rory Phillips, Cobra Killer, and Johnny Slut‘s interspersed DJ sets. I was tucked away in a room talking house prices, having kids, resource depletion and mobile phone photos of old friends. The occasional, ever-drunker wanders through to the toilets were pleasant, exciting trips through crowds of stunning-looking, excited people, but none of the music—whether caught in snatches on the way to piss, or piped through to the bar where we were ensconced—grabbed me enough to make me think about relocating.

But, at some hazy point, we decided to get down there for Peaches. She comes on with a long blonde wig, red box guitar and a deep bass pulse, over which she grinds a persistent, buzzing riff. It arcs around us as the pink and blue lights swirl and Peaches sticks the guitar out from her crotch, mocking and glorifying standard male cock-rock into something new. Her new album, Fatherfucker, she describes as "70% more ‘herm’" (her/him/hermaphrodite) than her last. It seems to me like a great thing to do, to drag (no pun intended) this masculinised female stuff so far out of lesbian subculture into public consciousness that there’s now posters just down the road from me on Blackhorse Road showing Peaches in her lingerie-and-beard pose. Women have rocked as hard as men before, but no one else comes to mind as having so explicitly brought the underlying issues to the surface. In a 1997 interview, Phil Hine remarked on how our culture’s "very limited in what we accept as androgynous. I mean, Ziggy Stardust is an acceptable androgyne. Is a woman with a beard an acceptable androgyne?" Maybe a little more so thanks to Peaches…

Things explode into ‘I Don’t Give A ….’, and soon some female cohorts join her on stage, sporting big pink strap-ons for the jokey ‘Shake Yer Dix’. I’m very slightly crestfallen by this point, because what totally bowled me over about the other time I saw Peaches, last year at 93ft East on Brick Lane, was how her presence, energy and raw noise very organically galvanised the crowd into a thing unto itself, a seething mass that seemed to writhe and pulse to rhythms that no individual had much of a bearing on. Here, I felt the burden of accumulated hype that seems to paralyse London crowds. Acts have to be here at just the right time to tap into the London beast. Too early, not enough exposure, and you’re nothing, worth some applause, but why waste the energy if there’s no projected media vibe to feed off? Too late, too much exposure, and you’re confronted with a "Come on, then, impress me!" attitude that kills spontaneity.

Peaches takes to the crowd, climbing up the elevated walkway down the side of the venue and balancing precariously from the railings, and only me and a few others a lost enough in the music to not turn dutifully to gaze at the spectacle. I guess her new album had only just come out, so not many people were familiar with the tracks—and the majority of her set was new stuff. A friend told me he wasn’t coming to see her because even though he really enjoyed the vibrancy of the time he did see her, he thought she was a "one-trick pony". In a way I agree. But this woman has some trick: to whip a crowd into a frenzied riot of fun, benevolent aggression and forceful lust for life. Anyone coming along to hear their favourite song is surely missing the point.

So anyway, things kick off here and there. I lose my glasses, as at the last Peaches gig and the last time I saw Alec Empire. It was less of a miracle than in those mad mosh-pits that I managed to find them on the floor straight away, but I shoved them in my pocket nonetheless. Mostly, when a bit of moshing kicked off, a space was quickly cleared to make room for the nutters like me who actually wanted to throw their bodies around, like a timid, too-cool-for-that anti-vortex. It seemed natural that the only other people down there really letting rip, in a state that’s open to injury (like Peaches, whose legs were covered in bruises at the start of the night) but lacking any will to injure, were mostly women. Here’s to you!

What really got me was the screen that was brought onstage. Suddenly there’s a life-size projection of Iggy Pop there, for Peaches to do their duet ‘Kick It’ with. Everyone went mad. This, together with the by now familiar phalanx of digital photographers at the front, who always seemed to feed more deeply from the show than the crowd, cemented a perception that’s been slowly mounting of late. The image really is gaining ground on the flesh. We should be worried, especially if we don’t fully see what this observation means. For myself, I decided to ban photos from my gig reviews.

The blinding, white-hot barbarism of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ burned this away for me. Then Peaches tried to get a karaoke thing going for the track that everyone seems to love—’Fuck The Pain Away’. (I doesn’t seem to be anywhere near her best to me. Maybe it makes more sense when you’ve someone to fuck the pain away with—cue mournful violins). Well, I couldn’t have sung any better than the people who tried, but Peaches’ reaction was instant: "They were a lot better in Glasgow." I didn’t doubt it for a second.

To cap it all, both of her dives into the audience to crowd-surf ended quickly with everyone under her collapsing down before she’d been carried even 5 feet from the stage. "I’m glad I’m not down there!" she said when was was back onstage, and for someone at the back they might have imagined she was relieved to have emerged in one piece from chaos. It was easy to see from the front that she was just being tactful about how limp we all were.

a review by Gyrus

• Event date: 6th November 2000
• Venue: Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

In the heart of Siberia, among mountains famous to anthropologists for the shamanic cultures they harbour, one may find the Republic of Tuva. Partly through the efforts of physicist Richard Feynman, but mostly through the sheer striking power of its performance, the unique Tuvan singing style, involving several tones being produced simultaneously, has come to more and more of the world’s attention. ("Not ‘throat-singing’," Yat-Kha’s Albert Kuvezin joked tonight, "because all human singing comes out from the throat.")

The effect is not unique in the world’s traditions; related techniques can be found among the Buddhist Gyoto monks of Tibet and numerous less celebrated shamanic cultures. Tuva, though, seems to foster a disproportionately deep love and passion for ‘overtoning’. The style has not lost touch with its undoubted shamanic, animistic roots, bound as it is to the Tuvans’ love for their varied landscape (snowy tundra to pastoral steppes) and the traditional means of traversing it (the horse).

Tonight was not about purity of tradition, though, but rather a demonstration of the uniquely new forms that Tuvan music has taken on though various collisions with the West. Yat-Kha, first on stage tonight, emerged from the steel-producing Siberian city of Sverdlovsk, combining the traditional lullabies and chants of Tuva with the post-glasnost explosion of DIY punk. I’d describe the music they make now as perhaps more rock than punk, if it wasn’t for the fact that punk much better expresses the mindset of people taking traditional music in such radical new directions. Familiar pounding guitar, drums and bass are joined by the sweetly discordant igil and doshpulur (traditional stringed instruments) to produce a sound that, when it really gels and is infused with passion, Perry Farrell circa Good God’s Urge would have killed for.

And of course it’s all thickly overlaid with overtones. I mean thickly. Albert Kuvezin has the most guttural, unfathomably deep voice on the planet, and he’s cranked right up in the mix, often obliterating all instruments. He’s complemented by the higher-pitched styles of Sailyk Ommun and the richly melodic traditional khoomei style of Radik Tiuliush—but Kuvezin’s earth-shattering vibrations are what I left with.

Sainkho Namtchylak also has a mixed pedigree, having been born to teacher parents and nomad grandparents on the Tuvan border with Mongolia, but with a significant stint of musical studies in Moscow (while still studying shamanistic traditions in Siberia). After touring the world with the Tuvan State Ensemble, she became involved with various Soviet and European avant-garde musicians, and has spent the past ten years in Europe blending her inherited traditions with Western experimentation.

Backed by double bass, classical guitars and a DJ’s loops and samples, Sainkho is fascinating to watch, her shaved head, distinctive pale features, and flowing, raggy white clothes giving her the appearance of a slightly awkward but precisely focused ghost. Her piercing voice can rise and pin you to the chair seconds before dropping off into a barely audible staggered moan. There was a lack of consensus between myself and friends I was with afterwards as to whether some sections, where she pushed her voice into fluttering, jagged, delicate echoes, were deliberately quiet or just badly mixed. Given the complexity and variation in the places she’s obvious intending to push her voice, I wouldn’t put a performance of several minutes of confusingly faint muttering and feathery glossolalia past her.

There are obvious Western reference points for Sainkho. Shuffling along to muffled, rolling beats, she cuts a figure like a middle-aged Björk. Shrieking out the pain of separation from homelands and loneliness in the West, she touches on Diamanda Galas’ operatic rawness. But it all hangs on an axis that’s utterly Tuvan, however far her experiments take her. ("I am changing also," she offers by way of explanation to anyone expecting wholly traditional music.)

A final mention must also be made of Gera Popov, from Odessa, whose mouth harp solo—expressing his love for Tuva—was the most skillful and effortlessly judged use of phasing effects I’ve heard, and the German Caspar Sacher, whose overtoning provided a good balance to the performance, showing that Westerners are taking on Tuvan styles as Tuvans take on the West.

a review by Gyrus

• Event date: 22nd April 2000
• Venue: Brixton Academy, London

I had a T-shirt ready for Death In Vegas. It had the cross-sectioned brain from the cover of The Contino Sessions on the front, with a Levi’s logo stamped across it. Underneath was the quote from Bill Hicks about every word from the mouths of artists who advertise being like a turd falling into his drink. In the end, for better or worse, I couldn’t be arsed to take it and throw it to them onstage. I was there for Primal Scream and just wanted to enjoy.

Still, I just couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for Death In Vegas’ set. I loved The Contino Sessions—that was exactly why I was so offended that they saw fit to sell ‘Dirge’; to fucking Levi’s. Do they have a legitimate excuse? Did one of their mothers need the cash for a brain operation? I suspect not. Kind of disillusioning for bands you love—young bands, at that, not old and tiring ones—to clamour for a piece of ass in the corporate gang-bang. Many say I’m naïve. Yeah, yeah—whatever. However matey they are with Bobby Gillespie, they didn’t deserve a fucking second of stage time next to Primal Scream and Invasian last night. I’ve always thought it was your loss if you let something about an artist spoil their music for you. And so it is. When ‘Dirge’ (their new single) started up and the crowd went wild, I felt nothing. These people are following in the footsteps of Nick Kamen.

Thankfully, the Primals unambiguously burnt those disillusionment vibes away.

I came in during ‘Swastika Eyes’, and spent most of that track piling my way down to the front. Most of the first half of the set was material from their incredible recent album, Exterminator. The only thing that shocked me more than the searing intensity of the uncompromising title track, ‘Insect Royalty’, ‘Kill All Hippies’, ‘Pills’, ‘Shoot Speed/Kill Light’ and ‘Blood Money’, was how half-assed most of what passed for dancing was down there. Around halfway through their performance, they played the first track to really get everyone jumping ecstatically—’Rocks’! Catchy beat, dumb hedonic lyrics—that’s what the people want! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not down on the Primals’ ‘old hedonism’ or something—’Higher Than The Sun’ was utterly majestic. But c’mon! You could feed a few Rolling Stones singles into Windows 98 and it could churn out umpteen ‘new’ tracks that kicked ass as much as ‘Rocks’. Plus, most of the aforementioned new tracks are at least twice as ROCK, musically, as ‘Rocks’—and they’re fuelled by the storming, righteous fires of Illumined Dissatisfaction. But for their duration, whenever I glanced out of my furiously leaping fit of dancing, most of the people around were curiously earthbound, just shaking their hips or pushing each other. Ah well.

That said, there was quite a healthy moshpit going for a lot of the Primals’ set. At times it just looked like it was filled with people who’d drunk too much to dance, and got the illusion of dancing by letting themselves be pushed about by a few macho lager lads. But during one track, I finally realised these were the people having most fun. There was no real aggression, and when one bunch of lads, jumping in unison with their arms round each other—that gleeful sulphate look on their faces—grabbed me to join them, my prejudices vanished. We were all having a truly great time together.

‘Accelerator’ was as blinding as can be, taking me back to that first, shattering time that I listened to the album, and then cranking the intensity up to white noise levels. The line ‘What’s that screaming in my head / It’s the future / It’s the future / C’mon!’ perfectly crystallises for me those moments when naked hope is born, bloody and wailing, from crushing frustration. Much leaping ensued.

Exterminator is so different, in many ways, from their previous godlike album, Screamadelica, that it was a grand testament to the band’s integrity to feel last night that they still encompassed the spirit of those years. Eight years ago I was on the very same dancefloor, as loaded as I’ve ever been, dancing joyously to ‘Movin’ On Up’. Last night I did the same, and felt a connection back to that time that had very little to do with nostalgia, or trying to ‘recapture’ some golden era. It felt like… an integration. Movement had taken place in the meantime. Stagnation had been faced, succumbed to, and overcome. Frustrations remained, but so did hope and energy. Just before ‘Kill All Hippies’, the inspiringly enthusiastic bassist Mani grabbed the mike and made the cheapest comment of the year: "Anyone who’s going to Glastonbury this year’s a bloody hippy!" (Right, so you’re making a statement by playing bloody Reading, then?) It’s ironic that the Primals are toying with subcultural rivalry at a time when they’re truly integrating—for me, at least—so many of the great impulses in modern music.

When they finished, that was it. At the moment, they’re just not an all-nighter band. Nothing, nobody can follow them. I popped in briefly to check out Invasian, whose rumbling hi-speed drum-and-bass rap would have taken my head off on any other night. But no, this was a Primal Scream gig—full stop and amen.