Thursday, April 06, 2006

Nick Hornby with Marah - Dingwalls / Lock 17 Camden

This was an interesting one – billed as “A Night of Words and Music with Nick Hornby and Marah”.

The show featured British author Nick Hornby (best known to me for ‘High Fidelity’ a book about an obsessive music fan and record store owner who puts his music ahead of most everything else in his life – interestingly the year this book was released, 3 different people gave it to me independently as a birthday gift!).

Marah on the other hand are a US rock band from Philadelphia – rock in the true Springsteen meets the Replacements sense of the word. While their “Kids In Philly” album may have been nestled out of my top ten albums of all time – “Roundeye Blues” would easily make a CDr of my favourite songs of all time.

So as you can imagine – I was pretty excited about this show. Things started very well with Phil Jupitus welcoming everyone and introducing things – we then settled into the format for the night: Nick would read a music related essay, and Marah would follow it with a well chosen cover (or in the case of Hornby’s final essay – A Love Letter to Marah, a monstrous version of one of their own songs ‘It's Only Money, Tyrone)

Kicking things off with a tribute to his first concert – Rory Gallagher – and the joys of ear-splittingly loud rock and roll – highlights for me included the tribute to Rod Stewart and The Small Faces, coupled with a great cover of Ronnie Lane’s ‘Debris’.

[In fact – the whole night was recording by Penguin Books for their Penguin podcast series – so you can actually download this portion of the show as a free MP3 here: http://thepenguinpodcast.blogs.com/podcast/files/penguinpodcast11b.mp3]

The crowd was an odd mix of Marah fans, music fans, literature fans – and celebrity spotters who seemed to have come along because the night had the whiff of an “event” about it. To this last lot I offer this piece of advise: if you’re going to see live music, you should generally try and keep chat to a minimum so people can enjoy the show, if you’re going to see a spoken word show SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Ok - glad I got that outta my system, Other subjects included going to a Bob Marley concert, and how The Clash saved Rock and Roll (followed by a brilliant ‘Lost In The Supernarket’).

After Nick finished with his “love letter to Marah” – which I did find strangely unsettling given they were on stage with him at the time – the band played an hour or so set. Highlights for me where ‘Point Breeze’, ‘Dishwasher’ and ‘Float Away’.