Walking into The Workers Club at 9:30 on a Friday evening doesn’t seem to be the right time to enjoy a band, and I can only guess that this was the reason why we see bAnofee performing to a crowd of about four people. This is a damned shame, because her striking vocals reverberated around the room to the ‘nth degree. It seemed to be nice enough, with glitched noises scattering through the room to provide a quiet abrasiveness.
bAnofee is a lonely figure on stage, which proved to be weirdly odd, considering the next two bands, but it was enjoyable to bobble around to, even though there was a not-really-willing-to-dance-around-with-four-people-in-the-room type of vibe.
Scot Drakula was next up, a wonderful bundle of joy for a support band. Greatly crafted songs and a lead singer who belts the lyrics out like a Britpop singer on caffeinated drugs that come in a weirdly-shaped pill. Their tunes were wonderfully joyful and noodly and no amount of clanking of the guitars took away from the perfect pop noise that emanated from stage.
Once again, the disappointing thing was that there was hardly more than ten people in the room again, despite it being past 10pm. A band like Scot Drakula simply deserves a better audience.
By the time Smudge got on stage the crowd swelled up to a size where there would be a decent number, but once again there was a decent enough amount of room to swirl your arms around, which I could have done if I felt inclined to because Smudge had two hours of amazing fun playing song after song, after song.
When you have pieces like “The Outdoor Type” making you confused as to whether you should stand there, reflecting on their meaning or jumping up and down like a toddler on cordial, you get a sense of a beautiful tightrope of music that straddles the line of fun and serious.
Tracks like “Don’t Want To Be Grant McLennan” get peppered with jokes about other bands of all sorts while Tom Morgan is actually singing. This was an amazing thing to witness in a weird sort of way, and allowed for beams to indie-type joy to fill the room (fuelled by alcohol of course).
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