"In Chicago We Like To Dance"

Blue Orchids: back when noisy bands were good

Last night I was at the downstairs room in the Black Cat watching the Crystal Stilts, a droning five-piece from Brooklyn (almost every male between the age of 18 and 35 who lives in Brooklyn is a member of a droning five-piece garage pop band), when there was almost a fight right behind me. Unusual, because indie-kids (and indie-grownups) in their drab, dark clothes and thick-rimmed glasses are usually too busy not smiling to get into fights. But then they’re not often getting whacked from behind by a bloke dancing like a rubber windmill in a hurricane.

Between songs, a lad in front of him turned around to complain. The dancer responded, “I’m from Chicago. In Chicago we like to dance.” He had a reedy voice a bit like the teacher in South Park. The sort of voice where, if this was a cartoon and not a real-life indie-gig, you’d expect him to get immediately flattened by a well-aimed punch that everyone would immediately cheer and laugh at. But the complainant just said something inaudible (perhaps, “Cut it out, you windmill-imitating dickhead”), and turned back to the band.

Then it was the turn of the woman next to me to get shoved in the back. At the end of the song, she too turned around and asked the windmill geek what he thought he was trying to prove. “I’m not trying to do anything,” he whined. “I’m just trying to have a good time.” For that, he could always have gone down to the front with the other enthusiasts, who all seemed to think this was the best band ever - they were surely all too ecstatic to mind being thumped by him.

I perked up when the band accidentally played a good song,

Throwing Memories

David Narzico, by an amateur photographer

I'm reading Kristin Hersh’s memoir Rat Girl, which is just the book to take you back to 1985 in Rhode Island and Boston, inside the head of a funny, sassy, precocious teenager diagnosed as bipolar and writing some of that decade’s most thrilling, frightening music. It’s also prompted me to unearth the photograph above, my one and only experience of trying to take ‘proper’ pictures at a concert.

It shows Throwing Muses drummer David Narzico at the Town & Country Club in March 1991, the month that Hersh’s band released their stunning album The Real Ramona. My friend and chronically untidy house-mate Tim Bradford was working for Amateur Photographer magazine at the time, and was always bringing home new cameras to try out and abuse. We took along one each, and smuggled them in to the venue, then edged our way to the front. The cameras must have looked fancy, because people kept making space for us, like they thought we were real photographers. That the above picture was my best shot testifies to the fact I didn’t go on to make a career out of it (nor anything else, for that matter).