What a way to round off such a fine day. The birds were singing, the weather warm and still, and the squirrels, happy with their day's terrorising of old ladies, chase each other back home so that they can have rough, nutty sex long into the evening, making sure to squeak in lusty pleasure as loud as they can in order to piss off the neighbours.
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.
That, I have to admit, is quite disturbing. Fortunately, I can take my mind off it by recounting the events of the evening at the Portobello Acoustic Sessions.
Felix Fables were back from their Platform de-virgining, and ready to rock again... folk again... roll again, whatever. Their particular breed of young, energetic, happy rock is reminiscent of Alphabeat, and it has precisely the same effect of forcing you to clap, dance and sing along. The audience did just that, and, I'm sure, went away much happier for it, particularly because their demands for an encore were met at the end of the night.
Nick Tatham, a debutant at PAS, brought along his clear, talented style, enthralling the crowd with good riffs, a beautiful voice, and some endearing bouts of verbal diarrhoea between songs. At one point, completely out of the blue, he leaned forward, mid-song, put his mouth over the mic and began to beatbox like a pro over the laid back melody, bringing a brilliantly original twist to the singer/songwriter genre. A well-played cover of "American Pie" got the crowd singing along at the end, even if, like me, they could only get as far as "Bye, bye, Miss American pie," before going into an uncertain mumble because they are musical heathens that don't know the words.
Nicol, the gothic-looking and spandex-clad songstress, came with her guitarist and drummer, and proceeded to play her power-driven blend of pop-rock and old new romanticism. Nicol's keyboards swept across the audience to the rhythm of the snare, and the guitar strummed away beneath it, forming the solid base from which Nicol's vocals leapt, growling and enchanting in equal measure.
Saul Ashby came back to PAS for a second time to play his soulful yet energetic acoustic lullabies. This was heartening for two reasons: firstly, because Saul is a great artist, with a wonderful voice and a talent for making consistently good songs, but secondly because last time he came it was a little bit of a disaster. For some reason, you see, Saul's guitar - like only a handful of others - is disapproved of by the PAS sound equipment. The electronic arsehole that is the mixing desk shows its objections by creating a buzzing sound, which gets ridiculously annoying once you notice it. The first time Saul came, the buzzing was pretty bad, so an attempt was made to mic up his guitar instead - but Saul's style is such that he moves around in emotive dances, so the mic became more of an annoyance than the buzzing. In the end, Saul just walked into the crowd and gave them a truly acoustic experience.
This time, however, we noticed that the buzzing stopped when he touched the mic - a grounding issue, we surmised - and the solution was to put a cable in his sock. I'm not making this up. We put a standard 1/4" jack in his sock, and the other end was attached to the casing of another mic. It worked magnificently, for no apparent reason, so everyone went away happy. Saul got to play without the annoyance of the buzz, the audience could listen to his superb music without any distractions, and I no longer felt guilty that I couldn't help before. Result!
The
Portobello Acoustic Sessions is held every Thursday night from 7:30 at The Metropolitan bar, Westbourne Park.
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The PAS Diaries: Felix Fables, Saul Ashby, Nick Tatham and Nicol
The PAS Diaries: The Platform Presents Felix Fables