I was back at YES in Manchester (in the basement this time) last friday to catch London-based up-and-comers
Dry Cleaning on their first real tour. Another band I'd been alerted to by 6Music playing thier first single,
Magic Of Meghan, from their debut EP Sweet Princess.
The first support was Burnely's The Goa Express (who also put out single
The Day last month, a year after their debut EP and have been gigging for over 3 years), who put out a solid wall of sixties fuzz-psych-garage noise. Their last song had everything turned up to 11, and resulted in lead guitarist Joey Stein playing with such fury that he ripped his fingernails off.
Second support was Faux Pas, hailing form York and have been around a similar length of time as Goa Express. Their set actually made me laugh a few times, purely by how unexpected some of the twists and turns their songs take. They have more than a hint of early Radiohead but particularly Placebo about them (mostly thanks to the singer Reuben Cowl's tone of voice being similar to Molko's). He also
cross dresses, and on Friday was wearing a granny dress.
I was stood behind his mum and sister during their set, who were proudly filming him on their phones.
Then on came Dry Cleaning, in their first visit to Manchester (they were playing the Future Yard festival in Birkenhead the follwing day, but I couldn't make that). They haven't been going for long, though the musicians Nick, Lewis and Tom have alll been in other bands before over the last decade. Vocalist Flo has had no prior band experience, and is an artist and photo researcher friend who they asked to add vocals over their jam sessions. Not being a singer, Flo makes spoken word lyrics woven together from her own inner monologues, quotes from newspaper articles, social media comments and overheard conversations using cut-up techniques that she uses in her artwork. Her deadpan vocal style (partially due to not being a singer, and also being terrified of being onstage) works well against the band's band pop-punk style.
The sound was a bit ropey to start with, with Flo's voice struggling to be heard over the band, but this got better after a couple of songs. One thing that amused me is that a couple of the songs from their EP have a bit of synth drone/pad as part of the backing, and this is reproduced live by Flo with a Walkman and a tape for each song, neatly laid out at the bottom of her lyric stand that she loads and presses play on cue. It was a relativley short set (they only have about 8-9 songs together so far) but I enjoyed it, highlights being the aforesaid Magic Of Megan,
Goodnight,
Phone Scam (I keep muttering 'She said I was a horrible cunt, she said I was a bastard' to myself) and
Conversations (with the added bonus that she uses the correct UK ringing cadence in her phone impressions). If they are your sort of thing I'd recommend catching them.
