After a two year hiatus, involving two separate solo albums, a bike accident, and a career-threatening car crash, there was certainly a feeling amongst the packed crowd at Hoxton Bar that we were lucky to be witnessing Two Gallants’ return to the road. Tonight’s gig was the second consecutive sold-out night at the venue, and its intimate setting enhanced this atmosphere of expectation, which was not to be disappointed.

Two Gallants are a two-piece made up of childhood friends Adam Stephens (vocals/guitar/harmonica) and Tyson Vogel (drums/vocals), who play an original, punk- tinged blend of blues and folk. The first thing that hit me when they started playing is just how much noise it is possible for two men and their instruments to make. The second thing was quite how brilliant they are at playing them, with Stephens’ intricate finger picking weaving perfectly around Vogel’s powerful, almost melodic, drumming. It really isn’t surprising to find out that these two have been playing music together since the age of twelve.

The set included songs from all four of their releases, as well as plenty of new material, which went down almost as well as old favourites, something not many bands pull off.  The intensity and emotion powering the whole gig suited the lyrics of many of their songs, which range from tales of heartbreak to narratives about murder and slavery. Whether playing louder numbers such as ‘Las Cruces Jail’ or sharing the microphone for the new, acoustic ‘Broken Eyes’, both were clearly putting everything they had into their performance, demonstrated both by the amount of sweat pouring off them and the way Vogel occasionally collapsed over his drums at the end of a song. The passion and honesty displayed in the performance led to slightly awkward silences as the crowd waited for Stephens to retune his guitar in between songs, but idle chit-chat might have felt anticlimactic in these moments.  Instead, I happily settled for watching a strange love-triangle developing in the second row.

Two Gallants are a band I’d wanted to see for years, and as they finished with a drum-less rendition of ‘Seems Like Home to Me’, my only complaint was that it had to end so soon (but not as early as it did for the jilted boyfriend in the second row, who’d already stormed off). If you don’t know this band, take a punt on iTunes or YouTube, but if you ever get the chance, go and see them perform, where the songs can really come to life.

“Never judge a book by its cover.” I’m sure you’ve all heard this phrase countless times and, to some extent, agree with its simple sentiment of searching for true identity behind an outward appearance. However, as New York based avant-R&B artist Autre Ne Veut’s latest EP proves, there are exceptions to every rule. The moist folds of pink flesh adorning Body’s front cover are a perfect embodiment of the music contained within, and any listeners struck by the vulgarity of the photo are likely to react with a similar level of repulsion when listening to this EP.

Opening with a lone undulating synth line, lead single ‘Sweetheart’ starts Body off on a particularly queasy note. Cluttered with cheap sounding keys and an oppressively rasping beat, the song submerges its catchy vocal melody beneath such layers of sticky sleaze that it almost fails to register at all. Sadly, the rest of Body follows suit. With the production throughout this EP, just as on the album artwork, Autre Ne Veut appears to be aiming for an ice-cool seductiveness but instead finds himself falling into crass excess.

What is most disappointing about this record, even for those attracted to the production style, is that Body is completely lacking in substance beneath its surface. Autre Ne Veut’s songwriting throughout the EP is formulaic at best and, at times, downright lazy; that ‘Not The One’ passes by in little over two minutes is no bad thing: its grating pitch shifted vocals refusing to develop at all throughout the song. Any personality that might exist in Autre Ne Veut’s songwriting has been suppressed by his obsession with maintaining his ultra-hip facade, ultimately leaving his music hollow. Released on the much buzzed about Hippos In Tanks label, Body will undoubtedly appeal to the label’s hoards of obsessive followers, but for the rest of us this EP is so devoid of heart, so slathered in sleaze that it is unlikely to connect during its brief twelve minute runtime. 

Brooklyn pop-rapper Theophilus London made a noticeable splash in recent months with his sugary, stylised hip hop, especially as featured in February’s breakthrough debut EP, Lover’s Holiday. A somewhat overly-laid-back flow aside, the production was lush, spacious, and effortlessly catchy, combining a keen pop sensibility with elements of more conventional hip hop, à la early LL Cool J. The attractive mix was typified by his pulsating, seductive collaboration with Solange Knowles, ‘Flying Overseas’, fleshed out with copious bass, a tense high hat shuffle, and sung hooks courtesy of both artists.

Lover’s Holiday and its associated singles rightly generated a large dose of hype for Timez Are Weird These Days, London’s first full-length effort. The essentials of the formula remain the same, but London missteps somewhat, borrowing not only the candied synths of radio pop but also its vacuous lyricism. The quintessential cocksure tropes of brazen hip hop are all here – girls, money, cars – but sound even emptier when boiled down into simplistic pop hooks. We are subjected to a full twelve lines of “Last name London, the first name Theophilus, Theophilus, Theophilus” in ‘Last Name London’: that’s thirty-six Theophiluses. He continues to repeat the obvious on ‘Love is Real’, itself complete with auto-tune and an absurdly melodramatic bridge: “Try to make the most of this. Don’t throw it all away. She had to change her number twice, and no time to count the days.” Oh dear.

Ultimately, the best material on Timez is lifted from the EP: ‘Flying Overseas’ regrettably doesn’t appear, but Timez does include the well-crafted ‘Why Even Try’ (an excellent example of London’s casual flow at its best), and the glitch-hop single ‘Girls Girls $’, which successfully (and hilariously) reduces hip hop’s chief obsessions to mere shouted slogans. Those not blessed with as much imagined cash as London, then, might do well to avoid the filler of Timez, and opt instead for this year’s far sleeker Lover’s Holiday EP.

According to the nineteenth-century psychologist and philosopher William James, understanding any man is easy, ‘if you can catch the centre of his vision.’ But how much with visual artists can personal history be conflated with their artistic practice? The world we all believe ourselves to inhabit is never just what’s ‘out there’ but always imaginatively intertwined with the places we live and have lived, with our own bodies and our own pasts. It is a rare and special condition even among artists to see through their art and therefore to present a perception of the world as filtered through themselves. But Cézanne did this and I believe Lucian Freud also did in his lifetime as a painter which came to an end on the 21^st of July of this year. He even called his work ‘autobiographical’, its true subjects being himself and his surroundings.

Last summer, I stood next to Lucian Freud and looked into those visionary eyes, which turned out to be deep milky pools of grey. Paying to slave for free on an internship, I had luckily ended up at the launch of Martin Gayford’s book about the experience of sitting for the artist. It was a warm night but pelting down with rain so that the streets outside the Timothy Taylor gallery were glossy and reflective (rather like black patent leather; this is an effect which I suspect is peculiar to Mayfair). Inside the gallery stood a somewhat drenched and motley bunch of journalists, PR executives, art dealers and publishers, not one of whom seemed to know whether the artist himself would be showing up. Eventually – long after the dull speeches were over and after many of the gathering had already stepped out into the shiny night to go home – a black cab drew up outside and Lucian Freud entered the gallery.

Freud stood there in his paint-splattered shoes, utterly disconnected from the PR that was buzzing all around him. This is a man who had deliberately avoided listening to speeches and who couldn’t tolerate a moment’s small talk. While he was making the bodily appearance required of him, the entire time he never brought his mind fully out of his studio, never lost that intensity and sheer interest in the visible that is necessary for painting.

I must admit that Freud appeared to me then more fragile and older-seeming than I had imagined he would be. I knew he was at that time 87 years old, but I had supposed he might be stronger and quicker than he appeared to me then for I knew he spent the whole of his life, right up to his last year, obsessively painting, always standing up in front of the easel and darting about.

In fact, there’s a word I believe may that help to capture a strand of Lucian Freud’s nature that I find apparent in both his painting and his person: dart. Freud had a notoriously wild and sociable youth, weaving from bar to bar with his friend the painter Francis Bacon, race-going and gambling on horses. Conservative estimates are that he has fathered over thirty children. His portrait, Self-Portrait with Black Eye from 1978 (which last year fetched over £2.8 million at Sotheby’s), is evidence of his free and merciless nature. Merciless, that is, not at all in the sense of deliberate cruelty, but in the sense that Nietzsche used the word to describe a godless universe: animal, natural, and without particular care for humanity’s invented virtues or comforts. Freud had gained the black eye in a fight with a taxi driver, a scrape which occurred not because the artist wanted to fight but simply because sometimes, as he remarked, ‘people said things to me to which I felt the only reply was to hit them.’ While he had a close circle of friends, Freud always understood animals deeply, and moreover claimed to see people as animals. He painted his sitters as having a stronger physical presence than an intellectual one; he loved, for example, to paint the twenty-stone benefits supervisor Sue Tilley and always presented her as a lumbering fleshy creature almost without any mental life. When he paints animals though, he paints animals that are lithe and quick: foxes, rats and his beloved whippets Pluto and Eli. Such creatures perhaps share Freud’s own instincts to dart, his eyes never resting, always shaking off the moral pettiness and pities of human life.

Yet this darting nature was always held together by Freud’s unchanging intensity and obsession over painting. Another word: pierce. His quickness is held fixed, pierced through in many ways. What other artist would be as successful as Freud and yet continue to work day and night at his studio so ferociously, so constantly? And very few artists work so slowly and systematically as Freud. A relatively portrait of David Hockney just forty centimetres high took him over one hundred hours. Freud stares intently at his subject building the work up by sweeping layer after sweeping layer but by aiming his piercing gaze at one tiny area of the subject’s face and painting that tiny section in full, the work as a whole spreading out from the centre. Freud seemed almost obsessed with depth of visibility through intense concentration, with piercing the visible world through so that he captured more of it than just its surface appearance. He liked working from his models naked because he said that way he could ‘see more’. In his life, too, Freud’s darting around was balanced by his piercing focus. Those who were honoured as his friends, like the gentle and supportive David Dawson, were held intimately close to him. And the story of Freud’s rise as an artist is itself one of fierce determination despite stylistic trends in art during the twentieth century being set against his thickly impasto-ed, quasi-realism.

Lucian Freud’s life and his way of seeing stood uniquely together. Both were darting and whippet-like, contrapuntally pierced through with intensity and dedication. When such a wonderful life has passed, how fortunate we are that part of its vision is preserved in paint.

“What an unbelievable arse,” you are probably thinking, “’The best band you’ve never heard of’; where the fuck does this guy get off? And who the fucking cunt uses a semi-colon in typed speech? Probably incorrectly at that.” True, there is an unattractive and paraphilic thrill I feel knowing I am listening to a band that counts fewer than a hundred listeners on last.fm , for whom a YouTube search yields but a solitary, fuzzy and uncommented live performance, and whose album can only be downloaded from a blog with the hipster-fellating title, ‘Wilfully Obscure’. I am in many ways, as you say, an arse. I cannot use; punctuation. But calm your profanities. There are reasons for my writing this beyond showing off. And valuable as my indie credentials are to me, for example in picking up chicks, I hope to be able to (Shore)ditch my vintage-clad elitism in describing the mysterious pleasures of my very favourite band-you’ve-never-heard-of.

This summer, the London and Manchester radio station XFM has joined a number of magazines and blogs this year in celebration of the seminal releases of 1986: twenty-five years on, we have remembered, eclectic as we are in our tastes, The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead, Paul Simon’s Graceland, Slayer’s Reign in Blood, and dozens of other classics ranging from R.E.M to Run-D.M.C. While it is can be just lovely to sit around every now and then and agree that ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ was really very good, and that people who liked Prince still like Prince, there is also room for the suggestion that there is more to the history of popular music than the rotating roster of acts that gloss the covers of Uncut and Mojo each month. It is in this dual spirit of nostalgia and iconoclasm then, that I bring you The Odolites, who released their first single, Chimes, in that same year.

A quarter of a century on, as a certain stretch of Memory Lane lies desolate, windows smashed and heirlooms burglarised, it is not just unimaginative journalists that are to blame. In recent few years, bands such as The Drums, Los Campesinos! and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have been caught on street corners peddling old NME C86 tapes and Field Mice singles, or working from disused warehouses, where they package Sarah Records compilations in brand new CD boxes for distribution to record shops. The influence of ‘C86’ British indie bands, and the Americans such as Tullycraft and Beat Happening who took up the ‘twee-pop’ banner, has never been stronger. As a mission statement for the musical values with which the NME C86 compilation became synonymous with – a staunchly DIY and independent outlook; jangly guitars and nursery-rhyme melodies; reverence for British post-punk as symbolised by Orange Juice and The Smiths and homage to the nineteen-sixties golden age of American pop music – you could do worse than Chimes:

La la la la la la, let the Rickenbacker ring

La la la la la la, hear the Vox begin to sing

You can sing, you can sing

Put it right, put it right,

Pop song it’s time you came back home.

Set to the intertwining Rickenbacker guitars of Harvey Saward and Ted Lethborg, dancing dextrously around Gary Aspinal’s bouncing bass lines, Chimes is an explosion of wonderful, adorable, child-like enthusiasm, the sound of four kids in love with music, potently combined with the self-assurance of naivety. As Saward recalled to Cloudberry Records’ blog two years ago, “The lyrics kinda reflected the excitement I was feeling re the music we were discovering at the time and the feeling that we were really onto something special with our new band.” The sense of belonging, and of ownership, of being part of something special, even moral, is expressed with the sincerity of knowing no better , and the confidence that comes with having nothing to lose:

A sound for youth, a sound for truth,

The chime and ring from the bold young things.

The sense of manifesto, the awareness of a scene, is tangible. Yet while the indie ethos and common influences shine through, and their tunes in many ways echo the jangle of their British and American contemporaries, The Odolites were about as far removed as possible from any scene imaginable. An ocean away from the Paisley Underground of Los Angeles, and on literally the other side of the world to the Rough Trade Shop in Portobello Road, The Odolites were in Australia, languishing in a musical outback.

While in the late seventies and early eighties a modest New Wave swept over the land down under, with the Go-Betweens and The Birthday Party surfing to reasonable international acclaim, to Harvey Saward at least, the mid-eighties music scene was something of a vacuum: ‘I think we fell into a bit of gap between what happened in Australia in the early 80’s with bands like the Go-Betweens and the Triffids (who we adored) and then a much more vibrant independent sector that started in the late 80’s.’ Besides, the Odolites started out at an even further degree of removal to their compatriots, imprisoned on the ex-penal colony island of Tasmania. Living in the small north-western port city of Burnie, they recorded their first demo on a farm, somewhere called Mole Creek, and gigged around the small number of pubs – ‘most of them were just oversized barns’ – that would put them on alongside the usual dipsomaniac-pleasing cover bands. After being picked up by the mainland label Rampant Records in late 1985, The Odolites moved to the bright(ish) lights of the relatively thriving Melbourne scene, but their music would always retain the mountainous, untamed, island quality of their home, an intensification of ‘the feeling of isolation and fatalistic sense of despair of the Australian countryside’, that music historian Ian McFarlane finds in The Triffids.

A lot of what you need to know about The Odolites is contained in the name itself. Taking apart ‘theodolites’, to conjure one of those gloriously complete-sounding names that sits alongside those of the legendary girl-groups, the quasi-suffix evoking the crystal pop of the Marvelettes or the Shirelles and testifying to a sixties influence that also encompasses the garage rock of the Sonics, the ‘Baroque-pop’ of the Left Banke and the shimmering 12-strings of the Byrds. Syllabically, it is nearly exactly ‘The Odd Delights’, perfectly descriptive of their charming, yet idiosyncratic, sound. Like diving for eccentrically shaped pearls. Taking apart theodolites is precisely the business of The Odolites, presenting the listener with an unsurveyed landscape, destroying our instruments of navigation and launching us into uncharted space beyond our solar system of familiarity. There is a cinematic quality to the music, evoking, like the cover of their debut Persistence of Memory E.P., expansive roadway vistas bathed in golden light, sleek sonic highways cutting through Australian desert.

The name of their album too is a perfect evocation of the band’s ethos. Released in late 1987, Face Down in the Violets plunges you headfirst into a sweet-smelling, psychedelic garden, chiming in the same key as Primal Scream’s Sonic Flower Groove, released the same year, and drawing on the same jangly sixties influences. Yet this album is more than sunshine and pansies: the sinister reverb on the drums, the arresting stabs of overdriven rhythm guitar that crash searingly across the intricate lines of Lethborg’s lead, and the eerie disembodied vocals of the breathless Saward, leave you wondering whether the subject of the title, face down, is indeed taking in the sweet scent of the viola odorata, or like Rimbaud’s soldier in the valley, ‘his feet among the flowers he sleeps… at peace’, with two red holes in his side.

Two years ago, the Tasmanian Government launched a new tourism brand for mainland Australia: A World Apart, Not A World Away, and this seems an elegant way to place The Odolites in relation to the music of their contemporaries and the bands that inspired them. Listening to the first E.P, the two singles and the one album they made in the space of the three years for which they existed, it is as if the scaffolding supporting nineteen-eighties indiepop has been comprehensively taken apart and then reassembled without instructions; a new and elaborate canvas, erratically stretched over the same points of reference. I know, after such florid and irrelevant hyperbole, it will hard for you to shake the notion that I am an unassailably giant twat (“He quoted Rimbaud for fuck’s sake!”), but just listen and try not to be delighted. Although 12” test pressings were made of Chimes for UK release, a deal between Rampant Records and Rough Trade, that might have seen them find their way into the pages of NME or the turntables of John Peel, fell through in 1986, and the Odolites never released a record in Britain. Twenty-five years on, with Peel dead and the NME irrevocably shit, maybe we can take the opportunity to welcome them to our shores. With a little luck, the memory of The Odolites can persist for another 25 years.

Download:

Persistence of Memory E.P. (1985) & Chimes 7” (1986): http://tinyurl.com/6an7rqu

Face Down in the Violets (1987): http://tinyurl.com/5spqdww

(With thanks to Wilfully Obscure for uploading the music, and Cloudberry Records for permission to reprint part of the interview with Harvey Saward)