Small Mercies
April 06, 2008
 The social whirl huh? Only one night in last week and I spent all of that going through the pictures that I took of the Small Mercies [pictured] at the Windmill in Brixton on Tuesday. A good night out but, bless them, the Mercies were up against it trying to impress on the same bill as The Scrape and The Computers [especially the latter]. Drummer, Sarah, was hacking and coughing her way through their set like a TB out-patient and it was only their second gig since parting with their vocalist.
Now sharing the vocal duties between them they put in a spunky performance and the vocals were too low in the mix to notice any shortcomings in that department. I felt a bit guilty for liking The Computers but they are an impressively tight outfit.
Is all this stuff really punk though? It all sounds like common or garden Rock'n'Roll to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Other than the couple of nights of "enforced" drinking its been a relatively cultural week really. Taking in the excellent Vesturport adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis at the Lyric; which was faintly disturbing and emotionally exhausting towards the end. Bjorn Thors perpendicular performance as Gregor was hypnotic. Even when he didn't have any dialogue he twitched and convulsed all the way through. Body Politics, I imagine, wasn't discussed as publicly when Kafka wrote his novella 90+ years ago as it is today. Yet the treatment and ultimate neglect of Gregor and the dark secret that a seemingly "normal" family keeps locked in an upstairs room would keep any tabloid editor in sales for a week or more these days.
We also saw Instructions For Modern Living, at the Barbican, this week. Which was a lot more light hearted than I expected. That's not to say that it detracted from it but I kind of expected it to be a lot more of an "arty-farty" affair! Well, maybe light hearted isn't quite the term I'm looking for. Any humour was as dark as the "CCTV" footage that Duncan Sarkies narration accompanied. Duncan recently wrote an episode of Flight Of The Conchords [New Fans] and that humour was evident throughout. The spoken parts, bemoaning the Pursuit Of Happiness and futility of life in general, were accompanied by Nic McGowan who layered ambient loops of electric piano, synths, xylophone, theremin and vocals behind Sarkies effected voices. It's not like nobody has made these observations before but it's always nice to be reminded that you may not be the only one that thinks these things... Isn't it?
Two very different but extremely entertaining bits of theatre which tempts me to try Contains Violence and Have Box Will Travel, also at the Lyric and The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other at the Lyttelton Theatre.
Categories: Music, London, Theatre
See my flickr set: Small Mercies
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