Blue Orchids

0	LONDON: The Water Rats
P	Friday 12th July, 2019
N	7:30pm

LONDON: The Water Rats

Friday 12th July, 2019

7:30pm

Event information

Blue Orchids, as a post punk psychedelic adjunct to Fall -world are well established in the music enthusiast’s consciousness, and yes, Martin Bramah was a founding father of The Fall, and as expressed recently might have reasonable grounds to even call himself The Fall, well, why not…but then he’s not daft. Perhaps people could do with reconnecting with Martin’s oeuvre a little more deeply than obsessing over the ex Fall schtick, specially what with the recent albums being a succession of magik pop psych masterpieces choc stock (oh yes) with fabulous gems full of rich, resonant sounds and stinging, esoteric lyrics.

Last year’s “Righteous Harmony Fist” was a total triumph, one of them stick to the turntable type records you used to know and love in the seventies and eighties. And the accompanying live shows were remarkable. A definite air of the ‘wow man we’re not worthy’ was rife amidst the awestruck punters in the Dublin Castle six months ago as they shook the embers of harmonic feedback off their clothing and made off into the night. That was a superb Blue Orchids show. Well there’s more on the way. Including what Martin Bramah calls, “the first covers concept album” the centrepiece of which is, “a pivotal anomaly”, an unseen Mark E Smith lyric from 1977, which Bramah has only now set to music.

‘The Magical Record Of Blue Orchids’ comes out on Tiny Global Productions on 7 June 2019 on CD and vinyl formats. Nuggets from The Penny Saints, The Aardvarks, The Growlers’, Crystal Stilts are promised and there’s an album of new Blue Orchids original material not far behind. Buy the records, attend the gigs, appreciate the illusive magic of Blue Orchids. A very special group.

Cult Figures - Having just released their nigh on 40 years in the making debut album, the very wonderful and very recommended 'The 116 Ploughs A Lonely Furrow', Swell Maps associates and West Midlands post punk/indie psych heroes Cult Figures have been astounding all comers with their remarkable live shows all these years later. Much fun, bridging the gap perfectly betwixt joyous irreverence and hard nosed intensity. Something for everyone then, oh, and they go back in the studio for album the second shortly. Perhaps that'll win some gongs to go alongside guitarist Jonathan Hodgson's two (count 'em) Baftas. High School Art with bite.

Vukovar - Post punk inforkmed indie pop with a bleak industrial undertow, heavy on the atmos, but they've some nice melodies in their widescreen soundscapes. (Ex The Bordellos, Carina Nebula, Gharials and Neurotic Wreck) “Vukovar hails from the Brutalist wastelands in the North of England. Ultra-Realism. Depravity. Monotony. Concrete. Hedonism. Silence. Vukovar are idealists, voyeurs and totalitarians.”.