THIS IS CULTURE

LINEUP:
- Live: The Cuckolds, Mersault Music, Stuffed Love, Stolen Colours
- DJs: Dialogue Disco Supreme Team, Mache residents

REVIEW:
The Notting Hill Arts Club is packed to the gills by half seven, forty folk from Liverpool gather together at the side of the stage to see Nafe (already inibrated, sweating, shaking with excitement or fear) open the show in front of an excellent London crowd – so different from the bitter musicians he has come to expect from a Monday night out in Liverpool. Nafe lays down the detail: Mercy, This and That and Super Magazines are extending beyond the written page, beyond their respective geographical boundaries, beyond the word, into music, performance, and art, blossoming together in this dark, hot club, for one night only – THIS IS CULTURE and you can have it! 

The Liverpool and London audiences begin to mix. Nafe hands out free envelopes stuffed with issues of Mercy from the last year. In the next room, there is a ‘Tower of Prince’ constructed by Becs Ward from Liverpool – it looks charmingly like a piece of school-girl idolatry, all cardboard, markerpen and glue, but no schoolgirl could have made something quite so cutting, vital, using the pop-star’s lyrics to form her own social commentary. Also in this room, Mercy artist Phil Communication is showing his surreal photomontage pictures – tearing up the city and putting it back how it makes sense – alongside Nick Kendal’s documentary photographs of the bad, beautiful, areas of run-down Liverpool. The atmosphere is one of wild appreciation and creative impulse, and over the night this bleeds onto the audience – conversation gets odd and beautiful. People from opposite ends of the country kiss and touch.

Stolen Colours are the first act on, and their wild, tough riff-based tyrade kicks everything off perfectly. They have a large following in the venue, and very quickly win everyone else over too. Stolen Colours are great openers, in that they give the audience an immediate opportunity to get jumping. They do. 

Nafe looks hot, happy and shocked as he bounces back on stage to the noise of six hundred hands clapping, and ushers on Dave Bamford, who reads his poem ‘Culture of Blame’ sounding like his vocal chords are shuddering with anger. Again, the audience go mad.

If this is indeed a battle of the bands, then Liverpool kick off their campaign with a superb set from Stuffed Love – broody, psychedelic, complex rock from the same stable as Can and Make-up, but of now. One might be also be reminded of Joy Division, the way the five lads play without any heed of the audience, driving everything into the tunes. The Liverpool crowd take over the dance-floor for a while, but are hastily joined by bouncing Londoners. A great corporeal mass of sweaty grins forms. Ross G Sutherland screams out a poem about Mr T, Olly Gruner follows, gangly armed and witty, bemused – ‘could you bear to see the peerage stoop to wheel-chair tipping?’ 

And so we come to the only sour note of the night, as the Mersault Music bassist pushes Olly off the stage and prances about like an idiot before an audience who very quickly decide they don’t like him. It’s a shame, and the set suffers – at one point even the lead singer turns to him in disbelief, a scuffle ensues. Such is the spirit of the night though, that all bad feeling evaporates, and beers are drunk in their honour. ‘They’ll get it together one day, and when they do you saw it hear first!’ Nafe laughs.
Meanwhile the bar-staff are churning though orders thrown at them from around the circular bar, with impressive speed. Everyone slurs.

After a short music break by D.J. Alextronic from the HIVE collective, Nafe’s back leaping and very drunk by now, and the crowd huddle close to see The Cuckolds. After more poetry by Nafe ‘TOO HOT FOR LOVE’ Jones and Ross G. ‘DEAD DOG’ Sutherland, The Cuckolds’ set begins with a thumping bass-drum, while the rest of the band take up their instruments – keyboard, double-bass, lead guitar and Tom Brookes on vocal and acoustic – and rage away at their first tune. The Cuckolds are tight as the International Bank, and Tom Brookes’ romantic, bitter lyric is clear as day thanks to some excellent sound engineering. We stood in collective awe all the way through their set, safe in the knowledge that we were seeing a moment of eternity, in the tradition of Dylan’s first electric performances, played out before us – thankfully everyone has learned that this is good by now.

The night ended to an hour of disco and dance classics with a twist by DJ Alextronic and everyone I spoke to said they loved every minute, then ran off to dance. That’s all you can ask. That, and ‘why one night only?’ 
Bertold Baker