a.P.A.t.T. / Kugelschreiber / Michael Woodman

The Old Library Bar, New Cross, London
Friday, 13th September 2024

Sitting on the swerve of New Cross Road (just as the latter prepares to commit itself to the Old Kent Road rat-run), The Old Library is an Edwardian survivor reacting to upheaval and displacement. Initially a Carnegie bequest for working-class literacy, it’s long since been deprived of its books and has now worked its way towards a second life as a performance space. Traffic wind buffets it, day and night; but during the evening a defiant purple light licks down its begrimed, faux-Georgian marble front. It’s like a respectable accountant who, late in life, packed it all in to become a stately old drag queen.

Go inside for the sounds and the surprising swishness – the elegant wood panelling; the immaculate low-lit bar in the domed entrance hall, with its explosion of foliage tumbling from the octagonal ceiling and its little stage for jazz, funk, Afrobeat and DJ turntables. Ignore that for the moment… also, ignore the downright peculiar toilet space, which folds in oddly cramped angles around the building’s back corner, giving even sober customers the feel of having been inserted into an uncomfortable pocket dimension, or perhaps into a remnant of L-space. Make your way into a windowless box of a room in the back, where two-dimensional book spines line the walls with neither friction nor fumblability (as if the wallpaper is just the ghosts of the library’s former books, rendered down by budget cuts and ambiguous gentrification alchemy). It’s here that tonight’s evening of lovingly constructed wonky pop, experimental rock and irreverent avant-garde circus music is happening.

MICHAEL WOODMAN

Michael Woodman, in particular, might harbour a wry appreciation for the Old Library’s transition from a knowledge store to a space for conjured-up possibilities. The Thumpermonkey frontman’s stash of songs have often given shape and voice to weird fiction preoccupations; while his solemnly playful, highly-literary sense of narrative carefully brings renewed dignity, subtle humour, pensive enthrallment and – yes – new life and freshness to the genre’s assorted tropes of waking/walking dreams, of uncanny encounters and symbolism, of the return of the ancient and the underlying. I arrive just as he begins, as he raises a ghostly mingling of Gregorian choir and floor-thrumming harmonic vocal out of his pedalboard and loop station for his magician’s prelude.

Increasingly working solo, Michael has brought his electric guitar, his crowded plank of foot-controls and his greatest instrument – that voice – to the evening. Barefoot and pyjama-clad, there’s a hint of Little Nemo about him tonight, but the onstage Woodman persona remains intact. Simultaneously remote and friendly; a neat, handsome, slightly distracted yet ordinary person, calmly immersed in the stories he’s sharing. Here and not here; singing almost to himself alone in his damask tones, which climb gorgeously between deep luxuriance and sigh-in-the-trees falsetto, and between tender reminiscence, awestruck horror and princely hauteur, all without ever blundering into showy glam-Goth theatrics. You feel that you could go up to him to talk about bus schedules, cake shops or school orchestras, and that he’d respond with warm, gentle, well-informed middle-class politeness; but at any moment he’d slip both of you back into the eerie without breaking a sweat or even changing his tone.

Michael’s opener, the brand-new No Moon, No Throne, is a prime example of where he’s at now. It’s a slow-paced compelling series of musical seductions, winding in on each other; a crooning sorcery gradually building and shaping the outlines of a story. His guitar shifts and paints from chord to unusual chord; a purposeful stepping ritual disguised as a meander; slow jazz for necromancers. As for that story, it’s unclear. Saturated with Woodman dream logic, it reveals itself more by its lunar and oceanic associations than by any tightly anchored plot. “Tell me,” Michael sings, “are you coming from the bottom of the sea?”, and we’re carried along with his tidal intensities. Hands sweeping upwards like a wizard – or a Wagnerian conductor – he orchestrates a mighty sea-swelling pitch-rise out of his pedals as the song moves from act to act before a final enigmatic ebbing.

If Michael sometimes seems as if he spends an alarming amount of reading time on occult tomes, it also seems very much as if he reads them with a permanently raised, Spockian eyebrow. He talks, briefly, about having the same surname as a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but it’s a shaggy dog story rather than an attempt to curry mystical credibility. As he wryly notes, for him a short thirty-minute opening set means just three songs; so he’s got to attend to business without too much fuss.

His second song (and the only familiar one) is The Levitant, from 2021’s Psithurism, which he puckishly describes as “a murder ballad, in funny counting”. It comes in on a rainfall loop and (after a compellingly long stay) eventually phases out on a dream loop of shrillings and pings. In between, there’s a mysterious folk-horror tale of memory and otherness, schoolbags and woodlands, mob rule and, it seems, some sinister sort of collusion. “If you hadn’t smiled so wide,” carols Michael, like a distracted chorister, “the fresh bereaved might have left you with a few teeth…. Well, there’s no rope or cuff or cell, / no authority to detain me, / no heaven and no hell, so take me back to where I believe / my human form is sleeping / under the leaves.” Again, clarity is elusive. There’s more of a flavouring of atmosphere, like the cut of wood-smoke in the nostrils as it drifts from an unseen fire hidden deep in the forest. Much like its protagonist, it seems to hover above the ground and avoid providing a straight answer.

Michael’s final song, Ignathox, is “a song about a puppet.” Another trip into uncanny valley, then. Again, the unwinding of looped and draped narrative. Again, the obscurity of the final picture, although stewed Edgar Allan Poe phrases like “your maladictive stew” come slipping through. Music-box stutters and echoed guitar punctuate the layers of words, and Michael also bestows a rare gift of straightforwardness – a piercingly emotive solo sitting somewhere between prime Pink Floyd and the jittering deconstructions of math rock. He slow-fades out, singing solo and unaccompanied, laying down the last few ashy pages… and then that’s it. The imaginary storybook’s leather binder is clicked shut, and Michael is back to being Mr Unassuming Nice Guy as he unplugs and breaks down his equipment to meekly make way for the next band.

KUGELSCHREIBER

Who, it seems, are starting with a bit of a collywobble. Onstage, behind her bass, Sharron Fortnam is suddenly nervous and exposed. Having assembled and launched Kugelschreiber following her exit from North Sea Radio Orchestra – and having put so much of herself into it – she seems unsure, at the last moment, of what to do with her new band. Of course, what she’s already done (in picking the right bandmates) certainly helps. With the minimum of fuss, James Larcombe, (a former Sharron bandmate in both NSRO and Arch Garrison) has already proved himself as one of British odd-pop’s great sidemen, a sparkling skill-set on keyboards, hurdy-gurdy, arrangement and production being offset and exceeded by his generosity, enthusiasm and humility of character. Here, gear slimmed down to just a single synth-and-mic set-up, he’s a cheery elfin presence. Chip Cummins pins things down neatly on the drums via a brisk, functional basket of supportive beats; but he’s also supportive in other ways; providing a simple cradle for what others need to do and stepping in to play master-of-ceremonies when nerves get the better of his bandleader.

Finally, there’s Jen Macro, the band’s latest addition, drawn from the punkier terrains of The Stuffies and Hurtling. Standing discreetly off on one side, she plays understated, offbeat guitar figures. In many ways, Jen’s contribution defines the Kugelschreiber approach of small, oddly-shaped humble fragments fitting into a larger mechanism, which in turn drives a bigger method for observing the macroscopic and microscopic. That’s a grand, prog-friendly conceit, but in this case one which is executed in understated little nuggets, tootling undulance, a general absence of solos and a post-punky approach of make-do and innovate. Above all else, Kugelschreiber are a garden shed band: revelling in home-made experiments, the soft bindings of small communities (families, friendships) and in the pursuit of understanding via reading and cross-referencing while knitting these things to the grain of the heart and mind.

As you’d expect, with all of this in place, things quickly get better once they knuckle down to the business of playing live. Visibly relaxing (and, whenever possible, drawing nourishment from humour both on and offstage), Sharron settles properly into proper Kugelschreiber thinking and begins to sing out her findings, her questions and digressions – the web of curiosity and intricacy which the band’s work is about, interlacing the vulnerable spirit, the freed brain, the marvels of the scientific cosmos and the nature of strength and endurance. It’s the modern human dilemma to be balancing all of these factors. It’s Kugelschreiber’s business to be knitting it all together in song: a personal observatory and workbench, balancing the need to maintain patterns with the need to cope with the wild human variables. There are elements, here, of Sharron’s pre-NSRO work in the bobbing, wheeling Shrubbies (and William D. Drake’s lilting, short-lived Lake of Puppies) but also, in James’ buzzing synth, a dose of Stereolab. Cuttings from Prince, ABBA, Field Music, Broadcast and Pixies are also apparently thriving in the Kugelschreiber window-box, imbuing the band with extra snippets of bounce, harmony and perspective. Atop it all, there’s Sharron’s winningly artless voice. Part chanting folk-soprano, part post-punk urchin, part ageless but watchful child, it entices you in with its unforced purity.

At the moment, there are two types of Kugelschreiber song. There are those with a steady and determined impetus, in which everything clicks and ticks (musical escapements marking tidy little arcs, melodic fragments meshing together or performing precise small dances of occasional engagement) and in which everything merges into a sprightly interlocking shape like a leisurely fairground ride. Unsurprisingly, these are often the singles. There’s Fuck Symmetry – despite its salty title, actually a gentle-mannered song on which Sharron explores and expounds the impact of conversation and connection over softly-skipping beats and reedy folk drones, the whole band bursting out in wiggling seraphic oohs and ahhs when words fail joy. There’s the throb and tinsel of (me x u) ≠ (u x me), bobbling baby-elephant funk with glitter-booted riffs and a stylophonic keyboard line, within which Sharron draws uneasy parallels between romantic attachments and chemical valances, partnerships and parallel universes; plus No Glittering Promises, an unexpected late-set bopper with a great bassline, a punky edge, lyrics summoning up chaotic images of flight, and a peculiar vocal break which appears to be being carried out in about three simultaneous different keys.

Then there are the other songs, in which Sharron freely strums and plucks her bass like a folk guitar, working her way through an idea while everyone else in the band waits to interject their carefully honed little agreements or ornamentations. Truth Will Out Of Me and Harold Lloyd fit into this category: songs which, particularly when played live, build up like precariously-crafted wedding cakes a few artful degrees away from collapse. It’s also where you can see the roots of Kugelschreiber work: the tenor thrum of thick strings tickled, the stacking of three-part harmonies, the quizzical mesh of science, metaphysics and simple human needs. Set opener Elasticine™ is also like this – a spindling investigation of a changing relationship punctuated by little gulps of silence, perhaps for quick tears or a moment of passingly painful focus. These songs are also where Kugelschreiber’s more eccentric ideas are allowed to flourish. Off centre stage, a little scaffold has been looming throughout the set, like a bent tubular bell festooned by hanging metal kitchen utensils – ladles, fish slices, potato mashers. After the initial sparse start of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Shoe, this finally gets a workout – Sharron and Chip precariously stretching themselves around it, flailing utensils against framework in glittering, clattering, wonky counterpoint to James’s stuck-Mellotron-flute loop.

It’s the first category of songs which work best at the moment. They show the band’s innate and potential confidence in full manifestation, enjoying the immediacy and effect, and it’s tempting to ask for “more like this, please.” But it’s the second kind of songs which engage a little more curiosity, a little more sympathy, as the band expose what are (for now) the vulnerable joints in between the mechanisms and anchors, and perhaps beg a little indulgence while doing so. Some of these songs may be about parenthood, others about the life and death of other loving relationships; in all of them, astronomical chartings seem to etch out some sort of post-astrological sense. It’s here, too, where there’s the most crossover between Kugelschreiber and the final-days work of their beloved Tim Smith. In these particular bassy mumbles and complex rambles, you can hear echoes of the scratchy, exploded, messy-life explorations of the last, most obscure Cardiacs songs.

The finale of Hold On Space Cadet! finishes off Kugelschreiber’s set with a mixture of slap and slam, lost nursery-rhyme pop, and a cheeky fake ending. Then Sharron sets up a chant of “eyes open wide, mouth open wide, arms open wide… HEART OPEN WIDE”, and we get our real ending: a final full-hearted space-rock wig-out, Kugelschreiber blasting out of the harbour with all rigging secure, all scopes on full sweep. Around her singing, Sharron is beaming. Like an intricately working muscle, Kugelschreiber might need some more exercise before they’re at full strength and comfort, but everything’s slotting into place.

a.P.A.t.T.

In contrast, a.P.A.t.T. are already well-exercised old lags, but of a delightful kind. For over twenty years now, the Liverpudlian band collective have been bringing their avant-garde rock circus to audiences. For the last few of those years, they seem to have particularly upped their performance game; as if hastening with giant exaggerated steps through secret underground passages, travelling from place to place and from speaker to speaker and stage to stage around the country, Perhaps they’ve found a set of space-time portals in the Williamson Tunnels; or perhaps they’ve found a way of oozing, Sadako-like, through the television network, hitching a ride between the streams. Their avid appetite for parodying, collaging and bounce-backing whatever they find en route suggests that they really enjoy whichever journey they take.

If Kugelschreiber are tonight’s metaphysicians, a.P.A.t.T. are its gleeful pataphysicians. There’s a zestful Dada-ism to what they do, as they all but burst out of their white lab coats stretching to grab, steal and fire off cut-and-shunt chunks of devilishly mismatched tunes and rhythms, but in a way that works. It’s easy to tag a few precursors. The switch-backing switch-ups of Frank Zappa are there, but a.P.A.t.T. clearly harbour no classical concert hall ambitions, nor Uncle Frank’s taste for mingled sleaze’n’cheese. Likewise the pell-mell changes and false feints of Mr Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3 and mid-1980s Cardiacs, hurtling through tightly drilled changes of mood, melody and rhythm. I’m sure, too, that they’ve delved into the cut-up aural piracy of plunderphonics (even if they perform their pillagings and quotes live by themselves), and that somewhere in the crammed rack of assorted vinyl, cassettes and soundfiles which presumably infest a.P.A.t.T. HQ, there are at least a couple of Residents records.

Listing off these people, though, fails to convey the absolute joy that a.P.A.t.T. bring to their romps – the gleeful rule breaking, the warped musical wit, the laugh-out-loud aural clowning; and maybe most importantly the refusal to capitulate to music-canon respect, married to a sunny goodwill as regards their audience. Or perhaps it’s SunnyD. At any rate, there’s not a drop of cynicism here, not a touch of disturbing Cryptic Corporation dankness, nor (despite the adventurousness and the stunt moments) any apparent wish to elevate themselves beyond fun bringers and music celebrators.

Twenty-nine a.P.A.t.T.-ers have passed through the ranks over the years – a roll call rivalled by few bands (except perhaps The Fall, or The Waterboys) – and it’s often difficult to precisely establish who they are and how they work. Tonight, there’s just the four of them… but, if anything, they give the impression of having expanded. What can sometimes feel cute and quirky on an a.P.A.t.T. record turns out to be wildly powerful in concert. Who’d have guessed? It seems that a.P.A.t.T. absolutely understand that their role, beside and beyond their avant-garde playpen-ing, is to be good enough entertainers to bring their music home to a sceptical audience, and they really go for it.

Bearded and bespectacled, his hair snatched up into girl-bunches, General MIDI leads the show from the side, twisting and dancing behind a keyboard from which he delivers brassy squirts of chords. He sings in cosy stentorian tones, sometimes yammers tunefully; acts as an unpredictable MC veering between sunny Scouse cheerfulness and unexpected screeches, as if Viv Stanshall had been taking tips from Mike Patton. Occasionally he strums on a guitar which looks as if it was stolen from a Cairo pawnbrokers sometime in 1930.

The General might be steering, but Bossa Nova is definitely driving, pushing the music hard out into the room with some astonishing solid drumming and enough energy to power a convoy of trucks. Boss DR-5 is the utility man, swapping between guitar, bass and squelchy little synth as required. At Stage left, Empress Play occasionally tosses her auburn mane and underpins the music with thick salvos of keyboard. When she’s not doing that, she ornaments it with punchy flute or saxophone, piping piccolo or wriggling clarinet. She manages to be the secret weapon in a band of secret weapons. Everyone sings. Everyone wisecracks, with that particular Mersey grace that recognises that everything’s as flippant or deep as you want it to be. Everyone hits every single mark in a set more full of twists than a pretzel factory.

Clearly, a.P.A.t.T. like buggering around within pop culture. The warped synth-pop sky-billow of Plump in the Mud sways through phaser bubbles and pomp chimes before repeated yanking on the gear-shift and crashing through chunks of opera, tv sign-offs and children’s songs before rushing back to chomp on itself. Later in the set, for the perky It Keeps Going (think woman-fronted power pop meets French ye-ye), Sharron Fortnam clambers happily onstage to take the reins on behalf of the absent original singer, Los Angeleno odd-popper Dyasono. On Yes… That’s Positive, the band take on a Devo snap and some West Coast bounce, filtered through rhythm tricks and squeaks, and some atonal string quartet moves meeting delighted brassy synth pomp. If there’s Residents in there after all, it’s Residents with a rocket up the arse, but what it reminds me of most is Poisoned Electrick Head; another bunch of gleeful Merseysiders marauders with a taste for the weird and comic-book geeky, but a diamond ear for a knockout tune along the way.

Mid-set, we get the knowingly demented envelope-burster Comm Break… which initially sounds like Suggs and Madness covering hoary old demonic metallers Deicide against a burst of disco Devo, before disintegrating into what seems like an endless welter of antiquated TV cut-ups. Well, antiquated to anyone born this century. Those born up to thirty years earlier will be fine. Rocketing past my ears, I hear bits of ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘The Bill’, ska, old counting songs and rap blasts, the Thames TV ident, and countless jingles in quick succession (Cadbury’s “finger of fudge”, Birds’ Eye Potato Wa-a-a-ffles, Country Life’s “you’ll never get a better bit of butter on your knife”) rounded off by a blast of the ‘Brookside’ theme. All around me, people in their forties and fifties (myself included) are busy laughing like drains. The General grins. Some sort of mission’s been accomplished, although whether it’s much more than nostalgia blipverts isn’t so clear. For a moment I do wonder if what I’ve just heard was a musical version of the Viz letters page, or, alternatively, some sampler-era Spike Jones-ery.

What is clear is that (like Spike) whether or not they’re delivering barrages of jokes, a.P.A.t.T. have terrific technique, and a tremendous ear for how music can be filleted, grafted and pushed forward in its new shape while still staying alive between the beats. It’s not just that they unexpectedly cross-cut the looping nag and bogus pomp flourishes of their own The Great Attractor with a sudden, unexpectedly straight cover of Chick Corea’s 500 Miles High (yes, really). It’s that they constantly scoop up the most disparate, even ridiculous, elements and make them fly together not so much as one, but as a happy multiplicity. The rattling surf moves and rhythmic cut-ups of Flat Stanley is layered with sea-shanties and bursts of laughter. Hello samples Fog on the Tyne then digresses into skritching power electronics, drum machine volleys and avant-garde tune-ups; breaks into (and then chaotically out of) polka, and finally enjoys a ‘Wombles’ moment on clarinet. The opening noise-break of Sunburnt gives way to a salad-chopping of bar-time and overlapping parts (a little like Gentle Giant’s tightly madrigalled Knots). Matter of Fact crosses tinkling baroque pop with happy Romani dance music; while the final set smasher, Peppercorn Rent (“OK lads, let’s do it!”) marries a heavy upfront Cardiacs slam-tutti with some Turkish thrash.

When it’s all over, the white suits still remain miraculously unburst after all. Even as they pack up to leave, a.P.A.t.T. maintain a puppyish delight in chatting to their audience. Other band members drift in and out of the room and the bar, chatting, swapping, gradually becoming indistinguishable from the audience. The wonky-pop atmosphere slowly circles the room, in sated contentment, and in gradually decreasing ellipses.

[All live photos by Dann Chinn]

SETLIST
A Soundcheck Song
Plump in the Mud
Flat Stanley
Yes… That’s Positive
Sunburnt
Commercial Break
It Keeps Going
The Company Won’t Look After You
Matter of Fact
The Great Attractor/500 Miles High
Hello
Peppercorn Rent

MUSICIANS
General MIDI – Lead Vocals, Keyboard, Guitar
Boss DR-5 – Guitar, Bass Guitar, Synthesizer, Vocals
Empress Play – Keyboard, Synthesizer, Saxophone, Clarinet, Flute, Piccolo, Vocals
Bossa Nova – Drums, Vocals

LINKS
a.P.A.t.T. – Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | YouTube | Instagram