Tuesday, June 14, 2011

A grand day out: Glaston-Ferret

No, it's not a great name, but at least the Mad Ferret pub in Preston has a reason for it - it's the weekend of Glastonbury, see, "set up to combat the varying degrees of impossibility of getting a Glastonbury ticket these days". To commemorate they lay real grass inside the pub, which is surely a health hazard in waiting, as well as hay bales and sales of ice cream and scrumpy. Oh, and bands.

The Victorian English Gentlemens Club
The Saturday night headliners always were a storming live proposition, but warming up for their out this week third album Bag Of Meat the trio seem to be turning it up a notch, both in presentation - Crusaders garb, bakelite telephone receiver as second mike, creepy mannequin at the front of the stage - and in sound, manic and dynamic in equal measure. A right racket, basically.



The Voluntary Butler Scheme
We don't know whether Rob Jones plays with a band these days but it's more fun for everyone but himself if he's alone with his keyboard stand-cum-bureau covered in noisemakers, toys and some very important and overused loop pedals. Second album The Grandad Galaxy, out July 18th, sends his stylistic radar haywire, from hip hop and J-pop to 50s rock and roll.



Race Horses
The Sunday headliners are a good old-fashioned psych-indie outfit of the Gorky's lineage, not unreasonably as they're from Wales too, Aberystwyth to be precise. And like many a good late 90s Welsh band they might start in psych-indie circles but their radar soon weaves all over the place and ends up existing well outside the current state of things.



ALSO: emotive, expansive elegance from Tigers That Talked, twisted melodies from Polytechnic fallout Driver Drive Faster, jangling psych oddness from Hey Sholay, spiky Brightonians We Walk In Straight Lines, The B Of The Bang, The Retrospective Soundtrack Players and a lot of people whose names we don't know.

Calendar: 25th-26th June
Tickets: £5 per day, £8 the weekend

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