GIG REVIEW: Tellison + Kinkane
- Posted on October 8, 2008 11:00 AM
- 0 comments
Tellison
With Kinkane
Koko October 3rd
Review by JW Arble
I’m talking to Tellison’s drummer Henry about their support act Kinkane:
‘No I haven’t seen them before. Yeah, they’re quite scary. You know—the necktie and the pointy shoes.’
‘So you don’t go in for that then, the whole rock star look?’
Henry looks wrecked. He looks like an extra in an episode of Casualty. His hair is static. His check shirt has an interesting freeze-dried appearance. It seems it got crumpled and then went solid.
‘Er, no. We’re like the least trendy band ever. I better go. Sort of get ready. I’m like the last person you should interview.’
I head to the side stage to catch the second half off Kinkane’s set. The singer (in very tight jeans) is leaping about energetically. Kinkane are pumped. Before they went on I watched them warming up, yodelling a couple of choruses ‘Just Hear Me Out!’ & ‘My Heart is Broken!’ and flexing their chests, a couple prowling back and forth purposefully while the other two indulged in a frenetic and skilful last minute bout of Tekken on the Koko’s ‘Artist’s Only’ Playstation. Kinkane looked the part. With the exception of the lead singer they’re all several inches taller than my 5’10 and they’re all strikingly well groomed.
Out on stage they’re giving it their best. I’m not quite sure where their music is pitched—probably between mainstream Indie and something a bit more Pop. They sound a bit like Razorlight at times. To be fair if Kinkane haven’t settled on an exact sound it’s understandable, they’ve only been recently formed, they’re still learning their trade. They haven’t even got a proper MySpace site where I can check for their names.
Then something happens. An object with a glittery, silvery, streaming tail arcs out of the packed floor of the club and strikes the lead singer in the side of the head, just as he struts towards the stage front. It’s a full (plastic) pint of beer. He’s drenched, but takes it like a man, and rocks on, finishes the song and the set. Even so he seems a touch shaken. When he swears at the perpetrator there’s a little whimper mixed in with the snarl. (Do you remember that bit with Simba as an adolescent in the Lion King? He sounds a bit like that.)
‘Did you see the beer?’ their guitarist asks me, afterwards. ‘We didn’t deserve that.’
No they didn’t. They were pretty good so far as I could tell. Certainly I’ve heard a lot worse. And I met Kinkane briefly earlier, when they offered to buy me chips. Decent of them. They didn’t even appear to mind when I eavesdropped on them trying to smuggle a girl backstage only to be confounded by an eagle-eyed bouncer.
‘Yes, no, I understand, but, you know, just she’s... kind of related, sort of.’
A clue to the crowd's animosity becomes clear when Tellison shamble into the anteroom. They look and move like miners coming off an eight hour shift. Someone fiddles with a packet of painkillers. He offers them round.
‘Lots of people.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What are we doing first again?’
‘These things make everything taste like shit, you don’t want them.’
‘Guys—the guy wants to know if we want to walk on together or like be there when the curtain comes up.’
‘I don’t know.’ ‘Walk on?’ ‘We could walk on.’ ‘Yeah’ ‘How far is it?’ ‘Did you see that guy got hit by beer.’ ‘No.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Harsh.’ The band manager pushes them towards the stage. ‘On you go.’ He has a Yorkshire brogue and thick dark-rimmed glasses, sideburns and a heavy tweedy coat, he looks like a seventies football coach.
The curtain rises and Tellison are on and suddenly galvanised. Midway through the first song ‘Hanover’, lead singer Stephen has given up his role—he’s hanging the mike out over the moshers who yell their way through the rest of the song. You can keep your pointy shoes—this is rock stripped back to the essentials. Frenetic and loud and Tellison batter through ‘Henry’, ‘Disaster’, new song ‘Horses’, ‘Ambulance’, ‘New York’ (by which point Stephen’s voice is fairly croaky and lead guitarist Andrew has skidded dangerously on a puddle of his own sweat) and then the real crowd-pleasers ‘Wasps Nest’ and ‘Gallery’ and an encore ‘Amory’. The songs toward the end of the set are markedly more imaginative. But overall it’s a lot punkier than you might guess from the recordings on MySpace. Possibly there’s too much bass chugging through the system.
In the small side room the band collapse sideways. The weary trudge has given way to an almost trembling slow foot drag—Napoleon’s army staggering home from Moscow through the snow. Peter lies upside down on the couch. A couple of them seem to go to sleep on the spot. Kinkane trip back and forth with girls in bright dresses. Tellison watch vacantly. Henry, looking punch-drunk, fiddles gloomily with the Playstation. ‘How does this work? Does anyone want...? Is this on...? How do you?’ He presses the buttons. The demo screen runs on undisturbed. He lets the controller falls and slumps back onto the couch. The manager tramps in. ‘You’re going to have to get the stuff off stage.’ No-one moves.
To avoid the heavy lifting Stephen volunteers for an interview. We move to another small room where there’s only one chair. He immediately settles himself on the floor cross-legged childlike, body weary, face cheery. There’s something of the comedian Robert Webb about him: the boyishness, the enthusiasm, the slightly gone-to-pieces hair.
‘Where does the band name come from?’
‘Oh it’s like,’ he looks a bit deflated, it’s a question he’s obviously been asked many times. ‘It’s like this character’s name from Bleak House, sort what he stands for like the ethos of the band...’
He gives a detailed explanation. I don’t catch all of it. We talk about books for a while, American early modernists, ‘Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Baldwin, Sinclair Lewis, those guys were really onto something. I’m kind of looking at them for songs, I think.’ And then he names some other leftfield writers. He knows his stuff. He doesn’t mention Faulkner or Hemmingway.
It’s past 1am. I feel a bit rough. My notes are disintegrating.
‘What’s it like being a rock star?’
‘Never. We never think like that. We’ve been going three years; we’re midway through a second album. But we don’t get much time. Everyone goes off to different places, like Henry was in the states doing jazz drumming. So we don’t think like that. It’s about connecting with the crowd, like the Clash.’
‘Who do you admire at the moment?’
‘Frightened Rabbit – just really, really good. Death Cab For Cutie.’
We talk about their lack of airplay.
‘We're just a bit heavier than mainstream Indie, you know for things like NME.’
‘You’re not Snow Patrol?’
‘No.’
‘But you are quite imaginative.’
‘Really?’
‘You said you play the trombone. I think you should bring that in more.’
‘A bit of trombone. Yeah, maybe. Trombone, I’m not quite sure how the crowd would react, if I just, like, whipped it out.’
‘What about groupies?’
He laughs, ‘No! Groupies no! Groupies don’t exist. Never, no groupies, no. And like—would you want to? You’d be sort of like lowering yourself. You’d think—this is horrible. You wouldn’t want to.’
I sense this might be another area in which they differ from their support act. Stephens is then summoned away to help the others.
What a nice boy he is! What a nice band! I can’t give you a massively informed view of Tellison’s music. I’d never heard them play before, and I couldn't make out a single line of any of their lyrics. But they had the crowd jumping. No one threw beer at them, they seem pretty tight, they know the cues, they’re musicians. Good luck to them.
Related Links
Buy Tellison tickets
Official Tellison Website
Tellison MySpace
Kinkane MySpace
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