Nick Miller

Guided By Voices
London Highbury Garage
Sunday 8^th September

GBV gave The Strokes their first break. When Julian and Albert submitted a demo tape at a New York GBV show they were soon touring together catapulting the Strokes to full on success. What goes around comes around with GBV playing Family Fortunes with The Strokes in the new video for ‘Someday’.  Tonight at the packed out Highbury Garage GBV fans Frisbee CDR demos on to the stage like Hardcore UFO’s were going out of fashion. Perhaps these demos could be the next band to spark the next  British Invasion wave or perhaps it’s just another audition tape for the next GBV job vacancy that crops up. Kevin March (ex Dambuilders) is parading the skins tonight, the bands third drummer in recent memory.

Whilst The Strokes are still peddling an almost finger countable11 songs like a bunch of slowly rotting genetically modified bananas, GBV are meanwhile putting out plethora of brilliantly original material every couple of months via Pollards home-grown Fading Captain label. For the unaccustomed check out the recent projects ‘Soft Rock Renegades’ and ‘Go Back Snowball’ featuring Mac from Superchunk. Safely back at Matador Records after a shaky experiment with a major label GBV are in town to promote their top trumping new record Universal Truths and Cycles.

The GBV set list tonight is a great big woolly mammoth and has to be written on the sheet of an A3 sketchpad in order to fit on all the song titles. A post show inspection of the fag singed hymn sheet reveals a stonking 44 songs.

“Good evening Philadelphia”…. err... London, Ontario” growls main man Robert Pollard wearing a wicked grin.  It must be tough to tell which city Americas hardest touring, bluest collar wearing, chimney smoking, beer quaffing indie rock stalwarts are in. It’s the final night of their whirlwind European promotional stint and GBV look shagged out and ready to go home to relax, eat decent pizza and record four new albums of songs that Pollard had no doubt been  penning that morning on the Eurostar over from last nights gig in Brussels.

With fatigue induced vacant expressions from the outset the band quickly begin to enjoy themselves and knocked out a stunning performance.

For the un-converted, GBV are not the latest bunch of fops from Detroit or New York, in fact they’ve been around donkey’s years and proudly hail from Dayton, Ohio. For the benefit of us Brits, Dayton is the Midwest equivalent of Mansfield but with cheerier church going folk, cooler charity shops and bowling alleys with bars. I mention bowling as I actually ended up playing with the University of Dayton bowling league with pals of Roberts Pollards son on a recent visit. To vastly improve my bowling skills they took me beforehand to get completely demolished at the best happy hours Dayton’s Oregon district had to offer. Dayton is a hospitable place and so is their music. The city is also responsible for The Breeders, Brainiac, Swearing At Motorists and Enon.

During the gig the purveyors of 60 second pop picnics racked up the hits. Most striking were ‘Wire Greyhounds’, ‘Father Sgt Father Christmas Card’ Shocker in Gloom town and Everywhere with Helicopter’. They thundered past like a heavy goods vehicle doing a ton on the M1 motorway. This left four minute prog' rock monsters like ‘Christian Animation Torch Caries’ and ‘Storm Vibrations’ to trundle in comparison and translate live as a tad indulgent and better to be left for maudlin drunk bedroom listening. Even Bob conceded, “This is a cigarette song” leaving their extraordinarily competent lead guitarist Doug Gillard to do most of the work.

Mid set, Pollard grabs his crutch like a nine year old kid desperate to take a leak but manages to holds off for another fifteen or so songs before the first encore.

Tonight saw the welcome return of the rousing anthem ditties ‘Buzzards and Dreadful Crows’ and Hardcore UFO’s to the live cannon and a rare dash of  ‘Chasing Heather Crazy’ from last years “Isolation Drills” record.

Lubricated by lager, Bob’s scissors kicks show no signs of seizing with age. However his microphone twirls became sloppier as the night progressed resulting in some near casualties amongst the seamless bobbing heads on the front row.

Rhythm guitarist Nate Farley and bassist Tim Tobias polished a bottle of Jack Daniels off greedily like they were drinking ice-t on a summer’s day. A quick front row tot courtesy of Nate reveals that ice-t it certainly aint.

Peephole and Smothered in Hugs brought a lot of love to the room during a second encore before another inspirational evening in the company of Guided By Voices is put to bed with the Beatles cover  ‘A Hard Days Night’. It quite literally has been and Harrison and Lennon will be turning in their graves and wishing they’d gone out a bought a copy of Alien Lanes.