With an ‘occasionally brilliant’ new album out soon, you’d think Simian would have chosen to reveal their darkly psychedelic brand of daft-pop somewhere other than a working men’s club. But they didn’t …
You can have your sanitised, purpose built from the ground up, shiny new various-sized Ocean venues in Hackney. And while you’re at it you can certainly keep your quadruple figured, re-launched and re-branded, gourmet-restaurant affiliated, Dave- Bleedin’-Stewart-owned, shopping-centre-situated Marquee club in Islington. Sometimes it’s best to just make do, it really is. So down a dark back-street in far from affluent Bethnal Green in London’s East End, in a genuine older than your dad’s dad working men’s club, Simian have a setting better than they probably ever intended. Because somewhere with a little more sheen would – you imagine – appropriately house their polished, electronically laced, psychedelic melody stacked, bob-along outings. Or maybe just serve to extenuate the all too clear averageness they’d been known to deal in with their first album instead?
But tonight is slightly different. And not only because they have an occasionally excellent forthcoming album to pull a few new surprises from now. The carpet is awful, for a start. The walls are wooden, but far from the trendy, treated West End wine bar type. There are chairs and tables pushed aside to aid creation of a ‘dancefloor’. They enter and leave the stage via the fire escape. There’s stuffy air and shit ale on tap. And hey, it’s kind of wonderful, bringing back that intimacy that you never quite got after upgrading from just seeing your mate’s band in the local village hall on a Thursday night, standing on your toes to look taller at the makeshift bar. Those nights when anything in front of you seemed like the best thing in the world, merely because it was there in front of you. And tonight with Simian just there in front of us, what else is there to do but lap them up.
Well aside from the fact that they really do benefit from this atmosphere, coaxing the audience into their lo-fi creative womb with naivety and beaming faces, there are still a few small niggles. We wish there weren’t, they do practically feel like our mates up there, ready to take on the world with a shake of their heads and a bounce in their bad dancing step, but expectation is a sod capable of ruining a good idea. When we’re expecting a frontier pushing, asteroid-belt weaving, psychedelic umbrella (or even just a raincoat) of sound, now and then we do just get funk on a budget, after a valet. If that’s where they fall down though they can end picking up enough pace to sound like Daft Punk pushing Jane’s Addiction down the Alps in a tin bath, which was enough to get us interested again. And it’s these constant to’s and fro’s that characterise, make and break the Simian live experience. On album he gives passion drenched vocal, live he sounds like an indie singer and has dull hair. But he’s on a small stage in a genuine older than your dad’s dad working men’s club, so right now we love him.
James Berry for Crud Magazine© 2002