Holy Fuck, Amersham Arms, 9 Nov 2007

When a friend who you've been meaning to meet up with for ages gets in touch and says that they're going to see a band called Holy Fuck in a recently refurbished pub that was one of your locals for seven years, it takes about two seconds to decide that you'd like to accompany them.

So it was that I ended up in the Amersham Arms at New Cross on Friday evening, having made only the briefest of efforts to check out the headlining group's material beforehand. With a scheduled 3am finish time, I'd put more research into how to get home.

The venue has been re-launched by the people responsible for Camden's Lock Tavern. It's been sympathetically done and, apart from the trendy grey paintwork and some nice leather sofas, things seemed fairly similar to when I started drinking there over 20 years ago.

The first support act was Lovvers, whose guttural take on punk and grunge rock did little for me. Turn on the John Peel show at any point during the 1990s and you'd stand a one in three chance of hearing something like this.

It wasn't particularly distinctive and my initial attempts at positivity ("At least they're up on stage doing it, unlike us") soon became much less charitable ("At least we're not"). Ah well, you can't win 'em all. Photogenic lead singer, though.

Second up were Dead Kids. Our expectations were fairly low at this point and we didn't pay much attention initially, but we soon found our conversational sentences trailing off as the music started to intrigue us.

Infinitely more melodic and polished than their predecessors, their driving rhythms and anthemic choruses sounded like a more art-rock oriented, edgy Hard-Fi. Their MySpace page contains an exemplary list of influences and I think I'd like to see them again.

Holy Fuck appeared on stage at half-past midnight, just as the final train back into Central London was pulling away from New Cross station next door. It was a shame, then, that they played a very short set. As far as I recall, it was all over by ten past one.

Nevertheless, it was clear that this band is special. A brief listen of their material the day beforehand revealed an organic, sinuous space-rock sound inhabiting a very unique territory somewhere between Add N To X, Thievery Corporation and Neu.

That turned out to be a fairly reasonable description, though in live performance they were heavier and funkier than their recorded material and comparisons with Parts & Labor, LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip also occurred to me.

Trippy and powerful, with a singular and accomplished vibe that managed to be both robotically motorik and dubbily spaced-out, they were ecstatically received by a euphoric crowd. Their album, LP, was released a couple of weeks ago and it's superb.

Rifling through the discarded free papers on my inward train journey, I'd been amused to find London Lite stridently demanding to know whether New Cross was the new Camden. More telling, though, was The London Paper's recommendation of this gig in its top three for the night.

Lovvers will probably find their niche and Dead Kids definitely deserve a second look. Holy Fuck, however, are surely destined for greater things. Catch them as soon as you can, because they won't be playing venues of this size for much longer, Batman.

Further reading:

• MySpace: Holy Fuck
• MySpace: Dead Kids
• MySpace: Lovvers
• MySpace: Young Turks
• Guardian/OMM: Holy Fuck album review
• Amersham Arms
• London Lite: Is New Cross the new Camden?

Posted by Hg on Saturday 10 November 2007 at 23:54.
Received 1 comments so far.

Damn, they're playing Nottingham next Saturday. If they come back and do a midweek, I'm there!

Comment by mike on Sunday 11 November 2007 at 23:15.

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