Les Savy Fav, Black Ramps, Ice Sea Dead People.

Lev 2 Esquires Bedford. 9th February 2008.

Reviewed by Martin Stapleton / Videos by www.drownedinsound.co.uk

Bravo! What a show! And more to the point, what a showman Tim Harrington is, frontman and vocalist for tonight’s American visitors LES SAVY FAV.

When a respected friend told me before the show that this would be “quite possibly Esquires best gig of the year”, I thought that was quite a bold statement. He had witnessed them at All Tomorrow’s Parties last year. But at the evening’s end at 11.30, I have to readily admit that my learned friend was absolutely spot on. Quite simply, as live performances go, Les Savy Fav were awesome. Although ticket prices seemed steep (£12.50 advance, £15 on the door), the audience who made up this sold out gig were both entertained and always enthralled.

Les Savy Fav are made up of Tim Harrington (vocals), Seth Tabour (guitar), Syd Butler (bass) and Harrison Haynes (drums), and Andrew Revland (guitar). The phrase ‘cult status’ could have been invented for this band.

As the band walk on stage, nobody is quite prepared for what Tim is going to inflict on us. While the ‘ordinary’ quartet take their positions, our gregarious frontman strides on stage with a pipe sticking out of his mouth, and a sailor’s hat upon his bald head. He gleefully sprays the whole of the front of the audience with beer. From a distance, with his thick bushy beard he cuts a Captain Birds Eye look!

Throughout their hour long set, he manically and randomly runs around dementedly exploring every conceivable part of the Level 2 room. Sprawled across the bar, he takes a drink! He swings the microphone around himself whilst gurning for the barrage of cameras and mobiles pointed in his direction. He speaks in a mixed up meandering sort of way, going off in different tangents constantly. Schoolboy humour about tampons brings a mischievous smile to his cherubic face. If the DNA of Mark E Smith and Roy Chubby Brown were mixed together I’m sure Tim Harrington would be the result.

After an evening of undressing, he appears for the encore dressed in circa 1967 psychedelic clothing. It’s colourful and bring as this pied piper of post punk rallies his crowd to join in and sing back ‘we took the door from our doorstep!’. Infectious nonsense, but we loved it!

Despite the fact that Mr Harrington was hell bent on doing a damage demolition of the lighting rig, he very kindly, at the end of the gig, profusely apologised and re-fixed the spots. A true eccentric gent, and if I see a better gig on level 2 this year, it’ll need to be bloody good!

Also, featuring tonight are art rockers ICE SEA DEAD PEOPLE, who true to one of their songs totally and utterly ‘Laser the Brain’. Plus, any band that count in their songs in German gain top marks from me. Imagine The Birthday Party fused with early Sonic Youth and that pretty much gets you Ice Sea Dead People.

A gig by sonic destroyers BLACK RAMPS is a rare pleasure. So modest, so brilliant, this trio detonate their sounds to brutal effect, it’s Velvet Underground innovation married to a Nirvana attitude and it’s oh so good.