Location: Citrus, Edinburgh
Star rating: *****
Vic Godard and Davy Henderson are two of the most significant musical mavericks to walk this earth. Both arriving on the scene in the fall-out of punk, Godard's Subway Sect and Henderson's Fire Engines created something wilfully skewed and bone-shakingly primal, and which were both steeped as much in avant-garde thought as garage band tradition. This double bill of Godard's latest incarnation of Subway Sect and Henderson's latest guise as The Sexual Objects, then, was a masterclass in ideas, which a million and one indie bands should bow down to.
The Sexual Objects are a short, sharp shock of deceptively straight-ahead rock drawl. With guitarist Simon Smeeton on a weekend break in France, Graham Wann of nouveau Sound of Young Scotland types Bricolage was drafted in to add extra edge to a loose-knit set of six songs (all they have) which suggested a new boogie-doo-wop underground is being forged. It closes with Henderson on his knees twisting the knobs of a phaser that sends the whole thing into outer space.
Godard wears a blazer and spectacles, giving off a raffish country club vibe. As he and his young band rifle through his back pages of tin-pan alley existentialism and punk chansons, the result is music hall crooner with an eccentric pop twist. Anyone who can forget an entire verse of their finest moment, Ambition, because, as Godard confesses, he started to think of his wife making his sandwiches, is a star on any level.
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