The 100 Club, despite its great prestige (the walls are lined with photos of stars that once played here), is not my favourite venue. Good location, on Oxford Street, but it has a weird configuration, having a very wide stage but very shallow auditorium. So standing at the back you are maybe not more than 5 metres from the stage, but if the band is strung along the full length of the stage you cannot see them all at the same time. And then add their favourite gloomy lighting with intermittent flashes, then some of the band are barely visible at all.
But here I was to see my penultimate gig of the year, Working Men's Club who I hadn't seen (or heard of) in years (well four years I reckon).
The other two acts on the bill were completely unknown to me. So they were going to be a surprise. Openers Ashnymph were a nice surprise - a duo, bloke on guitar, deck and vocals and a drummer. In composition like Public Service Broadcasting. And they were surprisingly good. Just liked their electronic dance music. (Given below are the best photos I could get, you can see what I mean about the gloomy lighting. The drummer to the left was effectively invisible, not unphotogenic!)
Followed by Honesty, who were a less pleasant surprise. Not so much that they were bad, just utterly pointless. Now this sort of rave music was never really my scene when current in the last century, let alone now. But I describe them as pointless because there was no stage act. They could be replaced more than adequately by a tape. Mostly just guys standing behind decks. Unless you count the guy in the fur hat playing electronic drums. But honestly, just skip the turning up - nothing to see and nothing interesting to hear. To be fair they did have a black guy come on for two or three of their pieces to talk unintelligibly over the music, but that felt like tokenism. And frankly made the dull even less appealing.
So finally to Working Men's Club. I had seen them here before Covid struck. And then post Covid they opened for New Order at Heaton Park in Manchester before a crowd in five figures, so I had expected them to break into the big time. But then instead, nothing. And here they were again playing to a crowd of I guess around 300, and a surprisingly elderly audience at that. Since I had first started seeing them, they have moved in an increasingly electronic dance oriented music direction. I think the band are basically the creature of lead vocalist Sydney Minsky-Sergeant. The line up has changed radically from the original.
And again they (or rather I) suffered from them being a six piece strung all along the stage. Girl on keyboards at far left disappeared completely into the gloom and dry ice. Their 10 song set literally melted into each other - the music never stopped. But while this was sort of computer based, there were always live musicians, playing real stuff. And while the other band members were as static as mannequins, Sydney did his usual prowling with distinctive vocals. Zero audience interaction - not a word. As I say there were no breaks. And no farewells. The end was only marked by them walking off stage. But don't get the impression that I disapproved. It was good. Worth coming out to a basement on a chilly night before Christmas
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