Blog: Wave Pictures

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Last night started with HILARIOUS INEVITABLITY. The last time myself and Mr S Hewitt met to discuss My Exciting Life In ROCK we did so in The Ship, Holborn, which is a LOVELY pub. Since then we have met for the simple joy of BEER in another lovely pub, The Ship in Fitzrovia.

Last night we hard a Catch-Up Meeting (oh yes), and I said "Shall we meet in The Ship?" Can anyone GUESS what might have happened?

How we laughed! We eventually managed to be in the SAME pub and shared an EXCITED run through of where we're at at the moment with the planning and arrangements (precis: AHEAD) and how excited we are about what will surely be the most well organsied Week Long Knees Up EVER (precis: VERY).

After we said our goodbyes I wandered off to The Social, to see The Wave Pictures. The Social's a funny old place - it's a TERRIBLE room to have gigs in, the audience is all split up in different places, with the area you stand around in near the bar HIDDEN from the actual stage, but the area people sit around in with their back to the band right NEXT to it. The sound system's really good, but it HAS to be to cope with the HUGE volume of sound generated by the people CHATTING in the concrete basement. It also has VERY nice barstaff - i THINK I paid for a drink with a 20 and got a tenner change, and when I said so everyone LEAPT into action - I didn't get my tenner back mind you, but they DID say they'd RING me if, upon cashing up, it turned out I was right. They were SO nice about it I don't really mind if they never do!

The first band sort of passed me by, but The Wave Pictures themselves were AMAZING. I'd heard them on the radio and, in a fit of KRAZY SPONTANEITY, bought their album, which is FANTASTIC. It's VERY Jonathan Richman influenced, but full of WORDS and TUNES and FEELINGS and HUMOUR and... well, basically it's really really really good. On the album the basic band is AUGMENTED by other instruments, but LIVE there was just three of them. There was, however, no lack of AUGMENTATION, althought it was ALL done through the medium of INCREDIBLY BRILLIANT GUITAR SOLOES.

My word, there were a LOT of Guitar Soloes! Just before they came on the DJ was playing "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon, which prompted them to start off with a song of THEIRS which I didn't know, but sounded very much of that idiom... and having heard THAT you could hear it through all the other songs, with a shimmery musicality (ROCK JOURNALISM) I'd not noticed before. Also: those GUITAR SOLOES. WOW! it was AMAAAAAAZING, I'm not usually a fan of the Instrumental Break, but these ones were EXCITING and TUNEFUL and just dead DEAD good.

At the start of the evening I'd been very tempted just to go home for my tea after the PUB, but I'm SO glad I went to see them - the levels of WOWness were such that it reminded me of seeing Belle & Sebastian the first time. My BRANE wasn't quite as UTTERLY BLOWN this time, as I'd at least heard Wave Pictures songs before, but even Belle & Sebastian did not WRESTLE THE AXE quite as majestically as this lot.

I had a MASSIVE grin on my face all the way home. FANTASTIC!

posted 13/6/2008 by MJ Hibbett

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