12 March 1999

Featuring KID CEREAL, RUBY, OPAQUE, THE ESCAPE COMMITTEE, THE PIER GROUP. March Madness was the second in an ongoing series of profile raising events at the Yorkshire House, with the added purpose of gathering funds for the cash strapped Musician's Co-Op. TT Boy was on hand to witness events as they unfolded on the ground...

Openers KID CEREAL are clearly too young to know any better, but will never improve (or more hopefully continue) unless someone points out to them that garish and tacky Indie-metal delivered with a nasty side order of casual schoolboy misogyny is not the future of rock n roll.

And although RUBY would be hard pressed to be any worse, so slavishly devoted are they to the whims of student pop tastes, in many ways they succeed at being so. By neglecting to involve any such small elements of, oh say, wit, charm, warmth, poise, invective, passion, anger or articulacy in their by-numbers jangle pop, they deliver a lifeless set the point of which was very difficult to discern. Whilst there is nothing wrong with owning the collected albums of The Sundays and The Stone Roses, yawning your way through a pastiche of their work in what can only be some kind of faux-tribute clearly is. This is music for people who thought 'The Best Album In The World...Ever!' was too eclectic, and that Ocean Colour Scene are now 'too weird'.

At least OPAQUE's Andy Lockley looks like he's having a deranged enough time of it all up there on the darkened stage, lunging around with his fretless bass as he is and affecting the age old 'confused man at a bus-stop having an argument with himself' routine. Their white noise adventures are perhaps too singular for the casual punter and certainly very frightening to small children and rodents. Such sonic terrorism has probably been more successfully rendered by other sources, but a deceptive discipline and their sheer bloody mindedness at the very least set them apart from the student rock sheep. For this alone they just about shade it.

Politics in music is rarely handled well, but tonight the ESCAPE COMMITTEE pull off the slightly unlikely feat of replacing the usual stomp n smarm with an irresistible melodic nous and even a certain swagger. This revelation coming after such crushing underachievement has the effect of breathing fresh air into an event which was in severe danger of growing a bumfluff 'tache and retreating to its bedroom to study some old copies of Parade. Singer / Saxophonist Lou has a great bittersweet voice, and although accompanied by three blokes who look as if their hairstyles were probably mentioned in the Criminal Justice Act, this matters little. In the most part this is inventive hook laden jangle pop, perhaps slightly reminiscent of Back To The Planet, but pleasingly free from rock pig fuzz pedal excess. The Escape Committee clearly don't give a shit about what they should sound like, and instead have relaxed into a niche that is all their own.

By now, the crowd is probably drunk enough to appreciate THE PIER GROUP's psychiatric ward blues all the more, and the band respond by tearing through a great set packed full of crunchy guitar interplay and woozy late night harmonies. Currently improving with every performance, they certainly seem to benefit from tonights enforced brevity by seizing their songs by the scruff of the neck and giving them a good shake. All in all a memorable display high in imagination and rock n roll mayhem.