while two heads were as good as one I wandered wearily through the back of the cultural quarter past reclaimed tv studios and old kebabs there was a sniff of arcade fire although only 27 people were witness. a man from london town squawked in tune and had polite guitaring reflects in his glasses which were thick and heavy with the age of twenty but he’s good, hint he. by the time we’d scratched together about a hundred of us, they were tying balloons to mic stands as we were mysteriously clouded by diagonal hair and man bags from the metropolis. I was almost anticipating
avoiding the inevitable comparison with the fire, they were a bit like the fire, except they didn’t have wasps in their trousers and faces like the revolution. in fact, they had faces like the magic roundabout. in particularly, the man with the pink air bed crowd-surfing into security had a face exactly like the organ player at the end of the magic roundabout and everything. also, they didn’t sing about northern hemisphere middle class angst scenario back catalogue art rock student philisophy, but they sang about chicken pox. in fact there wasn’t really much comparison, except there were about eleven of them, which, at the waterfront, is like a telephone box trick (smile if you’re over 30, oh, you all are) and all the song sounded the same. most impressively of all, by the end, they had those there present all baying like a pack of mad pigeons for more for a full 3 minutes, which, in norwich, is as rare as 5 fingers, after which they encored straight into a laptop dj set which had 79 people in a circular conga (I was kind of wanting to leave by then, but I had to wait until someone fell over a crisp).
I’m off to the amazon when I collapse my spreadsheet. tiny cracks.