Music

No one will come with me to the Klinker tonight. I have texted and emailed everyone I know with the promise of ‘sound poetry’, a man playing a gas-mask (strapped onto his face) and the possibility of a virtuoso mouth-harp performance. They sell Nobby’s Nuts at the Klinker, I say, lamely. But no. No takers. Finally, my trusty flatmate Ellie agrees to come, more out of pity than anything else.

We go into the pub – The Sussex in Dalston. We buy nuts. Take our pints through to the back room, where the Klinker happens twice a week. Hugh Metcalfe, the guy that runs it, takes our money (only a fiver). Ellie observes that he is wearing a cabbage tea-cosy on his head. He looks at us a bit suspiciously. Feature continues

In fact, Hugh – now in his fifties – is something of a legend on the underground freeform jazz scene. It’s not just that he’s been pulling together extraordinarily diverse acts every week for the Klinker for the past 24 years (the flyer reads: ‘Improvisation – Film – Musics – Vocal Acrobatics – Contraptions – Right Weird – Pants’). He’s part of a scene that thrives, quietly, throughout London; anarchic art gatherings like Free Radicals at the Red Rose, Boat Ting at the Yacht Club or The Gathering at Betsy Trotwood.

If you’ve ever listened to Resonance FM, currently celebrating ‘Pestival’ (‘insects in art and the art of being an insect’), you’ll get the idea of the aesthetic. Think the passionate, serious artistic commitment of the surrealists, plus the gleeful absurdist hoot of Monty Python and the Goons and you’re pretty much there; this month alone hosts performances from artists who call themselves Fuck Off Batman, Sir Gideon Vein and Birdy Flapwing, with a Super-8 film from Hugh called ‘A Day In The Life Of My Y-Fronts’.

Anyway, back to tonight, and Bucket are on first. They are ‘proper jazz’, in that they are a trio of highly skilled instrumentalists; the melancholy, wheeling trumpet recalls Miles’s ‘Sketches Of Spain’. They are improper jazz in that one of the turntables is Fisher-Price and the drummer is frantically hitting a red plastic bucket with what look like two wooden dildos. Hugh is grooving elegantly.

The crowd doubles in size when six furtive looking teens come in and sit down – Finnish dance students, they’re here on a whim having read about the Klinker in Time Out’s listings. Hurrah! But what will they think of the next act?

Unlike Bucket, skill is not at a premium with Shashe and Mel. Shashe is wearing a layered peasant skirt, has henna-ed hair and, at a guess, is in her forties. She sits down and very sweetly announces her first song, ‘Oh Gypsy’. It’s like Raw Sex playing Buffy St Marie. Nnnng! Mel, her guitar-playing compadre, is younger, has a stolid air of defiance. Mel’s song sounds like Syd Barrett singing Everly Brothers ditties. The words are terrible. ‘Think of you all the time… what you’re doing, are you fine’ etc. And yet there’s something deeply, beautifully pure about it, so unreconstructed, so unselfconscious – a part of it makes me want to cry.

And it makes me think of watching bands like Editors in the mud at Glastonbury and thinking, Jesus Christ, this is boring – the affected moodiness, the thin belts, the ‘edgy’ sound. Give me Shashe and Mel any day. The Finns agree: ‘They didn’t apologise for themselves, they just went for it,’ says Frey, thoughtfully. ‘I appreciated it.’

Bob Boyton is certainly not embarrassed either. He’s a brusque-as-a-terrier storyteller who’s been described by a Tory MP as ‘a sick Marxist comic’. Good-o. He starts reading. His prose is brilliant and, with eyes closed, I begin to get lost in its lyricism; a dusky London evening scene, walking through the streets, descriptions of clouds. The story winds up, Bob concludes, ‘and I think of the taste of your cunt’. We clap.
Bucket return, blaring out crackly ’60s public information records to frenetic percussion and warm, distracted-sounding double-bass runs. They are in full-flow. I begin to fear it may never end – I think the dildo drummer does too, as he looks up at the band with a ‘shall I stop now?’ face.

It occurs to me that this is the sort of place where ideas happen. Trendy bands that bill themselves as ‘art rock’ are so rarely experimental, inventive, willing to be clumsy or look stupid while they explore ideas. London has always been a hotbed of musical, artistic talent, with such legendary venues as sexy ’60s folk spot Les Cousins (Davey Graham remembering being spliffed out of his mind in a sleeping bag, admiring ‘pretty brown boys with earrings’, while changing the face of modern guitar-playing), and the 100 Club in punk’s stinky heyday. But as far as what’s going on now, it’s not the rock clubs that are gainfully fucking things up, being playful for the sake of it, having a bit of innocence about the whole music-making lark – no, it’s the Klinker. It’s right here.

It’s 12.30am and Hugh kindly offers us a lift home. What’s that smell in the car, he wonders? It’s not the sherbert lemon that Mel’s sucking in the back. No. Ah! It’s the heron wings in the boot. Sure enough, when Hugh drops us off, we open the boot and he pulls them out: two beautiful, huge, feathery heron wings, as found on a river stroll he was filming for the Klinker. A badger ate the body, he says. Thank God for people like Hugh, I think.