Black Kids @ The Zodiac, 2nd June 2008.

(I'm still not going to call it the Carling.)

It's been a while since I went to a gig on my own, but with 'Caela being too ill, I find myself in the Zodiac on my own for the first time in years. I'd forgotten what it was like, how the mind wanders. How the voices of the crowd morph into white noise. The album "Black Sunday" by Cypress Hill is playing, but all you can hear over the crowd are the beats, so it kind of sound like some kind of avant-garde concept album. Variations on a drone - the mass of anonymous voices remaining constant while a series of different and changing beats are put behind it to see how they affect and alter it.
This is the kind of thing you start thinking about when yer at a gig on yer own.
I started thinking about my drink quite a lot. How it was cheaper to buy a JD & Coke at ATP than it is here. Get that? It's cheaper to buy booze at a festival than it is at the Zodiac now. Ridiculous.
Also, when I came to DJ Derek 4 days previously, a JD & Coke was £3.30, whereas tonite it's £3.40, the same price it was when I bought one at the Hot Chip gig in February. Are Carling changing their prices for drinks depending on whether they're putting on a gig or a club night? Seems a bit cheeky to me.
And it seems to be tonight, that either Carling aren't selling 25ml measures of JD, or their syrup to soda ratio in their coke is heavily in syrups favour. Either way, £3.40 for a JD & Coke the size of a rat's foot spa should taste a hell of a lot more alcoholic than that one did.
There is one thing I'm enjoying about being on my own tonite tho'. For the first time I can remember, I'm on my own at a gig before the band starts, NOT getting depressed by all the hot women in the audience all either having boyfriends or being blatantly not interested in any attempt at pulling I could come up with. It must be because a) I'm not single: & b) My girlfriend doesn't live hundreds of miles away. It's strangely liberating being on yer own in a room with hot women and not giving a crap.
It's lucky for me too, coz one of the women in Black Kids is seriously hot. Tonite, she looks, dresses, and moves like Chaka Khan, reinvented as an indie sex kitten. If they had been playing at any gig I'd been to on my own before, I'd have probably fallen in love with her instantly. Not tonite tho', thankfully.
Thankfully because a) I have a girlfriend: & b) Black Kids are a pretty exciting prospect, and one I may not have been fully aware of had I been focusing on one particular band member and not on the band and the music as a whole.
Their dynamic is a little strange in that they have about 3 frontpeople - the afforementioned Chaka Khanesque woman on synth and vocals, a woman who tonite looks quite a lot like someone I know called Cecilia also on synth and vocals, and a man who looks and moves a little bit like a teenage Omar Rodriguez-Lopez on guitar and vocals. The other 2, drummer bloke and Bassist guy, just kind of stay at the back and get on with things while these 3 entertain us. Basically it's the "Dare" era Human League dynamic, but with more instruments and with less of an obvious sense of who holds the power in this band. Whereas Human League have (since "Dare" at least) seemed, quite obviously, to be a Phil Oakey autocracy, Black Kids seem to be a band of shared responsibility, a group of equals coming together to pursue a dream.
This shared responsibility probably goes someway to explaining their sound, a pooling together of ideas which sounds simultaneously like about 100 bands and yet you can't really put your finger on which ones. Part synth pop, part indie dance, part 80's guitar that's come from the same place as wherever VHS Or Beta got their influence from, part other styles you're not sure of in this context, this is why Black Kids are such an exciting prospect. They genuinely don't sound like what you expect or know, but at the same time sound familiar/recognisable enough that they have potentially a very wide ranging appeal. It will be very interesting to see what happens with this band of energetic youngsters. I can't wait to hear what the album sounds like, because live, they, well, they just rock basically. I know I use the word far too often, but they are totally awesome.