Spiders and Chuckle Brothers (2008)

From the archive of The Fly magazine

Sep 08 2008 11:09 am, Joe Shooman

- Do you want to go to this Love Music Hate Racism gig, Shoobag?

- yeah definitely, who’s on?

- Roll Deep, The Courteeners, Reverend & The Makers, Kaiser Chiefs, loads of local bands and that. It’s an indoor carnival, really.

- yeah man sounds sound, la, which venue is it at?

- Magna

- Ah right, I don’t know that one, is it the new name for the Students’ Union?

- No mate, it’s not in Liverpool

- Ah. Manchester?

- Think more… Yorkshire

 

so I did, and this is how I ended up not in Sheffield, or Leeds, but in an old steelworks in an industrial estate in Rotherham this weekend. Not that I’ve got anything against that town whatsoever: the footy team are one of those perennial-underdog types that crop up on MOTD kicking the fuck out of the latest fancy dans in the FA Cup Third Round, for a start. Secondly, of course, it’s the home of the Chuckle Brothers (whose autobiography I wanted desperately to ghost-write til they went and did it with someone else) so it can’t be all bad.

 

Magna is an odd and rather wonderful place that, according to the blurb, is ‘the UK’s first Science Adventure Centre’, something that sounds vaguely Scientologist but has very little to do with Xenu, volcanoes and Operating Thetans and everything to do with getting kids to learn cool stuff by accident whilst they think they’re just lobbing things at each other in ball pools and giving people electric shocks with cattleprods and the like (I’m extrapolating here, I haven’t been there properly). Anyway from what I saw of it, it looks bloody ace, and has massive turbiney things and stuff to play with.

 

What it isn’t, is an obvious venue in which to set up a Love Music Hate Racism gig in response to recent BNP gains in the area.

 

But then Jon McClure, the politicised groove-monk(ey) behind Reverend & The Makers, doesn’t always take the most obvious path – for it is he who was catalyst for this event, and he who ensured that the Kaisers would headline, despite the fact that it fell on one of Ricky and the gang’s only days off, apparently, til 2010. They were fucking great and if this album doesn’t get them some US success I’ll probably shrug and say ‘ah well’ or something equally dull. The gig – a tenner for some of the UK’s top talent – was top and the atmosphere was rather excellent too. Even if it was a fiver for a double JD & coke, which took the piss.

 

I ain’t gonna write a review or owt cause Ruth Offord has, and she’s dead good at that sort of thing. Just worth reiterating, I think, that the inherent power of music to bring 4,500 people together here with no immediately obvious ways of getting home is and was a quite remarkable and beautiful thing, and hopefully next time the elections come around a similar amount of people can be arsed to get down the polling stations and make sure the BNP don’t get elected by dint of absent, apathetic voters. Democracy depends on participation a chunk of the time and though the right to not vote is a fundamental tenet of the concept, this is the kind of thing that can happen when nobody bothers to go and put their X on a piece of paper. Secondly, LMHR have some of the damned coolest T-shirts known to mankind so go and get one: www.lovemusichateracism.com

 

The journey to Liverpool the next day was long, and sweaty, and horrendously hungover, and happy, and got even better when I alighted at Lime Street straight into a crowd of several thousand people whose gaze was set upon a massive spider halfway up a derelict office block. No ordinary spider, neither: a massive, mechanical beast called La Machine, which was commissioned by Liverpool Culture Company from Artichoke who paraded a massive elephant round London a while back for some reason. Art, I think they called it, which is good enough for me cause I don’t know what that word means at the best of times. Anyway, the spider is fantastic, and realistic, and a little bit Ridley Scott/HR Giger-ish, and as several thousand people watched, and watched, and watched, this wonderful hybrid of animatronix, machinery and primal-fear perched on the side of the horrendous 60s office building that’s been set for demolition for ten years and the spider, with the power to shock, to break, to destroy, immediately set about doing… absolutely fuck all.

 

What had happened, we all soon found out from an errant security officer, was that a website had been put up online which indicated that the spider was to do some Mad Skillz Climbing at 3pm on Sunday, so everyone congregated outside St George Hall to watch it do its scampery thing. This not only brought traffic to a standstill, but necessitated a mass security and police operation just in case… well in case there were spider-related riots, or somesuch. Marvellously, however, piss all happened because, apparently, said website was an unofficial one, a hoax one, and had no relation to La Machine, Artichoke or anyone else. The spider wasn’t gonna do anything at all til 7pm that night, in actual fact.

 

You’d think that a spider of all fucking things would have a reliable web presence, but as befits the Liverpool Capital Of Culture, no such luck. Brilliantly, too, I heard over the weekend that most of the people working for the Culture Company have contracts that come to an end on December 31, 2008. So culture stops, officially.

 

All of which is academic cause we’re gonna all be eaten by black holes when they turn on that big massive Hardon Collider thing in Switzerland on Wednesday, but that’s another story. See you on the dark side.