The Surfing Magazines are in town, touring to promote the release of their eponymous debut album
Featuring David Tattersall and Franic Rozycki from The Wave Pictures and Charles Watson from Slow Club, The Surfing Magazines are the latest indie-rock supergroup. Rounded out by Dominic Brider on drums, their gig at The Angel Microbrewery is just the fifth they have ever played and it shows in the way that they are still having fun onstage, not yet ground down by perpetual touring.
If The Man In Me is good enough to open The Big Lebowski then it's good enough to start The Surfing Magazines' show, the two frontmen David and Charles grinning at each other at missed cues in the Bob Dylan cover. They also bookend the show with another Dylan song, You Ain't Going Nowhere and another song, Your Way Of Leaving, which is heavily influenced by Bob.
It's not all Dylan though, You Could Never Come To Me Too Soon is pure 60s garage. Elsewhere there is a track with a Bo Diddley beat that includes the lyrics "Pickled Monster Munch for lunch" and Orange And Blue, which is striped of the David Bowie sax that is has on record, reminded me of John Lennon's Cold Turkey.
The highlight of the set is recent single New Day, which is played pretty early on in preceding and is described as their "hit single", with the band offering the evidence that even Lauren Laverne has played it as proof of its popularity. Despite the self-depreciation, it really is a brilliant song.
It takes until half-way through the set before we get an instrumental, surf song, replete with some terrible, smirk-inducing Shadows-like dancing. They have another instrumental later in the show, before which David tells Charles that he'll follow his lead - cue more bad dancing.
Two of the most interesting songs are left until late in the show - first single Lines And Shadows, which has an almost Velvet Underground instrumental break-down and Silver Breasts, a song that sounds like one of those late 60's Rolling Stones tracks that aped Robert Johnson such as No Expectations. Although it's about an experience with a lady in a tent and I can't imagine that the king of the delta blues singers was really the Glastonbury type.
It's great to see a band enjoying themselves onstage (surely this is what side projects are for) and it was pretty much the perfect lo-fi, straight-ahead Sunday night gig. The Surfing Magazines wear their influences on their sleeves but take the music in interesting directions and the mix of surf, country rock and garage rock isn't something that we've heard too much of before. Personally, I love those influences and so I thought that this was a great gig.
The Surfing Magazines played The Angel Microbrewery on the 3rd of September
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