crazybobbles

Tilly and the Wall says "HI!"

Rough Trade East isn’t the only place for free gigs, there’s loads of small independent record stores offering free gigathons if you know where to find them. Using my ever so trusty last.fm calendar I managed to track down an instore show featuring Tilly and the Wall. I’ve seen them live before at Reading and Scala so I’m no stranger to their tap dancing shenanigans. It was a no brainer to go see them playing live at Pure Groove records. I purchased their latest album (signed as well!) and was given 3 guest tickets to see them perform at the store. I managed to find a crew of people to tag along to the gig including my work mate, and the girl with the colourful dress I met at the CSS gig. We have ourselves a free tap dancing party!

Having a wee conversation before singing Tall Tall Grass

Luckily I was able to find the store pretty easily (I actually visited the place a few days a go hoping it was still open for me to buy an album there only to find the store closed! :() and man there was quite a queue going on. Fortunately I bumped into a familiar face (he told me he was going to this gig so I already knew he was coming) and was able to ninja myself to the front of the queue with my coworker, luckily everyone was cool about it, I made sure the queue bumpage was worth it by making myself interesting (haha!). The girl with the colourful dress appeared with yet another cute and colourful dress so I quickly met up with her and handed her the tickets, she brought 2 friends along which meant she had to queue up near the back with everyone since it would have been pretty rude to tag another 3 people in front of the queue (if i concentrated hard enough I could hear some grr’ing in the background :(). Anyway, another time for queueing equitette, they all knew I was going to do some photolising so most of them were ok about me bumping to the front (plus I’m all kinds of ickle and fit nicely in a corner with my big camera).

Once the door was open we started pouring into the front of the stage, the band were horsing around so it was pretty easy to just strike a conversation with them, and so I did… I spoke to Darrek the guitarist about the of Montreal gig I went to the other night, the fact that of Montreal mentioned them during their gig and that they’ve toured together made me pretty confident that Tilly and the Wall were there watching the show. It was a fun conversation cut short by the fact that they were about to start.

The lighting wasn’t the best (as commented by another fellow photographer I met at the Emiliana Torrini gig who happened to be there) but it was still pretty doable with the prime lens. I managed to be in a nice position where taking photos of Neely (who btw constantly made me think of Joseph and the Amazing Technicoloured Coat of the Dream Variety) was easy. There was a wee space for me to later on kneel down and take low photos of when they sang “Tall Tall Grass”

The setlist was very short mind, only 4-5 songs I believe (short enough that a setlist wasn’t really needed). They covered “A Little Respect” by Erasure (which Wheatus covered for those who don’t remember the oldskool version) which was pretty neat. There was also a quite tap dancing duel that went into Dust Me Off. Here’s a video of Dust me off, sorry I was too close to the stage so you can’t see much, there’s also a video of the Tap dancing duel if you wanna see).

My highlight was when they sat down singing Tall Tall Grass. Beat Control was quite a cool song too (it got my coworker singing it afterwards), but perhaps better if the sound was a lot louder and you could hear the synths more. It felt quite anticlimatic at the end after they finished their last song, there really wasn’t a backstage area so they sort of stood there and thanked everyone before plugging their T Shirts and shows they were playing in London. The band then pretty much hung around the store whilst fans mobbed them for photos and album signage (I already had mine dispatched so woo).

After some lounging about we decided to head off, I said goodbye to everyone I met and chillaxed for a bit outside a pub, afterwards I pretty much went back home since the number of gigs were wearing me down haha. SO yeah, enjoy the wee selection of photos, not much lighting as Scala but hey, I’ll be seeing them at a proper venue on Saturday so stay tuned!

Click here to see some crazy animation!

More photos of Tilly and the Wall