crazybobbles

Man, this is a blast from the past. Anyway, a few weeks ago (we’re talking 19th September haha) I went to a gig near Bush Hall to see Shearwater, for those who don’t know much about Shearwater, the band was formed when band members of Okkervil River Will Sheff and Jonathan Meiburg wanted an outlet for more mellow and quieter songs. The cute thing I like about the band is that quite a lot of the names are based on birds, this is because Jonathan studied ornithology and knows his stuff about birds, so the name shearwater itself is a birds name . Anyway, I knew they were playing at an ickle venue so I decided to catch them live at good old Bush Hall.

The venue was pretty ickle, when entering it I noticed a lot of articles about famous artists once playing in this tiny venue, I can’t remember who but there were some pretty huge bands. The entire yesterday I was actually spent panicing on my lack of tickets arriving for the show, I though they were either lost in the post or some silly thing happened. Turns out after a closer look at my confirmation email, it was a box office thing where you simply go to the venue and state your confirmation code, oops haha. I don’t think there were tickets for this gig anyway, perhaps it was too ickle for the venue to do tickets hehe.

I met up with a load of people I knew from the other Okkervil River gigs, we talked about gigs, and more gigs we’re going to, and gigs we went to in the past (I kinda got bored for a bit tbh haha). It was nice meeting the same folks from another gig. Anyway, that was pretty much it, the support band “The Constantines” played and were pretty alright, though I got the feeling most people went to see them instead of Shearwater which was pretty weird. There was a hoard of photographers surround the band when they played on which I never saw when Shearwater played *shrugs*.

One of the many cool instruments they played during the gig

Shearwater appeared on stage and greeted us with “On the Death of the Waters“. Jonathan Meiburg has a very soothing voice and it was further enhanced by the soothing electric piano chords. It was nice going to a gig that wasn’t about jumping up and down and more about enjoying the mellow side of things. Granted I always found Okkervil River still awesome when they play their mellow tracks but this was different, the entire set was mellow meaning you could really sink into the music and not worry about all kinds of ear buzzing after the gig. The gig made me smile.

ROOKing to ROCK (or the other way round)

One thing that you’ll notice further on the gig was that they were far from a normal mellow rock indie band. The drummer / percussionist, Thor Harris, was a classically trained music student and a former carpenter. He’s a special fella, he built his own house using recycled and found materials, some of the instruments he used are self made too (most of them anyway), you could instantly see his huge involvement in the music of the band when songs included a lot of unique instruments played ranging from steel pipes to random bones (that he killed for, kidding haha). He also had an awesome hairdo / dress sense (orange trousers anybody?) which is a plus in my books. It was very experimental and creative, defintiely a gig I’d love to see again (which I am woot!)

Songs that stood out from the setlist were Rooks, Seventy Four, Seventy Five and Leviathan Bound. They closed the set with a Talk Talk cover in which they played intimately behind a grand piano, a few meters away from the stage, using only acoustic instruments for the ultimate unplugged experience. It was an amazing set! Hope you enjoy the photos.