Yet To Reach The Summit

Friday 20th February: Blimey! I nearly forgot to blog...

After the relative disappointment of last week's four bands for four quid, it was time to try again. Tonight saw us taking a rare trip to Fibbers to see The Summits, a band that I have previously been recommended and was looking forwards to see. So much so, that I even took Debbie along.

We arrived just before Jonny Dobbs took to the stage for a one-man acoustic set, but managed to not catch his name when he introduced himself. A quick scan of the running order put that to rights and also started alarm bells ringing - The Summits were not on it. (Subsequently, I have been informed that Mr Dobbs often plays with or alongside the Summits at the Melbourne pub, and a bit of investigation shows that they were also supposed to be playing Fibbers two weeks earlier but, t seems, had to drop out due to illness, so I assume the same applied tonight.)

Anyway, Jonny looks a bit like a certain James Blunt and, in style, sounds a bit like him too, just without the annoying voice. His songs were pleasant enough, if a tad simple-sounding and it was only with the last one that he introduced a mix (nay, indeed a melange) of playing styles within the song itself. He certainly got my foot tapping and, so, the evening was off to a good start, despite the disappointment of the main act not being there.

Next up were Seven Heroes, a foursome from Hetton-le-Hole in County Durham, although lead singer Dan Gibson seemed a bit embarrassed to announce that fact, which he only did after a bit of prompting from the audience. Not heavy enough to be full-on rock and too mainstream to be classed as indie (whatever that actually means these days...) they are likened, on their own website, to The Killers, The Cars and The Undertones. Being honest, I haven't heard enough of any of those to comment. I can, however, say that they were blooming good, with enough variety to keep things interesting in their all-too-short set. Quite early on, I had to have a wander round the audience to get a different view of the stage as I couldn't work out where the keyboard player was standing. After a few minutes, I realised that there wasn't one. It seems that David Smith, on lead guitar, played with some sort of device which made his guitar sound like keyboards (sort of Keane in reverse...) Whatever it was, it sounded good and the evening was getting better as it went along.

Seven Heroes have, apparently, completed work on their debut album - another one for me to look out for.

Finally, we had Modern Day Chicane, a slightly older looking and much more local band from somewhere called York.

Slightly heavier and louder than Seven Heroes is about the best I can do to describe them (it doesn't help that I'm writing this nearly a week after the event and I don't take notes...) I quite enjoyed the music, although it has to be said that the songs did sound slightly samey all through the set. There wasn't anything too adventurous and the vocals were a little muddy but, overall, there wasn't a great deal wrong with the music. I have to say, though, that I preferred Seven Heroes.

After the lights came up at Fibbers, we did the usual and headed off to the Roman Bath. Tonight's fare was Flashback, a retro three-piece, again from York, who specialise in the "beat" music of the 60's, as well as a bit of witty banter between songs. I'm afraid that this type of music, whilst inoffensive to listen to, does very little for me. I have probably heard a great deal of it, but almost certainly wouldn't buy any. Flashback were entertaining enough but, it has to be said, Debbie enjoyed them a lot more than I did.

Friday 13th February: If there is one thing nearly as good as the opportunity to see live bands for free, it's the chance to see live bands for little money. Tonight, for the first time this year, my free time and original music were in sync so it was time to shell out the princely sum of £4 and venture once again into the crowded darkness of the Duchess.

Well, I say "crowded". In actual fact, if everybody in attendance tonight had caught the same bus home, it might have been a crowded bus. If it was a single decker. And that included the members of all three bands.

Anyway, first on stage were Dressed In Their Best, a four-piece from York. Both Andy and Roj admitted to liking these youngsters but I'm afraid that they did little for me. Over-loud drumming seemed to be the mainstay of their performance. There did seem to be a few decent tunes struggling to get out from underneath both the drums and the somewhat thrashing guitar playing but, for the most part, it was just noise to me. It didn't help that, at times, the noise seemed to change rhythm dramatically halfway through a song. I'm afraid that I caught none of the lyrics and, being brutally frank, the vocals simply weren't up to much. (As I said, all opinions are my own and, in this case, I was in the minority.)

Which is pretty much the same situation regarding the second band, as well. I Call Shotgun are listed as being from Leeds, York and Preston and are, I think, the first "Electro/Power-pop/Disco House" band I have seen. When they started, the first thing that sprung to mind was a combination of 80s keyboard-led pop and a little bit of punk. After two, vaguely similar sounding songs, we took the decision to vacate the main performance area and sit in the slightly quieter bar so that we could talk. Which meant that, as the set went on and I felt my feet tapping along, I was getting more than a little ribbing from Andy and Roj. Despite the frequent odd noises coming from Josh Weller's keyboards and Joe De Luca camping it up as he pranced around stage (at times looking as though he was more than a little desperate for the loo), I found that I was liking the performance more and more. After all, it's not often you hear a young (semi-)York based band sampling Supertramp's Breakfast in America.

Finally, on came The Telegraphs. Apparently, this Brighton-based band is generating a large amount of buzz at the moment and, because of this, they were moved up to headline act tonight. That didn't seem to make a great deal of difference to their set, however - Andy reliably informed me that they played a full twenty-four minutes, and played just five or six songs. But what songs they were. Loud, energetic, guitar-heavy rock in the style of The Foo Fighters with melodic backing vocals (courtesy of rock-chick bassist Hattie Williams, who frequently broke her image by flashing a stunningly gorgeous smile). The Telegraphs are the best new band I've seen since The Mexicolas and I will be keeping an eye out for their debut album, due out in May.

Then it was time to join the crush as everybody tried to get up the exit stairs at the same time and make our way to the Roman Bath (for which "crowded" was too small a word) to catch the second half of Storm's act. Storm are a rock covers band (what else would you expect at the Bath) and we were treated to songs by Thin Lizzy, Coldplay, Black Sabbath, Green Day (and many more), along with way too many muscle shirts, lots of smoke and a rather impressive (for a pub) laser show. (Storm - the band that entertains and cures your short-sightedness at the same time...) A hugely entertaining end to an otherwise variable evening.

Y Comics?

Sunday 8th February: It's been a couple of weekends since I've seen any live bands, I haven't bought any CDs yet this year and I'm currently halfway through a Robin Hobb trilogy. Put those three facts together with a distinct lack of free time over the last few weeks and you have the reasons why I haven't blogged at all.

However, I still like to think that I have regular readers (poor deluded soul that I am) and so thought I'd better write about something this weekend. The lack of usual topics left me just one option - comics.

Now, I may be generalising (and I apologise if that's the case) but one of the reasons that I don't talk about comics much is that, for the most part, I find that people who are "into" them as much as I am (I've been reading comics for as long as I can remember, collecting for thirty years and have a current collection of over 17,000 individual issues) simply aren't the sort of people I like hanging around with. It's a fact that a lot of people I do know consider me to be a comics geek but, unlike most of the comics geeks that I have encountered (and I used to part-own a comic shop, so I've encountered a few) I go to football matches, use my gym membership, drink beer in places that aren't associated with conventions and buy CDs that, in general, aren't movie soundtracks.

All of which can make it a bit pointless talking about comics. People who don't understand comics aren't going to be swayed by anything I write and those that do probably know everything I could say.


But, while most of the comics out there are still the (perhaps) under-rated super-hero titles, there is a subset of comics which are specifically written for adults. Vertigo is a sister company to DC Comics - the publisher of Superman, Batman and the like, - which publishes a wide range of adult titles, ranging from crime to Western and encompassing war, fantasy, horror, science fiction and many things in between.

One of the best titles, in my opinion, that they have published in the last few years is Y: The Last Man, the title of which can be said to have multiple meanings.

Started in 2002 and completed in 2008, this series tells the story of Yorick Brown, the only male human survivor of a mysterious plague that wipes out everything with a Y chromosome within a matter of minutes. Joined by Agent 355 of the U.S. government secret agency the Culper Ring, geneticist Dr Alison Mann who hopes to study Yorick to find out why he survived and Ampersand, a capucin monkey who is the only other males left alive on the planet, Yorick travels across the now female world in the hope of finding his fiancee, Beth, who was on an archaeological fieldtrip in the Australian outback when the plague hit.

Y is one of Vertigo's creator-owned titles. In this case the creators are writer Brian K. Vaughan, who wrote the whole series, and artist Pia Guerra, who draw the vast majority. It is also one of the titles that Vertigo allow to come to a natural end, a trend started when they published Neil Gaiman's Sandman a few years back. No matter how popular these titles are, the creators have a fixed idea of the story they want to tell and when they reach the end of it, the title is effectively retired. Y: The Last Man lasted 60 issues or, the way I am reading it, ten collected volumes.

The story contains intrigue, mysticism, action, humour, romance (yes, there is only one man on the planet but romance and, indeed, sex are everywhere, if you see what I mean...) and much more as Vaughan takes Yorick from New York to Washington, San Francisco, Australia and, in the volume I'm currently reading, Japan. Along the way minor and not-so-minor characters are introduced and expanded on and the effects of all males suddenly effectively disappearing from the face of the planet is investigated (at least from a the viewpoint of a male writer).


In some of the shorter arcs, Vaughan looks at how the lack of males would (might) affect the Catholic Church (in one of the bleakly humorous sequences a nun explains that she is scouring the planet for an immaculate conception because, while she believes that God will now allow females to communicate with him, she needs a man to ask God whether that is correct...), how drug trafficking would (might) become prevalent and how different groups of women would react to the sudden disappearance of men.

At the same time he produces a page-turning epic that gradually answers questions while asking more and more. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Vaughan is also a writer and producer on TV's Lost.

Reasonably early in the run, Dr Mann discovers how Yorick and Ampersand survived the plague. The questions then become: Why they survived? Who is looking for them? Whether they can save the human race from total extinction and whether Yorick will ever be reunited with Beth


Oh, yeah and whether the baby conceived by a male astronaut in orbit when the plague struck and now alive in an air-tight "hot house" back on Earth will survive. And why agents of the Israeli army are liaising with Yorick's mother, a U.S. Senator. And whether the same Israeli actually shot Yorick's mother. And....

Well, you get the idea...

I have deliberately avoided reading any details of the ending of the series but I understand that there is no cop-out and that the ending works really well. Personally, I can't wait to get to it but, at the same time, I wish the story could go on and on.

Filled with brilliant characters and superb storytelling, Y: The Last Man should be compulsory reading for comics fans to show that not everything out there consists of bulging muscles and spandex and for non-comics fans to show that comics can be intelligent, fascinating literature.


Unfortunately, one of the downsides of comics is that, compared to books (for example) page-for-page they are incredibly expensive. To buy the full run of sixty issues would have cost somewhere around £108. The ten collected volumes would be slightly cheaper, but still around £90 for something that amounts to about 1,300 pages of story but can be read a lot more quickly than any novel.

Still, comics dragged me in a long time ago and refuse to let me go. I like most comics, especially the much-maligned superhero stuff. Once in a while, though, something comes along which really knocks my socks off and reinforces that old adage.

Comics definitely aren't just for kids.