Be afraid of your parents. Be afraid of their clever friends.
If your parents happen to live in Lewes and are prone to hanging around with fearsomely busy creative types, their cleverest friends of all might well be a young couple called Simon and Julia. A twosome who when not holding music workshops, designing T-shirts, writing children’s books, knitting glove puppets, making fudge or running one of the UK’s most innovative online record labels, etc… write, record and perform biting lyrical pop rock under the name The Indelicates.
Make no mistake, whilst nominally a ‘band’ The Indelicates are essentially a duo with some other people filling out the sound. When previewing this concert, SOURCE suggested that they’d be debuting a new backing band this evening and this is indeed the case. “Once again we fired our whole band and got a whole new band,” admits Simon at the start of the set. Debutants Emma (drums) and Nick (bass) shuffle nervously as the guitarist and his audience ponder how long they might survive the duo’s Mark E Smithsonian caprice.
I’ve read this book before and darling I can tell you how it ends.
Although nominally a launch gig – or at least a warm-up for the official London launch – for new album ‘Diseases Of England’, most of tonight’s set comes from their three previous long players (does anyone call them that any more?). Opener ‘Flesh’ is keyboardist Julia’s treatise on female submissiveness, fatalism and de facto prostitution with its unnerving “I love you/Whoever you are” refrain. A somewhat intentionally awkward segue into the visceral megalomaniacal howling blues tract of the next song in which Simon claims to be a prophet of God. Er, all prophets of God, in fact.
That was ‘I Am Koresh’, one of several standout numbers from the duo’s rock opera ‘David Koresh Superstar’. That the singer is channelling its eponymous anti-hero rather than his own delusions (the vocals ridden raw atop a grinding delta gutter riff) doesn’t make the charismatic self-belief any less unsettling, especially not when given the coda: “That’s what I actually believe. You can’t leave. The doors are now locked.”
Be afraid of the line they teach you, be afraid of the way it goes.
Tracks from the new album pepper the set. As one would expect from its title, ‘Diseases Of England’ sees an act already noted for the cynicism of their lyrics crank it up to eleven. The couple adopt different persona for the tracks and it’s the Eton riflemen of Cameron’s government and their ilk who are the targets of ‘Class’, a sneering testament to privilege dispensed tonight with particular venom.
The new album is The Indelicates’ slowest paced and bleakest release to date. All too aware of this, Simon and Julia lighten up their performance of ‘Everything Is Just Disgusting’ by producing glove puppets of themselves to sing said anthem to a fearful Daily Mail generation. The appearance of the puppets is a well-received surprise, much enjoyed by everyone – except possibly Emma and Nick, nervously wondering why they don’t have puppets of their own.
You’d be amazed what you can raise to something everybody knows.
The set features a smattering of harder foot-stompers such as the Dresden Dolls-esque ‘Europe’, but its quietest moment comes with the final song prior to the well flagged “we have two songs left on the setlist” encores. If the puppets were a surprise, pre-encore closer ‘Not Alone’ is even more of one. From its opening lines “There’s no money/Barely any love/But I see you/And you’re not alone” it’s clear the track – which we hadn’t heard before tonight – is positive, uplifting even. Which makes it a rare diversion for lyricists more known for (albeit third person) misanthropy rather than empathy.
That The Indelicates, quite widely known and acclaimed in Germany, remain something of a secret in their home nation is perhaps another disease of England; that fear of clever friends mentioned in ‘Be Afraid Of Your Parents’, a song whose referencing of Foucault and Derrida offers something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This set was prefaced by a warning that the new line-up was “woefully under-rehearsed”, but the new additions did their job of soundtracking the pop punk poetry with admirable aplomb and shouldn’t fear a musical P45 from their ‘clever friends’ any time soon.
Latest Music Bar, Thursday 18th April 2013
Words and photos by Adam Peters
