Some Different Music

We celebrated St Catherine's Day last week by heading out to see The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing at the Star in Guildford. Having both seen them before some years ago we knew what we were getting and wondered why they were straying to Guildford to play in the back room of a pub (there couldn't have been more than 60 people there - was it really worth everyone's while?). Still, it had to be done. The said back room, helpfully called 'The Back', is a long, narrow and awkward space for a band, accessed by negotiating the staircases and mezzanines of the Star's appealingly maze-like interior, but it meant we could loiter at the back and still see something. I don't much enjoy stand-up comedy, so I found Andrew O'Neill's warm-up routine only intermittently effective, and neither of us was ever going to respond to all the silly encouragement to the audience to bounce around the limited space, but the set was fun. The Men's lead singer and saw-player Andy Heintz had a tussle with cancer last year and is only just recovered, and has swapped his pith helmet and red military jacket for a bowler and tattered Dickensian urchin coat with a touch of makeup that makes him look rather like the Tiger Lillies' Martyn Jacques after a very late night. The new album, Not Your Typical Victorians, has a more political edge than their previous stuff as well as being more musically interesting, and I rather liked pieces such as 'This House is not Haunted' and 'Third Class Coffin'. I felt like taking Mr O'Neill to task on his lyric insisting 'Jesus was a Cockney (even though he didn't exist)', but I'm glad someone is doing this kind of thing.

PS: I forgot to mention that the audience included remarkably few visibly identifiable Steampunks. 'I thought all that business of sticking goggles on a cheap fancy-dress top hat had finished', opined Ms Formerly Aldgate.  Truth be told, the few folk dressed up looked more like Morris dancers than Steampunks, but it can be a fine line, I suppose.