A Night in the Factory

Wow. A few hours after yesterday's hike along the canal, I was perusing a TimeOut London and accidentally discovered that the Factory records band Section 25 mentioned a few posts ago was playing its first gig in London in 19 years, less than a mile from my house. In addition, Kevin Hewick (also mentioned below and also of Factory, for a time) would be opening. There were also clips from some forthcoming documentary about some of the Factory-world bands, Shadowplayers. So wiggling out of a few social commitments I grabbed the 274 over to Camden and made my way down the stairs to a basement-level dingy club, The Underworld.

Now it would be easy to say that the movie 24 Hour Party People renewed interest in all things Factory and has caused this re-emergence of these bands (indeed, in NYC a year or two ago I caught Crispy Ambulance). But there's a lot more to it than that, particularly as some of these bands started to emerge from the time capsules well before that movie came around. The internet and WWW, of course, had something to do it, allowing a widely scattered fanbase to rediscover and reconnect with these bands.

But there's yet more to it than that, and last nights performances proved that. Kevin Hewick opened with a phenomenal and potentially dangerous set, a set that perhaps kowtowed to nostalgia and the Factory days only outwardly. Hewicks' songs and performance were born of necessity, to use a Frippism, a necessity that did not depend on income or youthful assumptions of widespread fame and fortune. Rather, these songs were clearly formed in the athanor of authentic experience, experience not too far removed from yours and mine, and yet transmuted by Kevin Hewicks' as-yet-undiminished songwriting powers. It was a really surprising set to seemlingly come out of nowhere like that.

Afterwards, I chatted for a little while with Hewick, and remarked that I had been surprised to find out he was actually still alive. What I didn't say was that the subject matter for songs such as Morphia didn't really lead one to believe that Hewick would be around forever.

Section 25 too, did not settle for polite and well-heeled versions of those ole factory Classics, though they did play a lot of old songs. Like The Crispies and, apparently, Kevin Hewick, SXXV has been in hiberation for a decade or two. But the energy and necessity and LIFE of real music was there in no uncertain terms. They wailed and pounded in a way that make current young alt-rock 'punk' seem all the more anemic and formulaic, their neatly packaged disaffection all the more intolerable.

SXXV also ended their night with a 'cover' of Joy Division's Shadowplay, which for Larry Cassidy (the singer) was not precisly a cover: He had apparetly covered for Ian Curtis a time or two when Curtis was too sick to play some of their double-billed gigs back in the Manchester days. So Cassidy might have actually sung that song as Joy Division's singer a time or two before.

IT SHOULD BE SAID that Cassidy's near-monotone voice is thin, limited, and not suitable for singing whatsoever. But apparently those Manchester (and Blackpool) boys had learned the lesson that Punk had brought to town and recognized that this is potentially a strength: If a voice is singing the right song, a song in which it has vested authority, then the result is actually far stronger than if a 'good' singer sang the same. Friendly Fires, Up To You, Looking From a Hilltop: Larry Cassidy's reedy voice layed down a lesson that could not be ignored, even silencing the chatting young Brits who had wandered in from the streets above.

Quite a little night, in the basement of a tiny, grimy club.

Cool.

Hey... here are a couple of photos and a review of the same gig.