The Sheffield Scenester

Leading up to this gig Sheffield had some of it’s worst snow in decades, buses, trams, in fact everything had ground to a halt, so in sub zero temps the prospect of getting down to see a gig was pretty daunting….but soldier on we must! Originally it was supposed to be four bands but for obvious reasons two had to pull out, leaving the night a bit depleted, so with a later start to give people the chance to get down here and Arkham Karvers playing an extended set, I grabbed a lager….I would have preferred a piping hot cappuccino but beggars can’t be choosers!

The first band of the night was in fact, five piece Gypsy Toes who opened their set with a single keyboard note, a prelude to the rest of the band joining in. What surprised me here was that due to their general demeanor I kind of figured they’d be going for an Oasis type of sound, but instead what came through was nothing like it…..It was a very chilled sound which to be frank Oasis may have achieved at times, but only when they didn’t feel like punching your face in! But ‘Champagne Supernova’ aside, what Gypsy Toes were doing had a general chillaxin’ feel to it, it was almost as if you could lose yourself in the sound. Now whilst I wasn’t around in the 60’s, this did hark back to that era of experimentation when the likes of Floyd would just get up and play while the crowd and the music slowly melded together as one. ‘Rumours’, one of the early tracks in their set was quite an outstanding piece of music, obviously greatly influenced by The Verve, in fact you’d almost be forgiven for thinking it was The Verve at times. Despite its almost simplistic undulating melody, it still has that slightly complex structure that just draws you in making you relish every note. As a band they are obviously setting their sights quite high and in all honesty doing a pretty good job of achieving those goals. For most of their set I was just stood at the back of the room letting the music wrap around me, I even managed to forget how cold it was….which considering I could practically see my own breathe was no mean feat! Generally their set was quite a sedate affair but the final track ‘Come On’ seemed to up the ante a bit as for the first time they brought guitars and drums to the fore and created a more energized and harmoniously chaotic sound in…this was in fact their most popular track of the night as the crowd seemed to really go for this one. After the set I got a chance to talk to their bass player Dale and ask him about their style of songwriting:

“We are trying to get away from the more acoustic style and move towards electric based songwriting, rather like the track ‘Come On’, which was only written over the last few weeks, that was in fact its first live performance! We have another song along the same lines called ‘Monroe’ which we would of put in but it still needs some final tweaking as it’s not quite finished. We’ve built our own rehearsal studio and since then our writing has just been all fired up, so we have quite a few more songs in the pipeline!”

With another gig at The Plug on Dec 21st and quite a few lined up in the New Year they are definitely worth seeing, meanwhile inside The Plug itself it was still freezing as you could tell from the fact that the DJ’s of the night were all huddled in their booth with winter coats on…….bbrrrrrrrrrr!! But now it was time for Arkham Karvers, a band we’ve followed for quite a while now and judging by the size of the crowd they were eagerly anticipated. Lead singer Dave thanked everybody for coming down from far afield, saying hello to anyone from “Leeds”, a small cheer came back, “London”, a cheer and a few sniggers came back, then “Buxton” which got a huge cheer and quite a few laughs! But on with the show and I have to say these guys have definitely improved, even since the last time we saw them down at The Boardwalk on their EP launch, they seemed a lot tighter, the music flowed a lot more freely and they looked like they really owned the stage. Mixing their trademark reggae/ska beats into a modern indie rhythm worked everytime especially on the classic favourite ‘Alaska’, a song which will always be one that I could listen to again and again. Even so they really pushed the boat out with a new song ‘Ticket To The Pictures’, their roots really shone through in pretty much the way that reggae came through in some of the latter day Clash tracks making it an admirable addition to their already extensive repertoire. When it came to the song ‘Observations And Wise Words Of The Curious Alan Smythe’ they put in a break to let tonight’s drummer, Josh do a little showboating, not to be out done when it came to the track ‘Leeches And Fingernails’ bassist, Tom brought out an electric double bass, not only a beauty of an instrument….but a bloody good sounding one as well! They jokingly finished their set by strolling off to the side of the stage before strolling back on for the encore of ‘At Night’ and ‘Powercut’ both of which went down well with the gathered faithful. A really good show from a great bunch of lads, and luckily enough due to the late start I actually had a chance to briefly interview them prior to the gig, here’s what they had to say:

Scenester: With the weather as it is, did you think you were actually going to make it to the gig tonight?

Arkham Karvers: We did have doubts, well it was mainly Josh who lives in Buxton and had to trek in over the moors, in fact he’s done the Buxton to Sheffield run twice already today, and then he goes back to Buxton tonight because he’s got an exam in the morning. But you look around town and it’s almost dead, we know some gigs have been cancelled over the weekend and we were almost playing in wellies tonight! But for some reason it snows every year in this country and every year we’re surprised by it, then the whole country comes to a halt, so we were quite determined to go ahead tonight, we’ve constantly been texting Joolz (tonight’s promoter and DJ) to find out what was happening. It wasn’t until this morning that we got the go ahead….but sadly two bands have pulled out, still with quite a few people turning up from Leeds, London and Buxton to see us so we wanted to go ahead really!

Scenester: Good, now as for the band itself how has 2010 shaped up for you?

Arkham Karvers: It’s been really good with an EP out on iTunes, that was our big achievement getting that recorded and done. Plus you can definitely tell the progression we’ve made since a year ago cos most of the gigs we were playing back then were in smaller venues like The Grapes and West Street Live, I mean we still like playing those sort of gigs, but we were here at The Plug opening up and its nice now that we’ve done an EP launch and tonight we’re headlining on the same stage we were opening up on! You can see how far we have come from there already I guess, it’s going in the right direction and that’s what we’re happy about more than anything else!

Scenester: And 2011, what have you got in mind for that?

Arkham Karvers: We’re planning on recording a new EP and that’s our main focus at the moment, getting that out there. What we do is every time we plan to make a new EP we have to plan how to make the money to do it, hopefully tonight is going to put towards that, so in February we can get down to 2Fly Studios and get a new EP put together there, hopefully after that we’ll do another big launch. Meanwhile in between we’ll be trying to move out of Sheffield towards Manchester, you know and around the North before going down to the South. We played Camden last summer, which was really good, it was quite a trek to get there with all our stuff, but we still had about thirty people come and see us from here. It would be great to go back there cos it’s like a sort of urban Glastonbury thing they have happening down there with all sorts of stuff going on, so we wouldn’t mind going back at some point. In the meanwhile we’re going to try and do Manchester and Leeds to start with; you know we don’t want to run before we can walk!

Scenester: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Arkham Karvers: Only to say thank to our drummer Josh, who is standing in tonight, it’s his first gig tonight….so no pressure!!! And lastly we’d like to say thank you to all our fans, as well as wish them a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, see you all in 2011!

And with that I ventured back outside dreading the drive home, a pack of huskies and a sled would have been a wish come true at that point, but it was a great night’s entertainment, I just wish they had a coffee machine in The Plug!

Words & Photos by Geoff Buckthorpe