Having introduced Dingo Baby to Midnight Oil I felt compelled to accept his invitation to a night with Mac de Marco, if for no other reason than to experience the Coronet, a legendary sticky floor venue in Elephant and Castle, before it is inevitably knocked down to make way for more unaffordable apartments built for overseas investors to rent out to Londoners at exorbitant rates (read here the litany of injustice involved in this demolition of communities' and people's futures from Southwark Council and Australian developer Lendlease).
A quick tour through Youtube and I discovered that Mac de Marco's style could best be described as stoner or slacker rock so I was expecting mostly stoners and slackers to be in the audience. It's always disconcerting when expectation and reality don't meet so it took a few moments to adjust to being surrounded by a crowd of young, preppy, posh accents seemingly engaging in their own version of cos-play for a few hours, i.e., a mass sing-along of not particularly subversive lyrics wishing they too could be swigging beer and whisky from the bottles lined up on their speaker stacks.
Maybe after years of dance tents and stadium gigs, or the fact that I was just sipping on burdock and dandelion soda, I was also struggling with the repertoire of three minute pop songs ... just when you think the song is going somewhere, it stops. It was only in the second half that some of the music started to get more interesting but by then the state of mind of the band was starting to disintegrate along with the cheese sandwiches and other food stuffs being thrown at the stage (which was pretty funny). It was also funny to watch Mac de Marco (clearly a talented musician who will not age well) replace the drummer who then came to the front to sing; only he can't sing so it started to be largely unfunny after ten minutes. With long pauses and occasional guttural screaming, the jackass-ery finally came to an end with a five chorus version of 'I'm Henry the Eighth', lyrics substituted for something vaguely comical but I had given up caring. Apart from a freestyle long version of an instrumental somewhere at about the half way point (which was exceptional), my vegan souvlaki from the Greek cafe in the neighbouring BoxPark was the best thing from the evening (and the ride home on the night tube; always guaranteed to be ethnographically fascinating).
I recognise that as the oldest woman at the gig, with a penchant these days for 'been there, done that' eye rolling, my opinion on these things is doubtless considered worthless, but I would counter with the following vignette ...
This morning, on the way to a well earned recovery brunch in E20 (because dandelion and burdock soda can take it out of you), we crossed the no-person's land of Hackney Wick warehouses still to be demolished, to hear the ever louder pulse of a techno rave being illegally held in a squat. As the grinding bass lines reverberated off derelict walls and the houses of suffering neighbours, we started to see the late morning wreckage emerging, blinking, into winter sunlight, sitting in gutters with cans of beer, crashed out on nearby benches, digging holes in the ground for no particular reason, grinning maniacally in baggy cargos, hippy tie-dye and dreadlock splendour, make-up smeared down sweaty faces, in desperate need of a shower and sleep, weaving their way down the street beneath the ever encroaching cranes of gentrification to the overground station. And this was the vanguard of early leavers .... the hard core still had another eight hours of partying to go.
Now that, fans of Mac de Marco, is proper stoner/slacker behaviour, although debates on its authenticity are irrelevant if you have to live next door to it and I suspect neither the ravers nor their preppy brethren nor Mac de Marco were feeling particularly spritely today, and that, as I smugly sip my dandelion and burdock soda, is a waste of a beautiful winter's day.
