Tragic City Thieves - Darling (What Can I do)

This is one of my favourite bands.
Now I don't want anyone mistaking that comment for the band being a favourite local act, or a favourite unsigned one or or the other little things that others will throw into the equation.
What I am saying is, and I want to make it very clear, is that they are one of my favourite bands.
There's nothing else needs to be added to that.
In my head I don't differentiate Tragic City Thieves from anyone else because of a degree of success.
It wouldn't matter if they never sold a record or sold a million.
What I like about them isn't rooted in anything other than when I hear them I fuckin' love it, and when I see them I equal fuckin' love it.
I think I once described them as the the product of someone opening up my head and creating a band just for me.
Maybe I didn't say that, but damn I've thought it often enough.

Electric 6 - ABC - 29/11/12 - (Glasgow)

Finally.

The best, and probably most manic, rock and roll act on the west coast of Scotland have made the leap from the bars and clubs to the big boys stage.

It's been a long time coming, but I'm filing it away in the 'good things happen to those who wait' folder.

In support to Electric 6 in the ABC, Tragic City Thieves, the only band worth a spit from Port Glasgow, tore it up with a set full of debauched songs that celebrated the exhilarating excitement of all that goes on after dark on the wrong side of town.

It's a heady brew of sleaze, glitter and blood.

A solid throbbing beat from the rhythm section of the band underpins some blistering guitar work, and frontman CJ Monk is a thrashing dervish of a focal point.

What they deal in is lightning in a bottle punk rock.

The sort that bands like The Dead Boys, MC5 and the New York Dolls did, but there's nothing that screams seventies retro at you from them as they have their feet firmly set in the here and now.

It's all as fresh as a slap in the face.

The new album is out in march so look out for the launch of that as the live date will go down in history as one of those 'you had to be there' gigs.

So consider yourself forewarned.

Electric 6 are of course the dogs b's.

I've never been ashamed to express my love for the band, and so far they have never left me feeling that my support of them has been misguided.

They simply don't do bad gigs, or it has to be said, crap albums.

That they aren't selling out the SECC is a mystery to me, but as long as they aren't then the main hall in the ABC will do.

On this outing it's an anniversary celebration of their debut album and the nostalgia crowd are out in full force to get down to Danger (High Voltage) and Gay Bar.

The band could have played those two songs and walked off and most would have been happy, but thankfully they didn't.

Instead the opened with a cover of The Osmonds Crazy Horses, threw in Formula 409 and Body Shot, two tracks that I suspect that a good 90% of the audience didn't know, and then they proceeded to do the whole of Fire at breakneck speed.

I mean what can be said about that?

To hear it played in its entirety is just aural gold.

Pour that shit right into my ears and it goes straight to my legs and I'm dancing.

I'm throwing my hands in the air like I just don't care and if someone has supplied the linoleum I may have had a crack at some break dancing.

The rest of the set kept the standard super high. Like superman super high. Like just a dot in the sky so high that you can barely see it high.

Down at McDonnelzzz tripped into Dance Epidemic and then along with The White Wolf, Dick Valentine gave us Jimmy Carter prior to the rest of the band joining them and doing my favourite Electric 6 song I buy the drugs.

After a short break they returned to ecstatic applause and finished the crowd off with Rip it.

Now the next time they come back I expect to see everyone who attending this gig to be be at the that show.

No way after a gig like that should they slip back to playing a club sized venue.

Consider that a warning Glasgow.

You better all be there. I'm not kidding.  

Dick Valentine/Tragic City Thieves - ABC2 - Glasgow (25/05/12)

I like the unexpected.

The moment when you realize that what you think you are going to get doesn't quite transpire, and instead it's a whole new ballgame.

I would happily exist in that moment, that exact second when peoples preconceived ideas are bitch slapped to tears.

In a list of personal motto's I suspect that 'dash my expectations motherfucker. I dare you.' would rank quite high.

So when Tragic City Thieves took to the stage, in support of Electric 6's Dick Valentine in the ABC2, and began an acoustic set the shivers ran up and down my spine as I was caught completely unaware.

This was not what glam trash terrorists should sound like.

Instead of thrashing the songs out acoustically the band have reworked them completely, and while they are recognisable as the originals its very obvious these beasts have a thumping heart all of their own.

Each song is the bastard offspring of what has come before.

In the space of one track being played a whole world of new opportunities opened up for them.

In the future they needn't feel constrained to playing electric sets as acoustically they are just as fantastic a band.

The guitar work from Stu seemed effortlessly organic. On each song he provided the perfect balance of flourishes and at times there was a definite cinematic feel to it all.

If pushed I could probably write a thousand word essay on how impressed I was with his ability to paint an aural picture over every song, but I could equally do the same for both Jim and CJ.

Jim's use of an acoustic bass instead of an electric, as I so often see being played in acoustic sets, gave everything a warm and authentic feel, while CJ's vocals allowed us all to appreciate his abilities as lyricist with his delivery of the songs.

In less than a week I have seen these guys play two completely different sets, and both have cemented in my opinion that no one comes close to touching what they do here in Scotland.

If this band fail to make an impact on a much larger scale then I would forever use them as an example of how talent and passion does not necessary equate to success, and that's just wrong.

If you have it, then you should reap the rewards. Simple as that, and these guys have got it in spades.

So how does Dick Valentine follow that?

Well quite easily truth be told.

Even without the pizazz that Electric 6 have, Dick on his own still commands attention.

He doesn't even really have to do much to draw the eye to him.

It seems to be that he naturally has a quality about him that has a presence on stage.

When he ambles on he could be a roadie, but no one pays much attention to roadies while every eye in the house is on Dick plugging his guitar in.

Avoiding the big entrance he steps up and shakes hands and chats with fans before getting down to the business it hand.

This isn't really what people expect from a headlining act from the US playing a show, but Dick could never be accused of following the herd. .

For all intents and purposes this is actually less of a gig as we know it, and more an artists communing with his fans on a very basic level.

From the beginning to the end it's all very relaxed with the between song banter akin to friends just shooting the shit.

I like it.

There's a real warmth in the room, and he's more than deserving of the reaction he gets when he does start in on the opening song of the evening.

Part of the appreciation may come from the audience knowing that this is a real solo tour to.

It's quite literally one man, a guitar, a bag full of CDs and a train ticket.

It's not a new concept and bands have been doing it forever, but the pioneering spirit of globe-trotting with a bag full of songs and little else is one that I find alluring, and I suspect others do to.

It's got an appeal to it.

No doubt their will be hardships along the way, long hours filled with mundane shit, and nights where he is so bored sitting alone in a hotel room that he may succumb to masturbating himself close to death just to fill the time, but they will hopefully fall short of shadowing the good times.

Let's be honest here and admit that travelling the world, experiencing new adventures on a daily basis, and entertaining people at night with a song is something that most of us would love to do, and here he is doing it.

The wandering troubadour aspect is tantalizing isn't it?

Anyway, the gig, yeah, the gig.

An easy raconteur Dick happily lefts Electric 6 at the door and mainly concentrated on the material from his solo album 'Destroy the Children'.

His run through of the songs illustrates that he is a songwriter of no little talent, and while some have dismissed his humorous approach to a song as on par with a low rent Tenacious D I would strongly disagree, and instead firmly push the argument that managing to insert some fun into a song doesn't make it comedic.

When you listen to him there's plenty of darkness alongside the sunshine and you would be pushed to name someone else who can deliver it so well.

He provides the audience with plenty of proof of this.

Songs like Mr Shadow and I Don't Speak French had me standing there trying to get the smile on my face under control before the muscles on my face had a mishap.

Brilliant material and it stand up alongside the best he has written throughout his career

Even the surprise inclusion in the set of Keane's 'Everybody's Changing' wasn't enough to derail the experience for me as it was quite frankly better than the original.

The gig was one that flew past.

A sure sign that it was an enjoyable one, and I'm pretty sure that everyone there will have been as equally impressed as I was and will be sure to acquire an Electric 6 ticket for November.

Maybe the full on Electric 6 gig could have the full on Tragic City Thieves in support.

Now that would be a gig that would require the ABC to check that the insurance for their roof is covered for acts of rock that could leave it blown off.

Highlight of the year may be a Glaswegian crowd chanting WE WANT DICK, WE WANT DICK, with no shame or explanation offered.
We should have taken the chant out on the street after the show and continued it long into the night.

Tragic City Thieves - Bar Bloc - 19/05/12 - Glasgow

The future of rock and roll is not to be found on the cover of a magazine.

Neither will it be found on many of the summer festival tents.

Instead it will be found on any stage that Tragic City Thieves perform on.

It's been a while since I have seen the band play, and their much welcomed return to the live arena was far more exciting than even I had anticipated.

Before I would have classed them as the best sleazy glam rock band that the west coast of Scotland had ever spawned.

Now I'm going to take that back.

Instead they are the best that the UK has to offer.

(Well the best I have seen.)

The comment was made during their set that this is a band that shouldn't be playing at a bar and club level, and I fully endorse that view.

While the current Guns and Roses are looking for £50 per head for a show it is a fact that Tragic City Thieves would rag doll Axl and his pick up band from here to next week without breaking a sweat.

If they break a sweat then any big rock band you care to mention should shudder in fear.

You want the fire then here it is.

I could lavish so much praise on them that readers would consider that it was a pastiche of a review, but ten minutes into watching them perform and the acceptance of the truth would hit them hard, and the truth is that no matter how much hyperbolic praise I shower them with it will still fall short of the reality.

Much of the set comprised of material that will be on their forthcoming sophomore release and will be new to an audience, but while that can normally be the kiss of death to a performance due to the unfamiliarity they exact opposite happened here.

Instead I'm left craving hearing them again, and I quite literally can't wait for the album to be released.

There's a huge step forward in the quality of the material, and that's not to say that the original album was lacking in quality.

More so it's to try and convey that if the punters liked that then they better hold onto their hats as this one is going to be all killer.

I count myself very lucky that so far in this year I have seen some fantastic live performances and here was yet another to add to the list.

Tragic City Thieves have to break through to a wider audience.

I don't want to keep them to myself as a grubby little secret.

I want the world to know about them.

Fans of everyone from the New York Dolls to The Dead Boys, from Turbonegro to The Dwarves, from The Stooges to Bowie are going to love them.

This is the future of rock and roll.

People just need to wake up to that and get with it.

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LA Guns/Venrez/Tragic City Thieves - Glassic Grand - 21/6/11 (Glasgow

LA Guns are coming to town maaaaaaaaan!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Pretty gnarly huh?
I mean those guys rock duuuuude.
Or the rough translation of that would be that the glam sleaze train was rolling into Glasgow and some people were rather excited about the prospect of hopping on board.
Not me though.
While I don't have a problem with LA Guns - and I was indeed curious to see them play with Jizzy Pearl fronting them – the main draw was that Gypsy Pistoleros and Venrez were the support acts for the tour.
Unfortunately the flamenco rockers, Gypsy Pistoleros, were dropped from the tour after one night because............wait for it...............they were too good.
Now forgive me, but if the band whose name is above the door feel that they are being overshadowed by a support act then it doesn't fill me with confidence that they will deliver the goods on the night.
It's also a bit of a backhanded compliment telling a band that they're too good for a tour.
It's a negative wrapped in a positive.
On one hand it sounds like praise, but on the other you have four guys who have juggled their personal and professional lives around to accommodate going out on the road, and then been left hanging.
It's to the Pistoleros credit that not a hint of animosity about the situation has reared its ugly head about what some would describe as being royally fuckin' shafted.
Okay. When I say some, I mean me.
I think that if the shoe was on the other foot then five minutes after being told that a band I was in was off the tour I would be standing cock in hand pissing in the petrol/gas tank of the LA Guns tour bus, even if I had to stand on tip toe to do it, but then again that might just be me.
With every dark cloud they say there's a silver lining though, and in this case the silver lining to this dirty black cloud was that the venue stepped up in the eleventh hour and procured the services of Glasgow's finest glam terrorists Tragic City Thieves to fill the gap on the bill.
Although they were one man down, with lead guitarist Stu out of the country, there was no evidence on display that they were going to let that get in the way of some good rockin'.
In fact the opposite would seem to be the case.
The awareness that their brother in arms wasn't bending the six strings for them seemed to push the band individually to go above and beyond the call of duty, and it was another blistering set from them.
I've genuinely yet to see them do a less than impressive show.
They've played the shitholes with crap pa's, played to crowds that just don't get them, played with members out of action, played to the three quarters empty halls in support to bigger, but not necessarily better, bands, and they have always delivered.
Never once have I seen them stumble.
Currently they have a fistful of new material that is getting road tested and if they can capture the fire of these songs in a studio then their sophomore release is really going to set the cat amongst the pigeons.
If you could get rock and roll broken down into it's smallest molecular components and looked at it through a microscope, then what you would see is the four members of Tragic City Thieves staring up at you and pulling the finger.
It was the perfect start to the evening and I suspect that if Tracii Guns had seen Tragic City Thieves in action he would have been very concerned about how his band was going to follow on from that performance.
Thankfully Tragic City Thieves aren't on the tour and have no need to concern themselves at being dropped.
Venrez who had survived the support band cull looked confident when they took to the stage and once they got into the flow it was easy to see why.
With ex members of Juliette and the Licks and Alex Kane of Life, Sex and Drugs, AntiProduct, Clam Abuse, Enuff Z'Nuff. Marky Ramones Blitzkrieg on board this is a band who can walk the walk.
Steven Berez on vocals has a rich solid classic rock tone to his voice, but the guitar work and attitude displayed on stage fleshes out the traditional skeleton with some punk muscle.
This mix works very well and allows the band to be imbued with that intangible something that while you can't put your finger on it does separate them from many of their peers.
There's some west coast psych hiding away within the music, but there's also some hints at Seattle's grunge sound.
Mainly in a vocal deliver that occasionally sounds reminiscent of Layne Staley from around the Jar of Flies time.
While not apparently everybody's thing there is no doubt that the talent is there, and Venrez could very well pull something special out of the bag at any moment.
For some reason I kept thinking throughout the set that I could imagine seeing these guys playing on a festival stage somewhere.
Japan would probably be a place to visit as I could imagine that the Japanese rock fans would fall in love with them.
If I was to have one single solitary criticism to make it would be that I would have preferred to see Steven Berez strut it a bit more, maybe swing that mic stand about a bit.
It wouldn't make any difference to the music, but visually I would have liked to have seen a bit more of the inner rock star coming out.
So far so good.
Two out of two band delivered the entertainment promised.
Then LA Guns ruined it to an extent.
They are one of the few bands who rode a wave of popularity many moons ago that I didn't see.
Motley Crue, check.
Ratt, check.
Guns and Roses, check.
Cinderella, check.
Bon Jovi, check.
I could go on and on, but you get the picture.
I even seen Love/Hate who as far as I recall were pretty much shit hot live.
So even although it's 2011 and we are all well past the glory years I expected that on some level I would feel myself swaying towards some level of enjoyment, even if it was rooted in nostalgia.
The thing is I didn't feel that pull into the past, and what was going on in front of me had very little to do with the present.
Yes, Tracii is a guitar hero, and yes Jizzy appeared to be in fine voice, although it was hard to tell as he was so low in the mix, but the over riding feeling I got was that I'd woken up in a scene from Hot Tub Time Machine.
The view of the past wasn't rose tinted.
It just looked silly, slightly embarrassing even.
It was like looking at a photograph of yourself as a teenager and cringing at what you were wearing.
It felt like this LA Guns were the facsimile of another LA Guns.
They look the same, sound the same, but it's a shadow copy.
The main thing that was bringing me down was the sound though.
The vocals were so low in the mix that Jizzy wasn't coming across as a fully paid up member of the band.
It was so bad that anyone could have been fronting them and you really couldn't have heard much of a difference.
At one point I was thinking that if it got any worse then you would fully expect a front man to have a strop and ask what the fuck the score was.
I doubt Tracii would have been too enamoured with a sound man who turned his guitar down so low, or the vocals up so high that you couldn't hear him.
So to allow Jizzy to work under these conditions is pretty reprehensible.
Maybe on a different night it would be a different story, but it wasn't a different night.
So I gave up and went and spoke to Alex Kane on the merch stand and asked if he wanted to do a quick interview.
To cut a long story short, he did.
So apart from providing an open and frank look back on his career, and what he is up to at the moment, I really have to thank him for giving me a legitimate reason to miss a good chunck of LA Guns.
If I had seen more of them then this review would have dipped to the level of tourettes sufferer showing shocking poor anger management skills.
To sum the show up I guess it would be fair to say that as a band they lived up to the dire Shrinking Violet album that was their last release.

*Please refer to the comments section for further information pertaining to some of the comments that I made in the review.

Glen Matlock & The Philistines/Devilish Presley

Not long now until Kilmarnock is exposed to a double header of fine rock and roll.
Everything is in place. The bands are looking forward to the shows, and over the course of the two nights we have a shit hot line up of some of the best talent that Scotland can offer in support.
On Friday the 18th we have Glen Matlock and the Philistines. Someone who really doesn't need an introduction.
To say that locally this is a bit of a big deal would be the understatment of the decade.
Prior to Glen Matlock and his band tearing the roof off, the night will open with Zoe Lewis. A very talented young lady who already has two self released albums to her name and an impressive canon of self penned tracks that will no doubt impress and entertain in equal measure.
Following on from Zoe will be Glasgow's Filthy Little Secret playing their first gig in Ayrshire.
Currently carving a niche from themselves in the city, and gearing up for a debut album to be released, they are certainly going to turn some heads with their penchant for yelping out primordial garage rock from the swamp.
Last of the supports, but by no means the least, and just back from their first UK tour will be the mighty Tragic City Thieves who will be playing their first show north of the border since burning it up down south.
This is also the first of two nights were they will open for Glen Matlock and the Philistines as they will also be setting the stage alight in King Tuts on the Saturday evening.
If that's not enough and you think that you can last the pace then on saturday night it gives us great pleasure to reintroduce everyone to Devilish Presley.
One of the hardest working bands in the UK, they are just on the cusp of releasing their fifth self released album "Dark Triad" and I can genuinely say hand on heart that they are up there as one of the most entertaining bands that I have ever seen.
They are the square peg that refuses to be hammered into the round hole. Goth Rockers, Deathrock Champions, Ghoulish punk. All are equally descriptive, but all fall far short of telling the whole tale.
You have really got to see them to really understand why once seen they are never forgotten.
First act to perform on the night is the truly mind blowing eccentric one man band "The Paraffins" whose refusal to pander to anyones preconcieved expectations surrounding a pub gig is a work of genius.
Billy Liar, our very own Scottish punk troubadour, will follow the Paraffins and will no doubt enlist many more people to his growing army of fans.
Then for those who can't have too much of a good thing, or those who missed the previous nights debauchery, Filthy Little Secret will attempt to shake off their hangovers and do it all over again for the Killie faithful.
What's not to like about all this?