THE SEA NYMPHS
The Falkon. Royal College Street, Camden Town, London
13 December 1998
In reality, the music room at The Falcon’s a tumbledown concrete box shoved out onto a bit of waste ground. But right now we could imagine it transformed by our collective warmth, enwebbed with flowered arbours and the hum of big lovable insects. This is good. The air’s alive with a warm, fireside excitement and the sound of a zillion Christmas triangles. Up on stage, Tim Smith has just flicked us one of his weird little opening-envelope smiles. Bill Drake – goateed and woolly-hatted, somewhere between pharoah and trainspotter – settles in behind his keyboards, half-in and out of the parallel universe he normally inhabits. Someone bleats like a sheep. Everyone laughs. Sarah Smith – as unreservedly sexy and wholesome as a fairytale milkmaid – readies her saxophone, smiles mischievously.
As they make a showing for the first time in years, The Sea Nymphs bring us the same kind of wonder as watching some obscure and exquisite little beast uncurl itself from hibernation or hatch out of a chrysalis. That, and the ability to awaken the sort of love that I haven’t felt sweep through a concert for six years. We’re crammed in shoulder to shoulder, the usual indie cattle, but this time it feels more like being a step away from holding hands. It’s as if we’re all bouyed up on a long curving wave of sea-songs, swimming keyboards, children’s play-rhymes, twinkle-fingered piano, folk fragments, pale running saxophones, Edward Lear, Edward Gorey, and all the other unguarded wistful subconscious flickers that may or may not inform The Sea Nymphs’ music: it removes the tarnish from our almost-forgotten joy at being alive. Because this is music that disarms and rebuilds somehow, ducking aside from the panicky hurtle of London neurosis outside and taking us with it.
This may seem a woolly cop-out, but Sea Nymphs offer a mystery of creation that doesn’t bear too much thinking about. Too much breakdown won’t break the spell; just ease you out of it, painlessly, like a splinter, into the cold again. And that’s something which you don’t want to do. Within Sea Nymphs’ space is very much a place to want to be: to rest in the anchoring arms of Tim’s bass, to cotton on to how the querying melody-hop of “Little Creations” sounds like a baby making its first connections, or to enjoy the unselfconscious way Sarah rejoices in striking a gong as if she was dusting a clock. As the tipsy near-waltzes sway around the air, as Tim, Sarah and Bill’s voices twine and alternate – from naked and frayed harmonies to scratchy yelps to impossibly sweet helium coos – we’re being given the opportunity to pig out on a different kind of instinct than the standard lash of rebellious noise.
There’s something baptismal in it (the little lilts of “Shaping The River”, the cries of “sponge me clean again” over a later chunky acoustic strum). And maybe something to do with a natural, maternal comfort: the key line of “Blind In SafetyAnd Leafy In Love” is “she smells just like you and she smells just like me”, while “Appealing To Venus” stretches out a begging hand to a gone goddess, pleading “Dwell among the people / come back to us, we need you”. And maybe – behind the celebratory music and the rosettes of voice and exhilarated sax lofting toward the ceiling – the vulnerable flutter at the heart of it all is the fears at the treacherous terrain of potential fuck-ups and traps opening up before the newborns as they make their blundering pilgrimages on from birth. “Back to square one… / large as life and twice as natural… / Let’s not reinvent the wheel; open that can of worms…”.
Still. Here and now our openness, our willingness to ride our curiosity, is our strength, and when “Mr Drake’s Big Heart” announces “something’s going to happen today”, we all feel like we’re a part of it. Today, at the very least, we’ll have been able to say that we were together, and it was good.
(DANN CHINN)