Cardiacs: London Astoria November 15th 2002
Dann Chinn/Misfit City.
It’s like a church in here. Really, it is. It always is, with Cardiacs. An unruly church, yes. With questionable scripture, the crusty Edwardian lettering of the Alphabet Business Concern banner looming behind the drum riser, and a priest who (quite frankly) acts a little bit unusual. Assuming that you can get past that – and deal with music that initially sounds like The Sex Pistols playing the quirkiest bits of Gentle Giant at high velocity and higher volume – you can worship in comfort. A thousand people are doing so tonight. They did the same thing this time last year, and will continue to do so, regardless of fashion, for as long as the Smith brothers and their cohorts can drag themselves out of obscurity for the occasional live evening. Some have done it for 20 years or more. That’s how it is with Cardiacs. If you want to see the beneficial cult effect in full joyous force, just come to one of these gigs.
Cardiacs, of course, are old hands at working up exhilaration. It helps to have a crowd who are entirely complicit to their rituals. That eight-note glockenspiel fanfare – straight out of kid’s TV – and the skirling, grinding tape-loop that announces the band’s approach. The audience’s traditional football chant of “Jim! Jim! Jim!” as they hail glowering bassist Jim Smith; whose bulk, scowl and shaven head suggests a disillusioned evil genius who’s gotten pissed off and retired to fix cars in a garage. Then there’s the thoroughly inappropriate suit-trousers, jacket, shirtsleeve-and-tie look which Cardiacs sport, as if plucked straight from an office lunch hour; and the way guitarist Random Jon Poole stands with eyes unfocussed and hips a-kilter, like a beloved damaged toy still devoted to fun. And then, of course, there’s the blocky, manically grinning figure of Tim Smith. He’d be the real evil genius, if he actually cared about evil-genius stuff. Instead, he cares about following the gloriously twisted musical paths in his head, and working out ever more bizarre ways of bonding with his audience.
Cardiacs are no longer the sprawling six-or-seven-piece of their heyday, when sax, percussion and William D. Drake’s circus of keyboards romped alongside the guitars. For over ten years now the band have been a power-pop quartet, roaring along to detailed synth-and-percussion orchestrations carried on tape. Real-music diehards might call this cheating. Others might mourn the multiple hidden subtleties of Cardiacs on record – bashed aside on the anvil of live performance by necessity, and replaced by gurning high-volume febrility. But the payback is the huge wash of joyous energy from the spectators – despite Cardiacs’ undoubted strengths (they’re one of the most powerful rock bands you’re ever likely to see) it’s the audiences that really make these gigs work.
All the way across the front of the stage, the audience boils and leaps like happy fish in a barrel. What’s making them do this is Cardiacs’ welter of unruly tunefulness and Zappa–punk impulses, which shoot in at the ears and fire our happy nerves up like Christmas tree lights. Sometimes the band throws us warped, should’ve-been-hits like ‘Day Is Gone’ or ‘Arnald’ – obsessive apocalyptic slices of psychedelic pop with an XTC swagger, or square-dances littered with harpsichord tingles. Sometimes, they blast off somewhere entirely weirder – into a slamming, reeling red-noise riff, for instance, laced with sudden explosions of cartoon bells. Or into ‘A Horse’s Tail’: a truly demented exercise in barmy, pumping mathcore structures, full of violently colliding riffs and disrupted continuity… to which this delighted audience knows every single twist.
Whenever I’m being sold the usual tired line about simplicity in popular music – about how audiences just can’t accept or deal with tricky structures, or anything that smacks of arty pomposity, and that’s why our pop future must consist of the umpteenth Stooges photocopy or an innumerable line of boy- and girl-bands trundling at us like so many bars of soap – I think of Cardiacs. I could think of a horde of still-eager Yes fans descending on the Labatt’s Apollo, I suppose; or Dream Theater selling out Shepherds Bush Empire, or King Crimson at the Albert Hall, or Godspeed You Black Emperor packing ‘em in at the Royal Festival Hall. But I tend to think of Cardiacs instead. I think of this crowd – a seething mass of bobbing heads sporting delirious smiles, and careering dancing bodies making the Mean Fiddler’s floor quake and sway like a deep-sprung dance palace. In the midst of this ecstatic swirl, you could believe yourself in a place where punk didn’t just torpedo prog but rushed into and through it like a positive virus: feeding new wiriness into its muscles, new angles into its vision, a new zest for life in all its wonder and messiness to drive the latest kink of out-there guitars or keyboards.
A little spectacle helps. The sparrowlike Bob Leith bounces gently on his drumstool .JPG)
while his bandmates scurry in frantic clockwork circles around the stage. Glamorous women in red dresses pound big drums and sing along with the rugged, ragged Wagnerian chorales of ‘The Alphabet Business Concern’ and ‘Dirty Boy’. The lolloping Poole throws rock-god shapes during Fiery Gun Hand, foot on the monitors and fingers spasming ludicrous Van Halen tap patterns across his guitar. And Tim Smith – from the cracked squawk of his South London voice, to his ranting monologues between songs, to the stiff Action-Man grip he has on his guitar – is every inch a perverse star. When the band disappear in a puff of smoke – only for a delighted Oceansize, (Cardiacs friends and tonight’s support act), to unexpectedly race back on and tear through a brilliant version of Cardiacs’ ‘Eat It Up Worms Hero’ – it has its own cartoon logic.
To the delight of the crowd, Cardiacs blow the dust off some of their older, proggier material. The juddery riff of ‘Visiting Hours’, the Roadrunner zip’n’burst of ‘Tarred And Feathered’, and the galumphing march of ‘The Icing On The World’ (making it’s first appearance in years). The tour-de-force is ‘R.E.S’. – Smith’s macabre but oddly touching parallel of playground life and army life. It hurtles for six dazzling minutes through a bewildering shape-shifting succession of children’s hopscotch rhythms and rhymes, mashed in with bogus-pomp military fanfares. Cardiacs’ taste for rough psychedelic indie is also in evidence – in the broiling drone of ‘Core’, in the way they teasingly sit for ages on the grinding riff of ‘Cry Wet Smile Dry’. In the psychedelic Oi grunts of ‘Ideal’, and the spidery Pixies-on-rocket-fuel bounds of ‘Signs’. Most of all it’s in the stately Gothic proggitude of ‘Is This The Life’, which rolls along in rain-spoiled grandeur like The Cure tackling a Genesis opus. 
In an evening full of odd and beautiful gestures, perhaps the oddest and most perversely beautiful is Tim Smith’s return for an encore, toting an acoustic guitar. Ballad time? No. He’s treating us to an acoustic version of ‘The Duck And Roger The Horse’ – Cardiacs’ most violently-arranged and kaleidoscopic piece, throwing surreal tangles of words up into the air, then slicing them to bits with explosions of contradicting tunes and riffs. Though we don’t know it yet, the entire band’s about to come back and treat us to the full-bore electric version. But right now we’re in the middle of a teasing cat-and-mouse game with an exaggeratedly childlike Smith. As he mumbles and yells his way through a deliberately broken-up, randomised version – like a child trying to tell a complicated story, pretending to forget sections and drop notes – it’s us singing those missing rapid-fire keyboard riffs. Us chanting the percussion bursts. Us shouting the interjections, and chivvying him on to the next bit.
For about five minutes, we get to be the heartbeat that drives the music – not by just singing along to an easy chorus, but by diving inside the complex, crazy engine of Cardiacs and pulling the handles and triggers ourselves. It’s a wonderful, hilarious feeling.
-Dann Chinn/Misfit City.
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ISSUE 5 LIVE REVIEWS
Cardiacs, Eva Lema. London Astoria. 15nov 2002.
Cardiacs are now well into a third decade of performing their intricate blend of prog and punk, with a theatrical bent. Even after all these years, the sashed, scout-like uniforms (including shorts) remain, with leader Tim Smith bedecked like a General overseeing his men, albeit with less beatings dished out to elder brother, and bassist, Jim. There is so much affection for this band, indeed they are credited with influencing Blur and The Wildhearts and a plethora of others, that an Astoria November date is becoming an annual event. Indeed, there is a convention feel about it as half the room parade their ‘Little Man And A House’ logo t-shirts. Each year, there’s always something a little special for hardcore fans which, frankly 99% of people here are as, if you like Cardiacs, you more than likely LOVE Cardiacs. Last year, former members Christian ‘Bic’ Hayes and Bill Drake appeared out of the darkness to knock out a number. This year, as the band leave the stage at the end of the main set, other support Oceansize run on and grab the instruments from their hands and bash through Cardiacs’ tune ‘Eat It Up Worms Hero’. ‘Dirty Boy’ with backing vox from the Eva Lema ladies is also a highlight along with, the as yet unrecorded, ‘Silvery’. So then Tim, Jim, on and Bob, can we make another date for next November then please? Earlier if you can squeeze us in.
-Skif.