The Lightning Ensemble – Ryan’s Bar, Stoke Newington

The Lightning Ensemble are already on stage when I arrive, after nine o’clock, due to our new boiler leaking and me having to wait for an engineer… then in the park I met a panicky mum who’d lost her kid and so I tried to help locate him.

(The Lightning Ensemble don’t do song titles – at least not ones they shared with the audience tonight – so I made these up)

Alien Bluegrass Blap! Zwap! Paaaaang! They do look like a bluegrass band due to the shirts and the beards, plus the double bass. However, this is bluegrass from the outer reaches of the galaxy. Drums, guitar and bass make grating, feral noises then the electronic sticks of Richard Scott (an old school friend) make rumbling white noise shards of raspiness. I find it easier to focus on something so I can take in the music better and set my eyes on the rather fantastic shirt worn by one of the audience members (Including me there are 16 people there altogether – and five of these turn out to be in the other band). The pattern on the shirt looks like the surface of Mars but on closer inspection it is also very much like those 3D picture patterns. As I try to attain the alpha brainwave state, bits of the shirt seem to move about. Time to get another ale…

Love in A Haunted Universe Beer in hand I get back to find that the Lightning Ensemble have started their slow ‘number’. I feel the urge to close my eyes and when I do I begin to lose myself in the music and drift off. As bits of electronica drones plop into the air in no time I am of course thinking of my own love life.  And this whole parallel universe business. And what a real equilibrium might feel like. I open my eyes and the guitarist and using a violin bow to hit the strings while he sticks his tongue out and starts grimacing.

Geiger Counter Lots of bleeping and crackling from the instruments, except for the drummer, who flails his sticks around pretending to hit the cymbals. Some of the audience are shifting around looking slightly bored. Or worried. I try to imagine these instruments played by the members of Trampled by Turtles. Then – excitement! Suddenly there is a nanosecond of tune. Then it’s gone, like a bubble floating away, to be replaced by more fizzing, blonging and zokka zokka sounds from the guitar.

Yuri Gagarin Came To Tea A haunting low  double bass motif repeats like KGB era radio state broadcast music. Various audience members start to dream of refilling their glasses – you can just tell – and I look at my mate Richard flailing away on his strange array of gadgets and I’m transported back to Lincolnshire, 1982, when we used to record in his parents’ sitting room on an old reel-to-reel recorder and he would jig and jerk about for a couple of hours, trying to sing, then he’d make us all curry and coffee (after that first tape of ours came out later on in the summer of ’82 Electronic and Music Maker  magazine said it was an intriguing mix of Stockhausen and Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Twenty minutes later and this piece finally ends, to rapturous applause from everyone.

After the gig I chatted to a few people I’d met somewhere before many years earlier then I headed home and  sat in the garden with one of the band (he’s an old mate) and drank beer until past three in the morning.